House Leader - Roxy Hill 11MB

House Champion - Janine Hatter (see below)

Mary Braddon - She was a Victorian actress, writer, poet, editor. Her most renowned texts are Lady Audley’s Secret and Aurora Floyd, but Braddon wrote over ninety novels, one hundred and fifty short stories, alongside numerous plays and articles. Whilst working in Beverley and the East Riding she performed alongside the country's leading black actor, Ira Aldridge, an indicator of the prestigious company she kept during this time in her life. Beverley can be credited with providing Braddon with the time, means and creative freedom to launch her writing career. She summed up her time in Beverley by saying “in that peaceful summer I finished my first novel, I saw spring time arrive in Beverley, the summer raes and the hopelessly wet weather, I learnt to love the Yorkshire people and left Yorkshire almost broken heartedly.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon (by Miss Brownell)- https://youtu.be/LGgoeOMjMX0

Article about her life - https://www.advertiserandtimes.co.uk/people/reflections-mary-elizabeth-braddon-pioneering-author-who-helped-shape-lyndhurst-9154395/

House Champion - Janine Hatter 

Dr Janine Hatter is Programme Manager of the Postgraduate Training Scheme (PGTS) at the University of Hull and is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Janine’s academic research interests centre on nineteenth-century literature, art and culture, with particular emphasis on popular fiction. She has published on Mary Braddon, Bram Stoker, the theatre and identity, short stories as a genre, and Victorian women’s life writing, as well as on her wider research interests of nineteenth to twenty-first century Science Fiction and the Gothic.

She is co-editor of two series: New Paths in Victorian Fiction and Culture and Key Popular Women Writers, both for Edward Everett Root Publishers. While she is co-editing a collection on Fashion and Material Culture in Victorian Fiction and Periodicals, her monograph for the latter series examines Mary Braddon’s life, fiction and periodical publication processes from a contemporaneous and contemporary feminist perspective, with an emphasis on gender and genre.

She has edited special issues on ‘Werewolves: Studies in Transformations’ for Revenant, ‘Gender in Victorian Popular Fiction, Art and Culture’ with Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and ‘Supernatural in the Nineteenth Century’ for Supernatural Studies, as well as three special issues on ‘Age and Gender in Feminist Speculative Fiction’ for Femspec.

Janine is Co-President of the Victorian Popular Fiction Association and has co-founded the Mary Elizabeth Braddon Association. She is also a keen conference co-organiser, having ran VPFA’s annual conference and Study Days from 2014-2022, while at the University of Hull she has co-organised ‘The Mary Elizabeth Braddon Public Engagement and Study Day’ (2015), ‘“Viewer, I married him”: Reading (Re)productions of the Long Nineteenth Century’ (2012), ‘Ph.D. Experience Conference’ (2011) and ‘Great Expectations: Researchers in Progress’ (2009)