Jessica Cox

Jessica Cox is a Reader in English Literature and Division Lead for English and Creative Writing at Brunel University London. She has research interests in maternal histories, Victorian popular fiction (especially sensation fiction), the Brontës, first-wave feminism, and neo-Victorianism. She is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and of the Royal Historical Society.

She has published widely on Victorian literature and culture. Her most recent book, Confinement (The History Press, 2023), examines women's experiences of maternity in nineteenth-century Britain, drawing on letters and diaries, medical and advice literature, newspaper reports, and court and hospital records. She is also the author of Neo-Victorianism and Sensation Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Victorian Sensation Fiction: A Reader's Guide to Essential Criticism (Red Globe Press, 2019), as well as more than twenty articles and chapters. She is editor of a collection of essays on Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Rodopi, 2012), and co-editor of a major anthology on Women and Belief (Routledge History of Feminism series, 2012) and of a special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies (2010). She has contributed blogs to the Journal of Victorian Culture online, and the History of Pregnancy Network.