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Professor Juliette Atkinson

Email:juliette.atkinson@ucl.ac.uk
External phone:020 7679 3146
Internal phone: 33146
Office: Foster Court 240

Juliette Atkinson

Education and Experience

Juliette Atkinson was educated at 911 (B.A. Hons) and Oxford (M.St, ‘1900-Present’; Christ Church). In 2008, she completed a PhD on Victorian life-writing, funded by a UCL Graduate School Research Scholarship.From 2009 she worked as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at 911, before becoming a Lecturer in 2012,Associate Professor in2018, and Professor in 2023.

Research Interests

Juliette's research focuses on three main areas:

  • Nineteenth-century fiction:she has a particular interest in the work of George Eliot. She has written the introduction, notes, and appendix for the Oxford World's Classics edition of George Eliot'sThe Mill on the Floss, and has edited Eliot'sSilas Marner,also for Oxford World's Classics. She has published articles on Eliot, and her Very Short Introduction to George Eliotfor OUP (2024), andThe Oxford Handbook of George Eliot (which she is co-editing with Elisha Cohn, of Cornell University), will appear soon. Her second book (see below) explored the influence of French fiction on Victorian novelists and their reviewers, and she is also interested in the work of Charlotte Brontë - she publisheda new introduction, notes and appendices for the Oxford World's Classics edition ofJane Eyre in 2019. Julietteconvenes the undergraduate Victorian Period course in the department.
  • Life-writing: Juliette'sfirst book,Victorian Biography Reconsidered: a Study of Nineteenth-Century ‘Hidden’ Lives(OUP, 2010), funded by a UCL scholarship, consideredthe lives of obscure or minor individuals who form the subjects of Victorian biographers working against the contemporary fascination with ‘Great Men’. Working-class biographies, ‘failed’ lives, the representation of female subjects, attempted recoveries of neglected Romantic artists, and the lesser luminaries of the Dictionary of National Biography are all given close analysis.She is currently finishing volume 5 of theOxford History of Life-Writing(General editor Zachary Leader), which will provide an account of nineteenth-centuryautobiography, biography, diaries, letters, and travel narratives.She wasawarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (September 2020-January 2022) for this research.
  • Transnational networks: Juliette'ssecond book,French Novels and the Victorians(OUP, 2017), made use of both book history and close reading approaches totakeissue with the common portrayal of the Victorians as insular and prudish readers. It considered thepublishing and cosmopolitan networks which disseminatedFrench literature in England, the complexities of Victorian (self-)censorship and censoriousness, and debates concerning foreign literary influence, interference and national literary protectionism.The research was funded by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (2009-2012), and part of the research, then in progress, was awarded a by the Bibliographical Society of America in 2012. Her current research on life-writing maintains herinterest in international exchange, and explores writing from across the globe.

Books

4.(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024, in press). 35,000 words.

3. Volume 5: The Nineteenth Century(Oxford: Oxford University Press, c. 2024). 150,000 words.

2. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). A British Academy monograph. 426pp. Reviewed in:Victorian Review; Victorian Periodical Reviews; Nineteenth-century Contexts; Nineteenth-century literature; French Studies; Nineteenth-century French Studies; Cahiers victoriens et edouardiens; English Historical Review; French History; H-France.

1. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 315pp. Reviewed in:TLS; Victorian Studies; Journal of Victorian Culture; Victorian Review; Life Writing; Journal of British Studies;Biography; George Eliot Review; Notes and Queries.

French Novels

Victorian Biography Reconsidered Book Cover

Editorial role

Julietteis the Victorian/ModernPeriod Editor for, published by Oxford University Press.

Edited Book

With Elisha Cohn (Cornell),(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025, in press). 400,000 words, 50 contributors.

Editions

4. Introduction and notes.

3.

2. Introduction and notes.

1.Bloom’s Classic Critical Views: George Eliot(New York: Facts on File, 2009).

Mill on the Floss
Silas Marner
Jane Eyre book cover

Articles and Chapters

11. 'George Eliot's Journals', inThe Oxford Handbook of George Eliot, ed. Juliette Atkinson and Elisha Cohn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025, in press). 8,000 words.

10. 'Continental Currents: Paris and London', in ed. Joanne Shattock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 224-44.

9. ''The most thrilling and fascinating book of the century': marketing Gustave Flaubert in late nineteenth-century England', in

8. ‘The London Library and the circulation of French fiction in the 1840s’,Information & Culture: A Journal of History(formerlyLibraries and the Cultural Record), vol. 48.4 (November/December 2013), pp. 391-418.

7. ‘George Eliot’s Reception to 1900’, ‘George Eliot’s Reception 1900-1970’, and ‘George Eliot’s Reception 1970-Present’, in

6. ‘Alexander the Great’: Dumas’s invasion of early-Victorian England’,(PBSA), vol. 106, no. 4 (December 2012), pp. 417-47.

5. ‘William Jeffs, Bookseller and Publisher of French Literature’, Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, vol. 13, no. 3 (September 2012), pp. 257-78.

4. ''To serve God and Mammon'': Braddon and Literary Transgression', in New Perspectives on Mary Elizabeth Braddon (NY and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012),pp. 133-54.

3. ‘󾱲--èFemale Biographers and the Reconsideration of Popular Women Writers’, inWriting Women of the Fin de Siècle: Authors of Change, ed. Adrienne Gavin and Carolyn Oulton (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 111-23.

2. ‘Mary Robinson’, inEncyclopedia of Literary Romanticism, ed. Andrew Maunder (New York: Facts on File, 2010).

1. ‘“Poor sons of Adam in general, in this sad age of cobwebs”: Biography as social criticism in Thomas Carlyle’sThe Life of John Sterling’. InLife Writing: The State of the Art and The Spirit of the Age, ed. Meg Jensen and Jane Jordan (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009), pp. 2-11.

Reviews

Juliette's reviews include pieces for the TLS, Review of English Studies, History, Notes and Queries, and the George Eliot Review.

PhD supervision

Juliette has supervised/co-superviseddissertations on Arthur Morrison and realist space, the fin-de-siècle literary agent J. P. Pinker, the Victorian doll's house, the literary landscape of the Victorian cemetery, newspaper poets of the South African war, nineteenth-century representations of vivisection, and Victorian cultures of self-help.

She welcomesapplications from prospective PhD students eager to work onVictorian fiction (especially George Eliot), transnational literary relations, and life-writing of the long nineteenth century.