Women, Literature and Finance in Victorian Britain: Cultures of Investmentdefines the cultures that emerged in response to the democratization of the stock market in nineteenth-century Britain when investing provided access to financial independence for women. Victorian novels represent those economic networks in realistic detail and are preoccupied with the intertwined economic and affective lives of characters. Analyzing evidence about the lives of real investors together with fictional examples, including case studies of four authors who were also investors, Nancy Henry argues that investing was not just something women did in Victorian Britain; it was a distinctly modern way of thinking about independence, risk, global communities and the future in general.

Nancy Henry is the Nancy Goslee Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, USA. She is the author ofGeorge Eliot and the British Empire(2002),The Cambridge Introduction to George Eliot (2008) andThe Life of George Eliot (2012) and co-editor ofVictorian Investments: New Perspectives on Finance and Literature(2009). 

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Women Investors in Fact.- Chapter 3: Investment Cultures in Dickens, Trollope and Gissing.- Chapter 4: Elizabeth Gaskell: Investment Cultures and Global Contexts.- Chapter 5: George Eliot: Moneys Past and Moneys Future.- Chapter 6: Charlotte Riddells Financial Life and Fiction.- Chapter 7: Margaret Oliphant, Women and Money.- Chapter 8: Conclusion.