Vanessa Smith is Professor of English literature at the University of Sydney. She is author or editor of five books focusing on different aspects of intercultural contact in the Oceania of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and has published widely on the British and American novel. Her new book, Toy Stories: analyzing the child in nineteenth-century literature, is forthcoming from Fordham University Press. She is convenor of the Novel Network at the University of Sydney, and co-editor of the Oxford University Press series Approaches to the Novel