Women and the Railway, 1850-1915

Citation:

Despotopoulou A. Women and the Railway, 1850-1915. Edinburgh University Press; 2015 pp. 202.

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One of the finest of recent scholarly interventions in studies of the railway.

- Victorian Studies, Vol 59, No 2

Anyone interested in the cultural dimension of the railway will find this book of great interest. Some previous treatments of this topic (including my own) have had little enough to say on the gendering of the experience of technology and this enjoyable and well-researched study offers a valuable corrective.

- Nicholas Daly, University College Dublin, Literature and History

From geographies of fear to resistance, empowerment, agency and unbounded imaginative forays, the gendered literary railway spaces as they are configured in Anna Despotopoulou’s study will, no doubt, engage the interest of gender studies and Victorian studies specialists as well as that of the general reading public.

- Reghina Dascăl, West University of Timișoara, Romania, The European English Messenger, 24.2
Despotopoulou’s study brings to light a fascinating and until-now forgotten fragment of gender history.- Lois Burke, Edinburgh Napier University, NINETEENTH-CENTURY GENDER STUDIES, ISSUE 12.1

One of the strengths of Women and the Railway lies in the range of materials examined; those interested in the representation of railway travel in the period’s journalism and literature (and not only in familiar texts like Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, but in many lesser-known fictional works as well) will be grateful for its author’s comprehensive efforts.

- Tina Young Choi, Journal of Victorian Culture
a very readable, well-researched, and, in places, humorous exploration of the way locomotion brought in new rules of
circulation for men and women.- Jane Stabler, Recent Studies in the Nineteenth Century