Her Voice in Her Pen: Victorian Women Who Wrote is an attempt to list in one place any Victorian woman who wrote in any way, including poets, letter writers, fiction and non-fiction writers, amanuenses, researchers whose work went into texts published by others, translators, and so on. The database identifies each author and presents evidence that she was a writer, providing biographical and bibliographical evidence. Several writers have suffered obscurity, anonymity, misattribution, and author conflations over the years. The mission of this resource is to provide recognition for individual women writers who lived in a world that too often discouraged, suppressed, deprecated, and forgot their writing.

Focusing mainly on women in Great Britain during the years of Queen Victoria’s reign, 1837-1901, this database lists basic identifying information for Victorian women writers. It also includes some women writers from both before and after this period, as well as some women from outside Great Britain. (This is usually to help differentiate between authors with similar names.) The number of entries grows nearly every day. I welcome feedback and corrections: please click on the link below to send it.

Portrait of Florence Nightingale and her sister, Frances Parthenope Nightingale, watercolour circa 1836 by William White (National Portrait Gallery, NPG 3246; retrieved via Wikimedia Commons 8-2-2022)

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