Behind the Times

Corbett's meticulously researched study... locates influence socially as well as literarily, and details the societal changes wrought by the female Victorian writers...

~Choice

In Behind the Times: Virginia Woolf in Late-Victorian Contexts, Mary Jean Corbett makes a nuanced contribution to the discussion by showing that Woolf's relationship with the Victorians was not a matter of periodicity but one of generation, attitude, and temperament. Well-written and well-informed, this book draws on the latest debates in Woolf scholarship concerning public life, political activism, the professions, and history, and it adds an important dimension to discussion of Woolf and the Victorians.

~Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature

The book provides a road map to guide us through the obscured routes of Woolf's neglected second-generation female predecessors. Corbett makes us pause to consider diversions from the Victorian male-dominated high road trodden by Woolf's father's venerated literary companions—Hardy, James, Meredith—and in some ways by Woolf herself. Through extensive research—patiently plodding along these archival paths—Corbett has made some of those second-generation voices more richly accessible to us.

~Virginia Wolf Miscellany

A considerable achievement. For too long Woolf has been placed on a pedestal as the 'exceptional' modernist woman, despite the efforts of scholars to challenge this narrative. Corbett offers us a different Woolf, one entangled and immersed in a world richly populated with exceptional women; perhaps a messier, more complicated picture, but one truer and all the more interesting for that.

~Modernism/modernity