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Fellow Victorian geeks will recognise Madame Rachel as Maria Oldershaw, foster mother and business partner of the delicious Lydia Gwilt in Wilkie Collins’ Armadale. She and her beauty products were also referred to in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. In this excellent biography, Helen Rappaport tells the true story of the woman behind the infamous creation of “Madame Rachel”, purveyor of dubious unguents which promised to make women “beautiful for ever”. ...

Until a few weeks ago, I didn’t have a favourite novel: then I read The Beth Book. First published in 1897, it tells the story of Elizabeth Caldwell, a heroine whose experiences are closely modelled on Grand’s own life. The young Beth is a bright, inquisitive and loving child who is constrained by her difficult upbringing in a remote town on the west coast of Ireland and then in Yorkshire. Her mother has no idea how to deal with an intelligent daughter and desperately tries to instil in her ideas of feminine self-sacrifice. Like many girls of the period, she is denied an education and encouraged to make an advantageous marriage as soon as possible. ...

As is often the case with Trollope’s novels, The Claverings (1867) is an uncomfortable yet compelling read. The hero of the piece is Harry Clavering, who is jilted by the beautiful Julia Brabazon in favour of a dissipated, but rich, old aristocrat, Lord Ongar. Clavering devotes himself to a career as an apprentice civil engineer and becomes engaged to his master’s daughter, Florence Burton. He looks set for a successful family and business life until the widowed Julia Brabazon, now Lady Ongar, reappears. He must choose between a safe but predictable life with Florence, or the glittering and indolent role of Julia’s husband. ...

In his Autobiography Trollope declared “Lady Anna is the best novel I ever wrote! Very much! Quite far away above all others!!!” Unfortunately, the reading public did not agree and Trollope was forced to defend his heroine on many an occasion. Much of the narrative in this 1874 novel is focused on the eponymous Lady Anna’s mother, Countess Lovel. She was the penniless Josephine Murray who impetuously agreed to marry the dissipated Earl Lovel for his money and status. After the birth of Anna, he casts them both aside, revealing that he already has a wife living in Italy. Shortly afterwards he dies, thereby creating much work for the lawyers. The Countess embarks upon an indefatigable quest to restore her daughter’s good name and fortune. In the meantime, they are supported by the kindly local tailor, Thomas Thwaite, who uncomplainingly spends his life savings on keeping them in comfort. The young Anna falls in love with his son, Daniel, a journeyman tailor and inveterate Radical, but the Countess is determined that she should instead marry her cousin, the heir to her father’s estate. ...

The reading public seems to be divided into those who fall hopelessly in love with Mrs Gaskell’s saintly Ruth and those who find her irritating. I belong to the latter group, an admission which will no doubt lead to some accusations of heartlessness (I’m also with Oscar Wilde on the death of Little Nell). Ruth Hilton, an orphaned dressmaker’s assistant, is seduced and abandoned by the wealthy Henry Bellingham. Alone and pregnant, a hunchbacked nonconformist minister, Thurstan Benson, takes pity on her and helps her establish a new life as a respectable widow, Mrs Denbigh. In this guise she is able to obtain employment as a governess with the evangelical Bradshaw family. All is well until Bellingham reappears on the scene as the local prospective parliamentary candidate, and then Ruth’s hidden past is brought into the light. Her continuing self-sacrifice leads ultimately to tragic consequences. ...

Sent out to domestic service by her drunken stepfather, Esther Waters is forced to leave a good position after being seduced and abandoned with child by fellow servant, William Latch. Repelled by her family, she struggles with life as a single parent, nursing a rich woman’s baby to the detriment of her own, working eighteen hours a day for a capricious mistress, and even resorting to the workhouse in desperation. Although an occasional character looks upon her kindly, most are out to exploit her weakened state. Her fortunes seem to improve when she finds work with a benevolent novelist and wins the affections of Fred Parsons, a steady and earnest member of the Plymouth Brethren, who believes she has already atoned for her “sin”. Just as she glimpses the prospect of security, William Latch reappears, begging her to come back to him so that he can be a father to his child. Esther must choose between the safe option of Fred and the more exciting, but dangerous, alternative offered by William. ...

Ouida (1839-1908) was born Maria Louisa Ramé in the Suffolk town of Bury St Edmunds to an English mother and a largely absent French father. An eccentric child, she rapidly outgrew East Anglia, let alone her birthplace. She was delighted when in 1857 her mother agreed to move with her to the heaving metropolis of London. The good people of Ravenscourt Park (a suburb to the west) were rather perplexed by this strange creature: “she had not, so to speak, grown into her nose, her straight, mouse-coloured hair hung in rats’ tails down her back, and she walked with one small, delicate hand resting on [her dog’s] collar.” Oblivious to her neighbours’ discomfort, Ouida (a childhood nickname) quickly built a career as a successful writer. There was no starving in a garret for her – she immediately struck literary gold with her work for Bentley’s Miscellany and soon became a firm favourite with the reading public. ...

Ouida’s Moths is credited with being the first English novel to show a divorced woman happily remarried, and as such represents a landmark in women’s writing. Of course many authors, notably of the ‘sensation school’, tackled the thorny issue of divorce, but ultimately either the heroine’s inconvenient spouse would obligingly die at the eleventh hour, or she would have to live a nun-like existence, hidden from society’s disapproving gaze. ...

Felicia Skene’s blue plaque at 34 St Michael’s Street, Oxford Felicia Skene (1821-99) was a philanthropist and writer. Born in Aix-en-Provence, she moved to Oxford during the tumult of Newman’s defection to Rome and was heavily influenced by High Anglicanism. Much of her writing was barely diluted Tractarian propaganda, but in Hidden Depths (1866) she exposes the prostitution rife in Oxford (thinly disguised as ‘Greyburgh’), and attacks the hypocrisy of those who blamed the ‘fallen’ women for the spread of venereal disease, rather than the men (and sometimes women) who exploited them. ...

Workers in the Dawn (1880) was the first published novel from the pen of George Gissing, one of the nineteenth century’s most original writers. It tells the story of Arthur Golding, a young boy who finds himself orphaned after his dissolute father dies in the squalor of a London slum. Through a series of fortunate encounters, he gains a good education and embarks upon a career as an artist, meeting the woman of his dreams, Helen Norman, along the way. As this is Gissing, however, it all goes horribly wrong when he rescues an alcoholic prostitute from the streets and tries to reform her, an episode that is largely autobiographical. ...