ES: Your first book is certainly a noteworthy achievement, and I look forward to reading more of your work. Are you working on any other projects at the moment? If so, could you describe your current research topics and analyses?

MY: For the past year, I’ve been researching a book project about the connections between literary and artistic representation in the nineteenth century.  I’m interested in how Victorian writers learned about artistic representation, especially the ability to capture an entire story in one image, and how they used the same principle in their own literary work.  In other words, how they created “word-portraits” that functioned much like literal paintings of people do.  In this book, there still will be a focus on women’s writing, since my primary authors are George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, and Charlotte Brontë, and there’s still a focus on the issue of realistic representation, which was so pervasive in Victorian literature.  But it’s a different project in that it takes up a wider variety of methods of expression than this book did.  In my earlier life, I aspired to be an artist, so I’ve always been very interested in how artists express themselves in ways that are similar to and different from literary expression. This book, like Feminist Realism at the Fin de Siècle, focuses on a topic I feel passionate about. 

The Recreation of Self