[the] Hildred Carlile chair in English at Royal Holloway, University of London, ...[She] died suddenly at the age of 47. Despite her comparatively young age, she had established herself as a leading scholar of 19th-century literature. Her intellectual pursuits ranged across the whole of the period, with important research on "the new woman" fiction of the fin de siècle, Dickens, and, recently, on the 18th-century origins of Victorian sentimentality.
Ledger's first book, was The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siecle (1997). Ledger makes the point that some women authors challenged prevailing cultural assumptions. An example is Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) whose The Story of an African Farm, (1883) refuses to use stereotyped tropes that feature, for instance, hair breadth escapes from "raging lions." Ledger's scholarship drew new attention to forgotten writers such as Schreiner had been.
Other of her books include Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination (2007), and a number of texts that she co-edited:
Political Gender: Texts and Contexts, (1994) with McDonagh and Jane Spencer,
Political Gender: Texts and Contexts, (1994) with McDonagh and Jane Spencer,
Cultural Politics at the Fin De Siècle, (1995) with Scott McCracken and
The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History, (2000) with Roger Luckhurst .
According to her Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article, Sally Ledger died
"as she prepared the family dinner [for husband and son] in their Letchworth home, [and]....suffered a sudden brain haemorrhage..."
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