Isabella Falconer

Thesis Title: 'Creating the First Edition of The Barnacle', in the field of Victorian literature

The Barnacle (1863–67) is a multi-volume manuscript magazine produced by 'The Gosling Society' (1859–77), a group of teenage girls who formed an intellectual coterie in response to their exclusion from formal education. Christabel Coleridge, the granddaughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and one of the founding members, recalled that for them, 'Education was often desultory, and High Schools had not yet been thought of'. To provide literary guidance, Charlotte Mary Yonge – by then an established novelist – assumed the role of 'Mother Goose', the principal editor. The Barnacle became the medium through which the Goslings disseminated their academic and literary pursuits amongst the 'brood', fostering a culture of collective self-education and intellectual exchange. The surviving manuscripts offer a rare record of authentic and innovative writings by Victorian girls who created a countercultural alternative to institutional education and the still male-dominated print industry. Nevertheless, the magazines have received minimal scholarly attention. My project therefore proposes the first critical edition of The Barnacle, to illuminate the Goslings' proto-feminist practices and ideas, and to facilitate further research.

Supervisors: Professor Helen Small and Professor Christina de Bellaigue

Publications: ''Ye Learned of All Classes Study Barnacle': Subversive Acts of Imitation in The Barnacle Manuscript', Victorian Periodicals Review (Spring 2027)

Teaching: Landscape and Literature Tutor at ASE Bath

Research interests: Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing; History of the Book; Women’s Periodicals; Victorian Girls’ Education; Juvenile Authorship; Female Autodidacticism; Writing the Self