Dr. Clare Walker Gore
Biography
I am a College Assistant Professor and Director of Studies in English at Lucy Cavendish.
As an undergraduate, I read English at Selwyn, where I went on to study for my MPhil and PhD. Before coming to Lucy, I held a Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity, where I was also a College Lecturer and Director of Studies, and I have also held a lectureship at the Open University.
Research Interests
My current project examines life writing by and about female novelists in the Victorian period, including Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, Charlotte Yonge, Harriet Martineau, George Eliot and Eliza Lynn Linton. I am particularly interested in how women novelists 'plot' their lives in their auto/biographies, and how they responded to one another's fictional and non-fictional portrayals of women writers' lives.
My previous project, Plotting Disability in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, grew out of my doctoral thesis, and explored the role of disabled characters in the nineteenth-century novel, investigating whether characters' capacity to function in narrative terms is curtailed by the attribution of a social identity based on incapacity. In fact, I found the opposite to be the case: disabled characters perform a host of necesary narrative roles in the Victorian novel, and disability functioned as an enabling concept for nineteenth-century novelists, used to test the possibilities and limitations of the marriage plot, to explore questions of social and narrative justice, and to probe the connection between embodiment and identity. The monograph version mainly focuses on the work of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Charlotte M. Yonge, Dinah Mulock Craik, George Eliot and Henry James.
More generally, I am interested in the nineteenth-century novel - especially in popular fiction, broadly defined, and in fictions by and about women - in disability studies, and in nineteenth-century cultural history. I mainly teach Part I Papers 1 (practical criticism), 6 (1660-1870), and 7a (1830-1945), and Part II Papers 1 (practical criticism) and 10 (1847-1872). I supervise dissertations on a range of eigtheenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century topics.
Connect with Clare
Publications
Books
Plotting Disability in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Edinburgh University Press, 2020)
Charlotte Mary Yonge: Writing the Victorian Age, co-edited with Clemence Schultze and Julia Courtney (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)
Articles
‘Why don’t he send the girl to the Asylum?’: Adaptation, Disability and the Social Body in Boucicault’s Dot and The Colleen Bawn’, Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film, 49.2, Special Edition on Dion Boucicault (November, 2022), 126–143
‘Unbroken health and a spirit almost criminally elastic’: Women’s Work and Women’s Bodies in the Autobiographies of Harriet Martineau and Margaret Oliphant”, Women's Writing, 27.4, Special Edition on Women and Labour in the Nineteenth Century (December 2020), 473-483
‘The Additional Attraction of Affliction: Disability, Sex and Genre Trouble in Barchester Towers’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 3 (August 2017), 629-643
'Noble Lives: Writing Masculinity and Disability in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 36.4 (September 2014), 363-375
‘“Setting Novels at Defiance”: Novel Reading and Novelistic Form in Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe’, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 10.1 (Spring 2014)
Book Chapters
'“But I have no vote, and what can a girl do?”: Suffrage, Reform, and the Marriage Plot in Felix Holt, the Radical and Miss Marjoribanks’, The Cambridge History of Victorian Women’s Writing, ed. Carolyn Dever and Amy Huseby (forthcoming from Cambridge, 2026)
‘“My chair is me”: Mobility Devices in the Victorian Novel’, The Oxford Companion to Disability and English Literature, ed. Essaka Joshua (forthcoming from Oxford, 2026)
‘Redemption from probable destruction’: Deafness, Isolation, and Identity in the Autobiography of Harriet Martineau’, in Modern Fiction, Disability, and the Hearing Sciences, ed. Edward Allen (Routledge, 2024), pp. 37-54
‘“They all revolved about her”: Disability, Femininity and Power in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing’, The Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism, ed. Rachel Carroll and Fiona Tolan (Routledge, 2023), pp. 69-81
‘“A lady with a profession”: The Governess, the Invalid, and the ‘Woman Question’ in the Novels of Charlotte M. Yonge’, in Charlotte M. Yonge: Writing the Victorian Age, co-edited with Clemence Schultze and Julia Courtney (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), pp. 85–103
‘“Our Ordinary Lot”: The Cross, the Crutch and the Theology of Disability in the Novels of Charlotte M. Yonge’, in The Figure of Christ in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Elizabeth Ludlow (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), pp. 195-207
‘“Of wonderful use to everybody”: Disability and the Marriage Plot in the Nineteenth-Century Novel’, in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Disability, ed. Alice Hall (Routledge, 2020), pp. 120–131
‘“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 (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, 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’, in The Variable Body in History, ed. Chris Mounsey and Stan Booth (Peter Lang, 2016), pp. 203-229
‘“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’, in Queer Victorian Families: Curious Relations in Literature, ed. Duc Dau and Shale Preston (Routledge, 2015), pp. 116-133
Radio Broadcasts
‘The Heir of Redclyffe’, Radio 3, The Essay, 9 February 2023
‘Wilkie Collins and Disability’, Radio 4, Free Thinking, 5 January 2023
‘John Halifax, Gentleman’, Radio 3, The Essay, 16 March 2021
‘Depicting Disability’, Radio 3, Free Thinking, 4 November 2020
‘Margaret Oliphant’, Radio 3, The Essay, 4 March 2020
‘Forgotten Authors’, Radio 3, Free Thinking, 26 October 2017
‘Hearing Voices’, Radio 3, Free Thinking, 6 December 2016
‘George Eliot and Germany’, Radio 3, Proms Extra, 2 August 2016
‘Politician and Pioneer: Writing the Life of Arthur Macmurrough Kavanagh’, Free Thinking Festival, 8 November 2015, and then broadcast on Radio 3, The Essay, 10 November 2015
‘Invalidism in Barchester Towers’, Radio 3, Free Thinking, 4 July 2015