Each paper offered an intriguing insight into the literary marketplace of the late nineteenth century, introducing authors previously unknown to many of the delegates and showcasing texts long since forgotten. Several cups of tea and biscuits later, delegates selected their preferred panel from three parallel sessions: ‘Man and Woman Both’, ‘Literary Tradition and Genre’ and ‘Literary Encounters’ discussing writers including George Eliot, Eliza Lynn Linton, Michael Field (the pseudonym of aunt and niece Catherine Bradley and Edith Cooper) and Amy Levy. The scarcity of the novel and the critical disagreement over its subject only lends intrigue to the tale, set against a backdrop of cross-dressing pirates and amazons from the mid eighteenth century and perceived in the light of fin de siècle scientific discourses. Monday morning dawned bright and sunny as more than sixty delegates descended on Old Sessions House for Ann Heilmann’s keynote lecture discussing the gender bending exploits of James Barry, a British Army surgeon considered to be the first qualified female British doctor and the subject of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s 1882 novel Madeline’s Mystery. "With more than fifty papers lined up for the third ICVWW international conference, this year’s event, Reassessing Women’s Writing of the 1880s and 1890s certainly looked to be our biggest yet, but would it be our best? Early signs were promising, with delegates arriving early organising an impromptu pre-conference meal, re-establishing old acquaintances and forging new ones in the beautiful surroundings of medieval Canterbury. In May 2013 she curated a successful exhibition, Wild Woman to New Woman: Sex and Suffrage on the Victorian Stage and has also coproduced a number of other exhibitions and conferences.
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She also works as a Research Associate for the International Centre for Victorian Women Writers and is currently working on a series of enterprises as part of a project entitled: From Brontë to Bloomsbury: Realism, Sensation and the New in Women’s Writing from the 1840s to the 1920s.
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Her current research explores the concept of Victorian crime short fiction as a vehicle for social anxieties and considers how dress and clothing illuminates and encrypts these anxieties. Alyson Hunt is a part-time PhD candidate in the School of Humanities at Canterbury Christ Church University, Kent.