At the centre of Reading on the Farm stands a large colonial library of just over 2000 volumes. The library belonged to Brancepeth Farm, a sheep station in the Wairarapa Valley of New Zealand, which, at its height in the late 1890s, employed more than three hundred staff. Brancepeth’s library, consisting principally of contemporary Victorian fiction, about half of it written by women, was consid ... (read more)
Deirdre Coleman
Deirdre Coleman holds the Robert Wallace Chair of English at the University of Melbourne. Her publications include Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Maiden Voyages and Infant Colonies: Two Women's Travel Narratives of the 1790s (Leicester UP, 1999), and Coleridge and 'The Friend' (1809-1810) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).