Jacqueline Banerjee, current Editor-in-Chief and Webmaster of the Victorian Web, took her BA (1st Class) and PhD degrees from King's College London, where she was joint winner of the Brewer Prize for English Literature at the end of her first year, and won University of London Finals and Postgraduate Studentships for her graduate studies. After holding lectureships in English literature at the Universities of British Columbia, Canada, and Cape Coast, Ghana, she was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship by the University Grants Commission in India, which she held at the University of Poona. On returning to England she was awarded a Research Fellowship at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. Both fellowships involved teaching (at Cambridge, supervisions). Subsequently she became a long-term Visiting Lecturer at Kobe College, Japan, and for many years taught in the graduate school of Konan University as well. During her husband's sabbatical in England in 1990-91, she was also an honorary faculty member at her alma mater, King's, giving tutorials and seminars on nineteenth-century literature. Since returning from Japan in 2001, she and her husband have been living in Surrey, UK, near their sons.
Her publications include Through the Northern Gate: Childhood and Growing Up in British Fiction, 1718-1901 (Peter Lang, 1996, now available from the publisher as an eBook); Paul Scott (Writers and Their Works series, Northcote House/British Council, 1999); Literary Surrey (John Owen Smith, 2005, last updated 2011), George Meredith (Writers and Their Works series, Northcote House/British Council, 2012); (with Patrick Swinden) The Gale Researcher Guide for Englishness and Empire: The Case of Paul Scott (2018); and numerous articles in a wide range of scholarly publications. Among these are The Burney Newsletter, College English, The Dickens Magazine, English, English Studies, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, The London Magazine, The Victorian Newsletter and the Victorian Review. She is a regular reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement, and her name has often appeared on its front cover.
Among her more recent publications are "Only Connect: Public Sculpture in Staines-upon-Thames," a contribution to Sculpting Art History, Essays in Memory of Benedict Read (2018); an entry on John Snow in the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies, ed. Anthony Orum (2019); and "Finding (and Moving on from) the Father: The Appeal of George Meredith's Adventures of Harry Richmond" in the Victorian Review (Fall 2021). Her many "In Briefs" for the TLS keep her up to date, but the longer review articles give more scope for thought. These include: "When Words Moved Fast: The Late Victorian Network of Ideas" (27 March 2020); "Virtually Victorian: A Return to Formal Engagement with the Novel" (25 February 2022); "Rejoice with trembling: Love and marriage in George Eliot’s life and fiction" (17 March 2023); and "Eastward Ho! The Victorians Came to Prize a Knowledge of Asian Cultures" (10 November 2023). She has also contributed both fiction and non-fiction on a variety of topics to newspapers and magazines such as The Anglo-Welsh Review, Poetry Wales, This England (mostly in the Literary Landscapes slot), The Weekly Telegraph and Aquila (for the younger age group).
Subjects of invited talks at arts centres, literary institutions and festivals include "A Stretch of the Imagination: The Thames in Literature," "Mole Valley's Literary Heritage," "Richard Jefferies: The Surbiton Years," "George Meredith's Talent for Friendship" and "The Hunting of Lewis Carroll and Other Local Authors." She also gave an inaugural lecture, "Perspectives on the Victorian Architecture of Sliema," for a new Heritage Association in Malta, and read a paper on "Baron Henri de Triqueti: An Artist of Sensibility and Conviction in Mid-Victorian England" at the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association conference of 2016. She has contributed to a BBC radio programme on Lewis Carroll and TLS podcasts on Emily Brontë and George Eliot, advised programme researchers on such subjects as crime and housing in Victorian England, and provided photographs for a wide range of publications, including an art gallery catalogue and Philip Davies's splendid English Heritage book, London: Hidden Interiors (Atlantic Publishing, 2012).
Since taking early retirement, she has done a good deal of part-time teaching, and some freelance work for the Cambridge University Press. Her contribution on George Meredith to the Oxford Bibliographies in Victorian Literature project, ed. Lisa Rodensky, was added to the OUP website at the beginning of November 2023. She is a member of the Victorian Society, the Pugin Society and the PSSA (Public Statues and Sculpture Association).
Dr Banerjee has been contributing to the Victorian Web for over twenty years, becoming its UK contributing editor in 2005, its Associate Editor and Assistant Webmaster in 2009, and its Editor-in-Chief and Webmaster at the beginning of 2021.
Contact Information
Dr. Banerjee can be reached via e-mail at jackie@victorianweb.org
Last modified 9 November 2023