Reviews:

“In this superb study of the nineteenth-century women’s movement . . . Philippa Levine examines the lives of two hundred active feminists whose sense of gender as a concrete political category led them to challenge the gender order of society in new and diverse ways.”

“Levine transcends traditional analytical categories to assert—with the women she studies—the centrality of gender in the making of the Victorian world.”

“In Feminist Lives in Victorian England we have at last a comprehensive and sophisticated analysis of the nineteenth-century women’s movement that gives credit where credit is due. Impeccably researched, fluently written, cogently argued, and full of insights, it is, quite simply, one of the best works on Victorian women extant.”
-Kathleen McCrone
(University of Windsor)
Canadian Historical Review

“Levine has an acute eye for the necessary pragmatism of an activist . . . ”

“She is especially good on the class dimension of Victorian feminism, ably defending the efforts of these educated middle-class women to replace class criteria with those of gender.”
-Martha Vicinus
(University of Michigan)
American Historical Review