Geraldine Jewsbury is now, just over a hundred years after her death, almost completely forgotten. She is largely ignored by literary critics and historians and unread by all other than devotees of the nineteenth-century novel. Her importance is for those who wish to trace the development of both ideas and action among the emergent "new women" of the century. She was not one of the great writers of social reform, such as George Eliot or Mrs. Gaskell; she was not of the "fashionable school" with Mrs. Gore and Mrs. Norton; but she was an independent woman who established a niche for herself in the literary and social life of her century. She is not easily put into any pigeonhole; as she wrote to Jane Carlyle, "It is no good your getting up a theory about me. I was born to drive theories and rules to distraction."

It would...