Trev Broughton

Profile

Biography

Trev Broughton studied as an undergraduate and postgraduate in the Department of English and Related Literature in the 1980s, before taking up a post in the University's newly formed Centre for Women's Studies in 1986. She returned to English in 2006, and works part time in the department.

Trev's doctoral work focused on Victorian autobiography, and in her early career she published essays on the Life writing of Harriet Martineau, Anny Thackeray Ritchie, Margaret Oliphant and Annie Besant, Leslie Stephen and James Anthony Froude. Her monograph on the subject, Men of Letters, Writing Lives, was published by Routledge in 1998. During that time she also co-edited The Governess (with Ruth Symes, Sutton 1997), The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter (with Joseph Bristow, Longman 1997) and Women's Lives/Women's Times (with Linda Anderson, SUNY Press 1997), as well as publishing on various aspects of feminist pedagogy and curriculum.  Since moving back to English she has developed and extended her interest in nineteenth century writing, particularly non-fiction prose.

Research

Projects

Since returning to English in 2006, Trev has published on Life writing in ‘British’ India, and has edited the four volumes on Autobiography for the Routledge series Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies (2007). She also co-edited with Helen Rogers an interdisciplinary collection of essays about the experience and representation of fatherhood in the Victorian era: Gender and Fatherhood in the Nineteenth Century (2007).   She recently edited volume 7, Writings on Biography of the Pickering Chatto Selected Works of Margaret Oliphant (2012). She has an active interest in  letters and epistolarity: see for instance ‘Life Slips:  Work, Love and Gender in John Constable’s Correspondence’, Studies in the Literary Imagination 15 1 (2010). The cultural history of biography is another persistent concern:  her essay on ‘Life Writing and the Victorians’ is forthcoming in Juliet John ed. Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture. She enjoys working between disciplines, and is particularly keen to research across literary and historical boundaries.  She is a regular reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement, writing leading articles on Virginia Woolf’s Essays, Katherine Mansfield’s Letters, and, most recently, on sensation fiction and needlework.

Supervision

Trev has supervised or co-supervised many research projects. Current or recent candidates have worked on Life writing in South Africa, Crimean War poetry, writings by nuns in the nineteenth century, the novels of J. M. Barrie, nineteenth-century letters, and Quaker women’s reading communities.  She welcomes proposals on nineteenth-century literary cultures, Victorian ideas and representations of labour and/or family, and  Life writing in all its guises.