Brecke, Anna J. Widening the Sphere: Mid-to-Late Victorian Popular Fiction, Gender Representation, and Canonicity. Brighton: Edward Everett Root, 2022. 216 pp. Reviewed by Helena Ifill, University of Aberdeen

The concept of separate spheres is both a useful means of summarising some dominant ideological aspects of the Victorian period, and a frustratingly reductive way of viewing a complex and heterogenous society. Anna J. Brecke asserts that, while scholars have long recognised that the notion of separate spheres is a middle-class ideal that does not reflect lived experience, it continues to have a disproportionate impact on modern-day perceptions of Victorian gender relations. Widening the Sphere begins with a consideration of how our conceptions of the Victorian era came to be so reliant on such a patently unrealistic and unachievable ideal. Brecke argues that this is due to the dominance of canonical realist fiction in Victorian studies since prominent critics such as Q.D. and F.R. Leavis and J. Hillis Miller valorised a small group of feted novelists (such as Eliot, Trollope and Hardy) whose work ‘reinforce[d] the dual notions that the novel was primarily a masculine genre, and that women, as depicted in realist work, only entered the public, or economic, sphere when tragic circumstances necessitated it’ (28). Brecke asserts that the ‘absence of women writers and women characters who challenge and subvert traditional thinking about gender roles’ in the canon, and so in the perceptions of modern readers, ‘had a long-lasting effect on how we viewed gender roles and gender relationships’ (xvii). Brecke’s aim is to show that if we move our attention from realism to popular fiction by women, we get a more varied and, ironically, more realistic sense of how women lived and worked in Victorian Britain, and of how those experiences were represented in the literature that the majority of Victorians were reading.