This lively, accessible, and meticulously researched book is the first to explore Victorian literature through scent and perfume, presenting an extensive range of well-known and unfamiliar texts in intriguing and imaginative new ways that make us re-think literature's relation with the senses.

• Note on the Texts


• Introduction


• 1: Top Notes: Victorian Perfume Contexts


• 2: Perfumed Melodies, Violet Memories: Scent and Remembrance in the Nineteenth Century


• 3: Les Fleurs du Mâle


• 4: Scent, the Body, and the Cosmopolitan Flaireur


• 5: Carnal Flowers, Charnel Flowers: Tuberose in Late Victorian Poetry


• 6: Michael Field's Fragrant Imagination


• 7: Dandies and Decadents


• 8: Victorian Drydown and Sillage


• Appendix

Catherine Maxwell read English literature for her BA and D.Phil. at St Hugh's College, Oxford where she was subsequently a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow from 1990-1993. She then joined the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London, becoming Professor of Victorian Literature in 2009. She is the author of The Female Sublime from Milton to Swinburne: Bearing Blindness (Manchester University Press, 2001), Swinburne (Northcote House, 2006), and Second Sight: The Visionary Imagination in Late Victorian Literature (Manchester University Press, 2008), as well as numerous articles on Victorian poetry and prose.