Biocritical essays on 33 late Victorian novelists illuminate a distinct period in British literary history, which witnessed the birth of the detective novel by Wilkie Collins and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creation of some of the worlds favorite childrens literature, including Alice in Wonderland, and the fourishing of aestheticism in prose.Themes prevalent in the strongest works of the late Victorian period were the confrontation with spiritual crisis, the problems of the independent woman, the conflict between sexual frankness and the values of the new age, and the dualities of self. The volumes appendix includes essays by Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy and Henry James, among others, reflecting on the state of English fiction of the time.