PMJ bags ‘new history of the Victorians through the women they ignored’

Penguin Michael Joseph (PMJ) has acquired Victoriana: A New History of the Victorians Through the Women They Ignored from social media historian Rosie Harte.

Publisher Jillian Taylor acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Hannah Weatherill at Watson, Little, with publication scheduled for March 2027.

Victoriana is described as “not a history of exceptions, but of a hidden majority: women who helped build the Victorian world, even as it denied them recognition”. “Sweeping, vivid and sharply observed, [it] reframes a defining century, showing that to understand the Victorians, we need to see the whole story, starting with the women who were always part of it,” the publisher said.

Harte, whose previous book The Royal Wardrobe was published by Headline, said: “At the time of writing this book I worked for an antique dealer in Mayfair. The pieces that most held my attention were the mundane objects: toilet sets, perfume bottles and miniature portraits. In its original sense, [Victoriana] means the material goods of the 19th century, but often it has a pejorative tone. Working with Victorian artefacts every day, I saw a world shaped as much by the unnoticed hands of women as by the famous men history has chosen to remember.

“It seems to me that the majority of Victorian women have suffered much the same fate as their knick-knacks and trinkets. A select few are deemed ‘museum-worthy’, immortalised in marble or oil paint, their stories recorded in biographies or displayed in glass cases. But the rest remain overlooked, dismissed as mere decoration in the grand narrative of history. I want to explore how the Victorians are still with us, their legacies woven into our culture, our politics, our environment and even the material objects that surround us.”

For more information, see the article in The Bookseller here.