SOURCE: “Jean Ingelow: Mopsa the Fairy,” in Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers, edited by Nina Auerbach and U. C. Knoepflmacher, University of Chicago Press, 1992, pp. 207-13.

In the following essay, Auerbach and Knoepflmacher examine Mopsa the Fairy against the backdrop of Victorian notions of the domestic role of women, focusing in particular on the novel's ending.

Jean Ingelow (1820-1897) had, like Christina Rossetti, already achieved a high reputation as a poet before she began to publish children's fiction. Indeed, her 1863 volume, Poems, was so favorably reviewed that Rossetti, “aware of a new eminent name having arisen among us,” immediately, and deferentially, pronounced Ingelow to be “a formidable rival to most men, and to any woman” (The Rossetti Macmillan Letters, 19). Yet the two writers, together with Dora Greenwell, the third major aspirant to the poetic throne vacated by the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning...