Joanna Turner

My article revealing Marie Corelli’s hidden decade of pseudonymous periodical publications is now available to read in this fantastic FREE issue of Victorian Periodicals Review!

@vpreditors.bsky.social
@rs4vp.org
@lboroenglish.bsky.social

Form and Modernity in Women’s Poetry, 1895–1922: A Line of Her Own While W. B. Yeats’s influential account of the ‘Tragic Generation’ claims that most fin-de-siècle poets died, or at least stopped writing, shortly after 1900, this book explodes this narrative by atte...

You can now get hold of my book Form and Modernity in Women’s Poetry in paperback, for a mere £34.39 in the Routledge sale (isn't that about the price of a flat white in London these days?)

Our next speaker in the Science and Imagination panel at #VPFAExtremes is Bridget Morgan, with her paper 'The Rejuvenated Spinster: An Alternative Narrative of Ageing in Marie Corelli’s The Young Diana: An Experiment of the Future (1918)'

SUCH a fascinating paper! I’d like to know if Corelli went to a radium spa, too!

We had a fantastic afternoon at graduation today! Huge congratulations to our excellent graduates, and to our prize winners!

A few more snaps from the prize ceremony 👏🥂🥳🍾🎉

On our Brontës and Relationships panel, we have Kiera Clark discussing the extreme consequences of restricting female autonomy, focussing on Bertha Mason. Various forms of the gothic are central to this analysis #VPFAExtremes

Wood-panelled mock-Elizabethan interior of the Shakespeare Memorial Library.

Wood-panelled mock-Elizabethan interior of the Shakespeare Memorial Library.

Drizzly but verdant shot of the rooftop garden.

After talking dinosaurs and nineteenth-century literature at the @vpfa.bsky.social annual conference #VPFAExtremes, we're on to Birmingham Library's nineteenth-century Shakespeare Library, which was surgically inserted into the modern building. Also a summer view from the rooftop garden.

Keynote 2 is Richard Fallon: Before De-Extinction: Encountering Prehistoric Animals in Victorian Popular Fiction.
#VPFAExtremes

Our third paper in the Braddon panel is also on 'Lady Audley's Secret'. Anna-Maria Grill: "The Mad-Doctress and her Patients: Negotiating Female Medical Agency in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s 'Lady Audley’s Secret'".
#VPFAExtremes

The second paper in the Braddon panel is on one of my favourite novels of the Victorian Era: 'Lady Audley's Secret'. Marta Shevchenko's paper is delivered online from Kharkiv, Ukraine is called "Vanishing Women: Anorexic Metaphors and Psychological Extremes in 'Lady Audley’s Secret'".
#VPFAExtremes

I had the best time presenting this paper! It was such a great panel to be on - by a *wild* coincidence, we had two separate papers, featuring two separate books that both just so happened to have a character with the last name of Tempest, and someone accidentally selling their soul...
#VPFAExtremes

The Sappho panel today was excellent. #VPFAExtremes

Great post-updates from you and @annas1891.bsky.social today! Much appreciated.

Thanks, Anna. Your posts are much appreciated!

I've finally joined Blue-sky on the train, on my way to #vpfaextremes. It's been a while since I followed a # but I'm looking forward to it! Obviously finishing my paper on the train.

"Ouida" has been selected as the runner-up to the VPFA Second Book Prize 2025! Thank you very much to the lovely scholars who supported this book and for these wonderful, generous reviews! ✨

Victorian Popular Fictions 7.1 8 Butler-Way Helena Esser, Steampunk London: Neo-Victorian Urban Space and Popular Transmedia Memory. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024, 248 pp. HB £85.00. ISBN: 9781350433908 Reviewed by Emma Butler-Way Downlo…

Exciting new issue of VPFJ is now out in the world, featuring my review for Helena Esser's fantastic Steampunk London: Neo-Victorian Urban Space and Popular Transmedia Memory. I'm a big fan. Get your libraries on it.
@vpfa.bsky.social @helenaesser.bsky.social
doi.org/10.46911/TWO...

Anyway, an hour or so investigating this very topic, and many other more interesting ones regarding Elizabeth Taylor and Angel, is coming this weekend/next week on Backlisted. We are all really excited about sharing it with you. Subscribe! SUBSCRIBE! @backlisted.bsky.social

@drsarahparker.bsky.social’s edited volume Michael Field in Context is due to be published by Cambridge University Press in September!

I am so very sorry to hear this, and send my condolences to his friends and colleagues.

Join us for BAVS Talks 2025 celebrating the 25th anniversary of BAVS UK; Friday 27 June, 2-5:30pm at the University of Leicester. Featuring talks from Victorianists + Postgrad Poster Session & Networking Reception - Register now: » bavs.ac.uk/event/bavs-t...

This Friday, @sadiseshiah.bsky.social is joining an expert panel discussion after the final performance of Jon Crewe’s play about women and ageism, ‘Go Gently’, which is playing at The Drayton Arms Theatre. If you’re in or near London, it’s not quite sold out yet: www.thedraytonarmstheatre.co.uk

Theatre Royal, Peter St, Manchester dressed up for the Diamond Jubliee of Queen Victoria in 1897.

The production on stage was The Sorrows of Satan an 1895 Faustian novel by Marie Corelli.

#Manchester #History #HistoryMatters

We held our ‘Periodisation, Generations, and the Gaps Between’ symposium this afternoon. Organised by @jadefrench.bsky.social and @drsarahparker.bsky.social, other speakers were @amigonidavid.bsky.social, Fatima Borrmann, @helenkingstone.bsky.social, & Helen Small. A wonderful event! 👏👏👏

Many congrats Demi (and Oli!). The issue looks amazing! 🤩

@lboroenglish.bsky.social

Commemorating Corelli A Centenary Conference

Coming this autumn is a special issue of Victoriographies, edited by Eleanor Dobson and me. We showcase some of the amazing work introduced at the Corelli Centenary Conference which took place this time, last year. You can read all about the event here:

‘Rosalind’ and the Countess: The Newly Discovered Poetry of Marie Corelli (1854–1924) The National Library of Scotland holds a handwritten Corelli poem, submitted under her family name of Minnie Mackay in 1883, and named ‘The Song of a Ship’

Last year I discovered an even earlier Corelli pseudonym - the poet, ‘Rosalind’. In Notes & Queries I discuss this and the brief spell where Corelli tried out an aristocratic title.

I also discovered that Corelli wrote under various pseudonyms for a whole decade before her first novel was published. With institutional access you can read all about her work as Vivian Clifford, Minnie Mackay, ‘Cigarette’, and Rose Trevor here: