Sara Lyons is a Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Kent. She is the author of Algernon Charles Swinburne and Walter Pater: Victorian Aestheticism, Doubt, and Secularisation (Legenda, 2015) and various journal articles and book chapters on nineteenth-century literature and culture. Between 2017 and 2019, she was the Principal Investigator on an AHRC-funded project entitled ‘Literary Culture, Meritocracy, and the Assessment of Intelligence in Britain and America, 1880-1920’. This book is a product of that project.

• IntroductionChapter One: George Eliot’s Moral IntelligenceChapter Two: Thomas Hardy and the Value of BrainsChapter Three: Acting Clever in Henry JamesChapter Four: HG Wells’s Very Ordinary BrainsCoda: Virginia Woolf’s Hereditary GeniusBibliography

In Assessing Intelligence Sara Lyons offers an excellent example of contextual criticism done right. The book is a thoroughly persuasive, nuanced, and meticulously researched exploration of the Victorian novel’s complex relationship with the evolving scientific and popular discourses around the concept of intelligence.