Editor's Note

Editor's Note Christopher Keep This issue's forum considers one of the most hotly debated figures in the study of Victorian literature and culture: the Poetess. Some scholars have argued that the Poetess was a cultural category that tended to valorize a limited repertoire of poetic modes, affective states, and models of authorial self-fashioning, and, in so doing, occluded the aesthetic variety and cultural richness of women's verse during the nineteenth century. Others have perceived in the figure a latent critical charge—a term which, in its very instability, opened up the radical potential of Victorian women's writing to contest the distinctions between public and private, reason and emotion, professional and amateur. As assembled by our guest editor, Marjorie Stone, the essays gathered here take up these debates anew. They range from studies of many of the major women poets of the period, including Felicia Hemans, EBB, and Christina Rossetti, to writers whose work has only more recently become the subject of sustained scholarly analysis, such as Michael Field and Frances Brown, "the Blind Poet of Ulster." The essays not only offer fresh and provocative insights into the verse of these authors but also highlight their significant and often under-appreciated contributions to Victorian print and visual culture more broadly. The Poetess, we learn, helped set in motion a set of cultural and aesthetic provocations that continue to resonate today in "Insta poets" such as Rupi Kaur and Hissa Hilal. An opportunity both to cast an eye back on the scholarship of the past and to clear a path toward the future, this remarkable collection of essays shows us that the Poetess has much more to contribute to our understanding of Victorian literature and culture. This issue marks an important addition to our book review section. Monographs and multi-authored books have and will continue to play an important part in the dissemination of research in Victorian studies, but with the advent of the digital humanities (DH) has come new and diverse modes of scholarship, modes that eschew the codex book in favour of digital archives, quantitative analyses, visualizations of large image sets, 3-D modelling of historical artifacts, and many other "born digital" approaches to the study of literature and culture. Despite the unquestionable contribution of such methods, DH projects have not been the subject of the kind of critical review that books have long received. With this issue, Victorian Review seeks to remedy this oversight. Constance Crompton's review of Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry (dvpp.uvic.ca) is the first in what we hope to be a regular feature in our review section. The winning essay of the 2022 Hamilton Prize competition is "You Have Only Yourself to Blame": Mind and Reason in Anne Brontë's Tenant of Wildfell [End Page v] Hall," by Rebecca Sheppard (UBC). The committee would also like to recognize the runner-up: "The Culinary and the Colonial in G.F. Atkinson's Curry and Rice" by Meghna Sapui (University of Florida).We are pleased to publish both these exceptional contributions to the field of Victorian studies in the current issue. The Hamilton Prize is awarded to the best essay submitted to our annual competition by a graduate student. Our grateful thanks go to our judges: Nathan Hensley, Pamela Gilbert, and Andrea Korda. Finally, it is my great pleasure to announce a new addition to our editorial committee. Richa Dwor is a specialist in Anglo-Jewish literature and culture who teaches in the Department of English at Douglas College. She is the editor of the anthology Religious Feeling (Routledge Historical Resource on Victorian Religion, 2021) and the author of Jewish Feeling: Difference and Affect in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Women's Writing (Bloomsbury, 2015) and numerous articles in journals such as Literature and Theology, Partial Answers, English Literature in Transition, and Leeds Working Papers in Victorian Studies as well as two entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (on Charlotte Montefiore and Judith Montefiore). We are delighted to have her bring her wide-ranging expertise in nineteenth-century literature and culture to our committee's deliberations. Welcome, Richa! [End Page vi] Copyright © 2022 Victorian Studies of Western Canada

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