This reader contains 16 new and recent essays addressing work by, and issues raised concerning, Victorian women poets. Among those discussed directly are: Elizabeth Barrett Browing, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Michael Field, Felicia Hemans, Adelaide Proctor, Christina Rossetti and Rosamund Marriott Watson. Key topics dealt with include the nature of home, the market, the fallen woman and the moral law, the mother and the muse. A useful critical companion to its sister volume Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology, the book provides fresh impetus to important current debates about interpretation, concerning: the use of biography, the tension between political and aesthetic readings, the question of poetic value and canonization, the conflict between old historical and new historical approaches, and the validity of psychoanalytic, poststructuralist and feminist readings. Critics represented are: Isobel Armstrong, Kathleen Blake, Susan Conley, Stevie Davies, Sandra M. Gilbert, Gill Gregory, Terrence Holt, Linda K. Hughes, Angela Leighton, Tricia Lootens, Jerome J. McGann, Dorothy Mermin, Margaret Reynolds, Dolores Rosenblum, Chris White and Joyce Zonana.