Sophie Gilmartin

• Emeritus Reader in English, Royal Holloway, University of London

My research interests vary widely over the nineteenth century, from work in progress on Jane Austen's Persuasion and early insurance companies to, at the other end of the century, my most recent book, co-authored with Rod Mengham, on Thomas Hardy's shorter fiction. I received a Leverhulme fellowship in 2001-2 to support a year of research on my study of widowhood in nineteenth-century Britain, France and the USA, and was awarded an AHRC research fellowship in support of my most recent book-in-progress, Letters from the Sea: women, navigation and identity in nineteenth-century literature and life writing. For this project I also was awarded the Caird North American Fellowship from the National Maritime Museum to fund three months research at the John Carter Brown library in Providence, Rhode Island and other maritime libraries and archives along the eastern seaboard of the USA. Other areas of research interest in the past and present include nineteenth-century marriage, ancestry, nationhood, the place of geography in girls' and boys' education, bodily disfigurement and the positioning and movement of the body in the Victorian novel, spectacle and sensation in nineteenth-century narrative, the Victorian periodical, nineteenth-century genre painting and its relation to the novel.

• –present Emeritus Reader in English, Royal Holloway, University of London

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