Clare Walker Gore

University of Cambridge, Faculty of English, Post-Doc

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Early career researcher in Victorian literature. Particular interests in disability studies and women's writing. PhD from Selwyn College, Cambridge, Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge from October 2016. Author of Plotting Disability in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Edinburgh University Press, 2019)
Address: Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom

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Books by Clare Walker Gore

Plotting Disabillity in the Nineteenth-Century Novel

Edinburgh University Press, 2019

This book takes an exciting new approach to characterisation and plot in the Victorian novel, exa... more This book takes an exciting new approach to characterisation and plot in the Victorian novel, examining the vital narrative work performed by disabled characters. It demonstrates the centrality of disability to the Victorian novel, showing how attention to disability sheds new light on texts’ arrangement and use of bodies. It also argues that the representation of the disabled body shaped and signalled different generic traditions in nineteenth-century fiction. This wide-ranging study offers new readings of major writers including Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot and Henry James, as well as exploring lesser known writers such as Charlotte M. Yonge and Dinah Mulock Craik.

A Noble Life

A brand new edition of Dinah Mulock Craik's novel A Noble Life, with Introduction, notes, and app... more

Papers by Clare Walker Gore

'The Additional Attraction of Affliction': Disability, Sex and Genre Trouble in Barchester Towers

Victorian Literature and Culture, 2017

Noble Lives: Writing Disability and Masculinity in the Late Nineteenth Century

Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Sep 2014

““Setting Novels at Defiance”: Novel Reading and Novelistic Form in Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe”

Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Jun 2014

Book Chapters by Clare Walker Gore

'Charlotte M. Yonge' and ‘The Daisy Chain’, in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women Writers, ed. Lesa Scholl and Emily Morris (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)

‘“That very ugly saddle’: Disability, Adaptation and Paternal Inheritance in The History of Sir Richard Calmady’, Lucas Malet, Dissident Pilgrim: Critical Essays, ed. Alexandra Gray and Jane Ford (Routledge, 2019), pp.52-68

'"Excluded from a woman’s natural destiny”: Disability and Femininity in Dinah Mulock Craik’s Olive and Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Daisy Chain’, in Reassessing Women’s Writing of the 1840s and 1850s, ed. Adrienne E. Gavin and Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp.153-166

'The Awful Individuality of Suffering': Disabled Characterisation in Dinah Mulock Craik's Olive and A Noble Life

The Variable Body in History, ed. Chris Mounsey and Stan Booth, 2016

This essay explores two rare examples of Victorian novels which have disabled protagonists, Dinah... more This essay explores two rare examples of Victorian novels which have disabled protagonists, Dinah Mulock Craik’s Olive (1850) and A Noble Life (1866). These novels are radical in being centred on the experience of disabled characters, and anticipate the social model of disability in their depiction of disability as a socially constructed category. However, I argue that Craik ultimately fails to construct fully functional disabled protagonists, and that it is this very failure which makes these novels so interesting. Craik’s unwillingness to engage directly with certain aspects of disabled experience not only reveals something about contemporary constructions of disability, but speaks to the limitations of the social model of disability at the present time.

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“The right and natural law of things”: Disability and the Form of the Family in the Fiction of Dinah Mulock Craik and Charlotte M. Yonge

Queer Victorian Families: Curious Relations in Literature, Feb 2015

Blog Posts by Clare Walker Gore

'Slobbering away with their hands': Cutlery, Cookery and Identity in the Life of Arthur Macmurrough Kavanagh

The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name?: Queer Desire in the Mid-Victorian Novel

'Half Man, Half Chair': Disability and Personhood in Wilkie Collins's 'The Law and the Lady'

Dickens and Disability at Christmas, Or, Why Tiny Tim Did NOT Die

'A Girl Who Wasn't Born Neat': Disability, Gender Trouble and 'What Katy Did'

Adventures in Marble and Monochrome: Victorian Sculpture and Photography at Tate Britain

Crafty Women and Artful Misses: Femininity, Feminism and Female Crafts in the Victorian Novel

Book Reviews by Clare Walker Gore

'Replotting Marriage in the Nineteenth-Century Novel’

Review of English Studies (70.293), 2019

Review of 'Replotting Marriage in the Nineteenth-Century Novel’, ed. Jill Gavin and Elsie B. Mich... more

‘From “Afflicted Man” to “Member of an Oppressed and Persecuted Race”: Rethinking Blindness in the Nineteenth Century'

Journal of Victorian Culture (24.1), 123-7, 2019

Review of 'Blindness and Writing From Wordsworth to Gissing' by Heather Tilley (Cambridge UP, 2017)

Reconsidering the Familiar: A Fresh Approach to the Victorian Marriage Plot

Journal of Victorian Culture, 2017

Review of Talia Schaffer's Romance's Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction (OUP 2016)

Plotting Disabillity in the Nineteenth-Century Novel

Edinburgh University Press, 2019

A Noble Life

A brand new edition of Dinah Mulock Craik's novel A Noble Life, with Introduction, notes, and app... more

'The Additional Attraction of Affliction': Disability, Sex and Genre Trouble in Barchester Towers

Victorian Literature and Culture, 2017

Noble Lives: Writing Disability and Masculinity in the Late Nineteenth Century

Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Sep 2014

““Setting Novels at Defiance”: Novel Reading and Novelistic Form in Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe”

Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Jun 2014

'Charlotte M. Yonge' and ‘The Daisy Chain’, in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women Writers, ed. Lesa Scholl and Emily Morris (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)

'The Awful Individuality of Suffering': Disabled Characterisation in Dinah Mulock Craik's Olive and A Noble Life

The Variable Body in History, ed. Chris Mounsey and Stan Booth, 2016

Download

“The right and natural law of things”: Disability and the Form of the Family in the Fiction of Dinah Mulock Craik and Charlotte M. Yonge

Queer Victorian Families: Curious Relations in Literature, Feb 2015

'Slobbering away with their hands': Cutlery, Cookery and Identity in the Life of Arthur Macmurrough Kavanagh

The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name?: Queer Desire in the Mid-Victorian Novel

'Half Man, Half Chair': Disability and Personhood in Wilkie Collins's 'The Law and the Lady'

Dickens and Disability at Christmas, Or, Why Tiny Tim Did NOT Die

'A Girl Who Wasn't Born Neat': Disability, Gender Trouble and 'What Katy Did'

Adventures in Marble and Monochrome: Victorian Sculpture and Photography at Tate Britain

Crafty Women and Artful Misses: Femininity, Feminism and Female Crafts in the Victorian Novel

'Replotting Marriage in the Nineteenth-Century Novel’

Review of English Studies (70.293), 2019

Review of 'Replotting Marriage in the Nineteenth-Century Novel’, ed. Jill Gavin and Elsie B. Mich... more

‘From “Afflicted Man” to “Member of an Oppressed and Persecuted Race”: Rethinking Blindness in the Nineteenth Century'

Journal of Victorian Culture (24.1), 123-7, 2019

Review of 'Blindness and Writing From Wordsworth to Gissing' by Heather Tilley (Cambridge UP, 2017)

Reconsidering the Familiar: A Fresh Approach to the Victorian Marriage Plot

Journal of Victorian Culture, 2017

Review of Talia Schaffer's Romance's Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction (OUP 2016)

'Review of "The Measure of Manliness" by Karen Bourrier', Critical Quarterly 58.2 (July 2016)

‘Reading Victorian Deafness’, Wilkie Collins Journal (April 2016)

‘Buried Treasure: Rediscovering Forgotten Women Writers’, Women: A Cultural Review, 26.3 (December 2015)

‘Return to the 1950s: Rachel Cooke’s Her Brilliant Career and the Novels of Mary Renault and Barbara Pym’, Glasgow Review of Books (June 2015)

'A Life More Ordinary?', Women's Writing 26.1 (June 2015)

Review of Anne Marie Millim's The Victorian Diary and Irine Wiltshire, ed., Letters of Mrs. Gaske... more

'Writing From the Heart of the House', Women's Writing 25.3 (December 2014)

Women: A Cultural Review, Dec 2014

' “Coming out of the Attic: Re-examining Disability in Jane Eyre.” Review of David Bolt, Julia Miele Rodas, and Elizabeth J. Donaldson’s The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability', Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 10.1 (Spring 2014)

Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Jun 2014

'"That very ugly saddle": Disability, Adaptation and Paternal Inheritance in The History of Sir Richard Calmady', in Lucas Malet, Dissident Pilgrim: Critical Essays, ed. Alexandra Gray and Jane Ford (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp.52-68

'"They can very well do without much beauty in me”: Disability, Desire, and the Body of the Dickensian Heroine’, Univerisity of Victoria, The Body and the Page in Victorian Culture: RSVP/VSAWC Joint Annual Conference, 26-28 July 2018

‘“Two Parallel Currents”: Gender, Genius and Woman’s Work in The Life of Charlotte Brontë’, Anglia Ruskin University, The Brontës, Elizabeth Gaskell and the Legacy of Romanticism, 1 June 2018

‘“A kind of ferocious modesty”: Dying in Style in The Wings of the Dove’, University of Cambridge, Style in the Long Nineteenth Century, 4 November 2017

“The Additional Attraction of Affliction”: Disability and Sexuality in Barchester Towers

“This gift of transferred life”: Disability, Plot and Inheritance in the Novels of George Eliot and Henry James

Disability Pride and Disability Prejudice: Blindness and Blueness in Poor Miss Finch

‘The “Wooden Man” and the “Possible Person”: Prosthesis, Personhood and the Minor Character in Our Mutual Friend’, University College London, Victorian Popular Fiction Association Annual Conference, 14 July 2015

‘“I thought you were a child!”: Disability, Desire and Dickens’s Child-Women’, Leeds Trinity University, Victorian Ages: BAVS Annual Conference 2015, 27-29 August 2015

‘“Excluded from a woman’s natural destiny”: Disability and Gender Trouble in the Nineteenth-Century Novel’, University of Cambridge, Gender Studies Seminar, 26 October 2015

A Magnificent Compensation: Disability and Queer Desire in Lucas Malet’s The History of Sir Richard Calmady

“Rising Above Every Disqualification”: Representing Disability in The Life of Arthur Macmurrough Kavanagh

“More Romantic and Exciting”: The Literary Inheritance of Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe

“Half Man, Half Chair”: Sensationalising Disability in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady

At the Margins of Mystery: Sensational Difference in the Novels of Wilkie Collins, Victorian Persistence Seminar

Because we are too Many?: Numerous Families and Disability in the Novels of Charlotte Yonge

“Am I really deformed?”: Disability as a Social Construct in the Novels of Dinah Mulock Craik

“Am I Really Deformed?”: The Social Model of Disability in Victorian Popular Fiction

The Active Crutch and the Missing Limb: Disability and Prosthesis in Our Mutual Friend

‘A Deadly Obsession in Victorian London’, BBC History Magazine (August 2017)

BBC History Magazine, 2017

This article explores contemporary perceptions of the murder trial and public hanging of Francois... more This article explores contemporary perceptions of the murder trial and public hanging of Francois Courvoisier in 1840 by examining the commemorative album compiled by Richard Monckton Milnes, an MP who supported the abolition of capital punishment but seems to have been fascinated by the details of this grisly case.

Review of ‘Sculpture Victorious: Art in an Age of Invention, 1837–1901’ at Tate Britain, 25 February to 25 May 2015

‘The Amazing Life of Arthur Kavanagh’, BBC History Magazine (March 2016)

Clare Walker Gore

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Books by Clare Walker Gore

Papers by Clare Walker Gore

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Blog Posts by Clare Walker Gore

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