Research Interests

After taking her first degree in English Language and Literature at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, Valerie Fehlbaum taught English as a foreign language in Geneva before joining the staff of the English Department at the University. She then completed a D.E.S. in Women’s Studies, writing her Memoir, “To Wed or not to Wed: The New Woman of the 1890s”, under the guidance of Michèle le Doeuff, and went on to write her doctoral thesis on the New Woman under the supervision of Lyn Pykett in Aberystwyth, Wales. Since then she has also been an Associate Lecturer with The Open University in Britain, tutoring courses on The Enlightenment, Approaching Literature, and the Nineteenth-Century Novel.

Publications

Books and Monographs

Guest-edited a special edition of Women's Writing dedicated to Ella Hepworth Dixon, Volume 19, Number 1, Routledge, February 2012.

Ella Hepworth Dixon: The Story of a Modern Woman for Ashgate’s Nineteenth Century Series. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Republished in London Routledge in 2019.

Forthcoming: One Doubtful Hour, and Other Sidelights on the Feminine Temperament: Short Stories by Ella Hepworth Dixon, to be published by ‘Jewelled Tortoise’ in 2025.

Selection of Articles

"Ella Hepworth Dixon:  Storming the Bastille, or Taking it by Stealth?" in Women in Journalism at the Fin de Siecle: Making a Name for Herself, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012:  182-201.

“Ella Hepworth Dixon: New Woman, New Image?” in Nineteenth-Century Feminisms, 4 (2001): 47-74.

"Ella Hepworth Dixon and Oscar Wilde." The Wildean 26 (January 2005): 41-50.

“Sisters in Life, Sisters in Art.” Michael Field and their World. High Wycombe: Rivendale Press, 2007: 107-115.

“Urban Space and the New Woman” in Feminismo/s 2005 (2) edited by the University of Alicante, Spain.

Contributions to Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism. Academia Press and the British Library, 2008.

“Paving the Way for Mrs Dalloway.” Inside Out: Women Negotiating, Subverting, Appropriating Public and Private Space. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2008: 149-166.

‘Ella Hepworth Dixon: Storming the Bastille, or Taking it by Stealth?’ in Women in Journalism at the Fin de Siècle: Making a Name for Herself. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (2012) pp. 182-201.

Guest Editor with Georgina O’Brien of Special Issue of Women’s Writing dedicated to Ella Hepworth Dixon. Routledge, Spring 2012.

‘Stepping Out: “At Home” or “From Our Own Correspondent”? The Lady Writer or the Woman Journalist?’ in Women In Transit Through Literary Liminal Spaces Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (2013) pp. 61-73.

‘Ella Hepworth Dixon’s My Flirtations: The New Woman and the Marriage Market’ in Victorian Review Vol 44, No 2, 2018

‘Ella and Marion Hepworth Dixon: “What’s in a Name?”’, Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies, 7.2 (winter 2024), pp. 61-75.