Sarah Stickney Ellis

The prolific SSE , author of thirty-four books, was the most popular writer of Victorian conduct literature. Her four advice books addressed women in the burgeoning middle class; she also wrote novels, poems, and didactic short fiction. One critic suggests that SSE may have been a key transitional figure in moving British literary tastes from the Romantics to the novels of domestic realism written from the 1840s. Generally, however, she is grouped with Mrs Beeton or the later writer Eliza Lynn Linton as purveying suffocating middle-class ideologies of womanhood. In The Women of England and its sequels she produced prescriptive anthropology—itself a bourgeois fantasy—of middle-class domesticity. Critics Karen Chase and Michael Levenson place her in the company of Dickens as one of the deep designers of the midcentury family imagination.