Pauline Nestor is a scholar of nineteenth-century English literature. She studied at the University of Melbourne, then went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar for her graduate degrees. She spent more than three decades at Monash University in Melbourne, finishing as vice-provost for research, and now holds the title of emeritus professor. She is an academic and editor rather than a novelist, so most readers meet her through the front matter of someone else's book.
Her subject is Victorian women writers, above all Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell. Her approach draws on feminist and psychoanalytic theory and reads novels against the cultural life of their time. Her first book, Female Friendships and Communities (Oxford, 1985), asks how those three novelists portrayed bonds between women. Later articles looked at letters, self-fashioning and Gaskell's correspondence with her daughters.
She also wrote the short critical study Charlotte Brontë (1987) and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1992), a feminist reading of that novel built around motherhood, sexuality and identity. She edited Villette: New Casebooks (1992), a collection of critical essays on Brontë's last novel. Her best-known editorial work is the Penguin Classics Wuthering Heights, for which she supplied the introduction and notes. Lucasta Miller contributed a preface.
Start with that edition, since it is the book on WebToTell. Read the novel first, and use her introduction and notes afterwards to place it in its period. If Brontë's fiction pulls you further in, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is short and approachable, about 110 pages. Female Friendships and Communities is more demanding and suits readers already comfortable with literary criticism.
