In 1856, George Eliot (1819–80) lamented the proliferation of ‘the least readable [variety] of silly women's novels, […] the modernantique species’, specifically criticising authors’ lack of ‘accurate and minute knowledge’.1 She favoured instead the writer of the rare, wellresearched novel, a work that rested upon a foundation of scholarly archaeological information and whose ‘genius […] familiarized itself with all the relics of an ancient period’; this type of novel, she claimed, ‘can sometimes, by the force of its sympathetic divination, restore the missing notes in the “music of humanity,” and reconstruct the fragments into a whole which will really bring the remote past nearer to us’. Over the following decades, the increasing availability of scholarly volumes on the ancient world saw a revolution not only in historical fiction but across literary genres. Of course, the novels that Eliot derided still persisted – texts in which authors, in Eliot's view, ‘make their mental mediocrity more conspicuous, by clothing it in a masquerade of ancient names; by putting their feeble sentimentality into the mouths of […] Egyptian princesses’ – yet a greater sense of historical and archaeological awareness became increasingly apparent in the years following Eliot's complaint, evident in diverse literary types, from the imperial romances of H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) and the Gothic novels of Bram Stoker (1847– 1912) to the decadent writings of Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) and the children's stories of Edith Nesbit (1858–1924).