In search of lost nineteenth-century novelists
A few posts down, a commenter asked about the fate of George Meredith. When I started graduate school, back in the murky mists of time (OK, 1992), Meredith-the-novelist had already been reduced to three books: The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), Diana of the Crossways (1885), and The Egoist (1879). Those willing to stretch also included Beauchamp's Career (1875). I remember John Sutherland observing somewhere that you could always find Meredith for sale by the yard, which he thought was perhaps not such a good sign for Meredith's status. (The American equivalent must be James Whitcomb Riley. Walk into any antiquarian bookstore, and I swear you'll find the Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley gathering dust on a shelf and/or feeding the non-figurative bookworms.) As for the poetry, everybody read "Lucifer in Starlight" and Modern Love. A quick check on Amazon reveals that there's one novel available via Kindle, thanks to Penguin, but there isn't any hardcopy Meredith available from either Penguin (which had a quick go at The Egoist again a few years back) or Oxford. Of course, there's plenty of POD Meredith, which obviously has to change our definition of "what's in print," but there's also plenty of POD Emily Sarah Holt. I'm surprised that nobody has tried to resurrect Diana of the Crossways, at the very least.
A number of semi-forgotten Victorian novelists have been brought back to something resembling life in the past few years, including Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Amy Levy, Mrs. Oliphant, Mrs. Humphry Ward (although, to nobody's great shock, there hasn't been much of a run on Ward's Robert Elsmere), and Charlotte Yonge. Who else out there is suitable for editorial reanimation, at least for literary-historical purposes?
Edward Bulwer-Lytton: I don't know if I would wish a Bulwer-Lytton renaissance upon the world, exactly (I would probably be sentenced to everlasting torment if I did), but his influence is everywhere in nineteenth-century fiction. You could probably make a good case for an edition of The Last Days of Pompeii, and maybe Paul Clifford and Eugene Aram along with it.
Emily Lawless: A late-Victorian Anglo-Irish novelist, not forgotten among Irish studies specialists but certainly out of print in the US. Grania and Hurrish are the most highly-regarded novels, but With Essex in Ireland remains extremely readable (and has some genuinely shocking/scary moments in it).
Charles Reade: The quintessential "blue book" novelist. The Cloister and the Hearth is the obvious go-to book, but there's been a lot of recent interest in Hard Cash.
Mary Martha Sherwood: At the very least, a good edition of The History of the Fairchild Family, which has to be the most famous Victorian book (series of books, actually) that nobody has ever read. I vote for the first volume, which has all the notorious material ("Just
between that and the wood stood a gibbet, on which the body of a man
hung in chains: the body had not yet fallen to pieces, although it had
hung there some years. It had on a blue coat, a silk handkerchief round
the neck, with shoes and stockings, and every other part of the dress
still entire : but the face of the corpse was so shocking, that the
children could not look upon it").
Frances Trollope: Alan Sutton republished a few of her novels some time back, and Nonsuch also brought out Michael Armstrong, The Widow Barnaby (which appears to have gone out of print), and Jessie Phillips. The Widow Barnaby is actually quite funny and could stand another edition. (A more enterprising soul could bring out the entire Trollope family of novelists...)
Other suggestions?