Introduction

Abstract

The essays in this book commemorate the life and work of Sally Ledger, who died suddenly in January 2009, aged forty-seven. At the time of her death, she was the Hildred Carlile Professor of English at Royal Holloway, University of London. Ledger was a leading scholar of Victorian studies, and died very much mid-career with much work still anticipated. Her students, colleagues, and friends remember her infectious enthusiasm for literature, and her generosity and kindness in supporting others. These qualities live on in the work of those whom she personally influenced. More publicly, her legacy resides in an influential body of research on topics that have contributed to a remapping of the field of Victorian literary history. This legacy includes her innovative inquiries into the New Woman; her editorial projects with Jane Spencer and Josephine McDonagh on feminist literary criticism, and with Roger Luckhurst and Scott McCracken on fin-de-siècle culture; her authoritative charting of the cultural transformations of British and Irish writing of the 1880s and 1890s; and, latterly, her critical discussion of Charles Dickens’s career, which relocated him in the popular and radical traditions of the early nineteenth century. She left unfinished a study of nineteenth-century melodrama and the politics of the emotions.