About the Author: Patricia Ingham is Senior Research Fellow and Reader at St. Anne's College, Oxford. She has published widely on the Victorian novel, and edited works by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, and George Gissing. Her recent publications include The Brontës: A Critical Reader (Longman, 2003), and volumes on the Brontës and Thomas Hardy for the Oxford University Press Authors in Context series, of which she is also the General Editor.