Room of His Own

Barbara Black is a professor of English at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. She is the author of On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums (2000). Her work has appeared in such journals as Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Victorian Poetry, and Salmagundi. She is a contributor to the volume Dickens, Sexuality and Gender, edited by Lillian Nayder.

"(Black's) book is an absorbing and enlightening study of the importance of clubs to the formation of upper-and upper-middle class Victorian masculinity…. Black deftly reveals how every club is a statement of both exclusion and inclusion; it needs its outsiders to help to define those whom it chooses to let in." (Times Literary Supplement) "Barbara Black's 'Literary-Cultural Study of Victorian Clubland' fills a notable gap in the existing literature…. She builds a persuasive case for the iconic status of clubs in Victorian literature, drawing on a range of contemporary printed sources, and paying particular attention to the prevalence of clubs in novels. Many novelists chronicling Clubland were also club members and Black effectively connects the real-life club experiences of such writers as Dickens, Galsworthy, Thackeray, Trollope, and Wilde; she highlights their overlapping journalistic, social and personal worlds, while teasing out the broader context of Victorian society." (Canadian Journal of History) "The strength of (A Room of His Own) lies in establishing Victorian men's clubs as a culturally specific response to the transformations of British society at a particular phase of modernization." (Journal of British Studies) "This splendid book boldly lifts the curtain and raises the sash of Victorian private gentlemen's clubs, which often were more comfortable, intimate, and yet sociable than the prized domestic hearth. According to Professor Black, clubs functioned as heterotopic spaces that were simultaneously apart from and part of the social fabric that constituted them. This is a beautifully conceived, thoroughly researched, and deftly argued book that expands our awareness of the homosocial associations out of which personal and national identities were forged in the nineteenth century and persist, with modifications and adjustments, even today." "Black credits both her own family background and her students' interest in 'club culture' for this intriguing study, which is a major contribution to scholarship on British clubs and their effect upon society and literature…. Thorough research combined with well-selected anecdotes and a jargon-free style makes this volume a delightful read." (Review 19) "Barbara Black has written a valuable examination of the world of Victorian men's clubs and their importance to some major novelists of the age…. (An) interesting and useful book." (The Victorian Web) "Barbara Black's wonderfully informative discussion of nineteenth-century London club culture is something of a revelation. She makes us see how significant were men's clubs in the social life of the expanding propertied classes of Britain; how ubiquitous, if critically overlooked, are their representations in the Victorian novel and the Victorian press; and how powerfully the sociability they fostered has shaped notions of English masculinity and national identity. That she does so in prose that is itself sociable—often witty and always appealing—is an added pleasure." (Associate Director of the Heyman Center for the Humanities and Associate Faculty in English, Columbia University)