Sally Ledger

Sally Ledger (1961 - January 2009) was Hildred Carlile Chair of English at Royal Holloway College, University of London. She was a Victorian literature scholar who made major contributions to the fields of nineteenth-century women’s writing and Dickens studies.

After undergraduate studies at Queen Mary’s College, London, she went on to the University of Oxford where she worked on the novels of Mark Rutherford under the supervision of Terry Eagleton. She was heavily involved in the activities of the student pressure group Oxford English Limited, and her earliest writings appear in its journal News from Nowhere: Journal of the Oxford English Faculty Opposition. After her doctorate, she moved between teaching jobs at various institutions before settling down in 1995 as a lecturer in English at Birkbeck College, London, where her passion for Victorian studies found a strongly supportive institutional context. She was promoted to Professor at Birkbeck in 2006 and took up the Royal Holloway Chair in 2008. She supervised many PhD students in Victorian and other topics across these years.^[1]

Sally Ledger’s major publications are The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle in 1997^[2] and Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination in 2007,^[3] both formative statements in their respective fields; she also has a lively shorter study of Henrik Ibsen (1998; second edition 2004). Her talent for academic collaboration also led to a series of co-edited volumes: Political Gender: Texts and Contexts (1994), Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle (1995), The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History (2000) and the posthumously published Charles Dickens in Context (2013). She edited George Egerton’s Keynotes and Discords (2000). In later years, she was involved with the Santa Cruz Dickens project in California, and was planning a book on the origins of Victorian sentimentality at the time of her death.^[4]

Ledger’s politics were of the Left, both in her practical campaigning activities for the Labour Party and in her academic commitment to marginalised literary voices and radical traditions.^[5]

The British Association of Victorian Studies has inaugurated a Sally Ledger Memorial Bursary fund for postgraduate students in her honour.^[6]

Obituaries

Tom Healy, The Guardian, 28 January 2009

Roger Luckhurst, The Independent, 7 February 2009

References