11 Facts About Mary Poovey

Mary Louise Poovey is an American cultural historian and literary critic whose work focuses on the Victorian Era.

Mary Poovey is currently Samuel Rudin University Professor in the Humanities at New York University, and Director of the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge.

Mary Poovey gained her PhD from the University of Virginia in 1976.

Mary Poovey's book is based around the idea of a "Proper Lady" and she looks at the difficulties that these three important authors had in breaking free from this mould.

Mary Poovey has been recognised as important in the work that she has done in feminist reading.

Mary Poovey has looked at how the growth of women writing was a device for seeing their voices emerge.

Mary Poovey conducted a public re-evaluation in 1999 at the British Women Writers Conference as a theoretical exercise of a writer's work.

Mary Poovey re-read the works of Ellen Pickering and decided that they were not worth reviving.

Mary Poovey concluded that the only reason to re-read works like this was to confirm that the books that we had chosen to remember, like Jane Eyre and Mary Barton, are the best of their type.

Mary Poovey used her re-reading of Pickering's novels to argue that not all writers need to be revived into the literary canon.

On January 30,2015 Mary Poovey received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Social Sciences at Uppsala University, Sweden.