Please note that this is an extremely incomplete list. You know where you can find a better one? A UofT library search!
As a rule, guides, overviews, or essay compilations by academic publishers like Oxford, Cambridge, Norton, Routledge, or anything “U Press” tend to be pretty reliable.
Bold titles are available at the UTSC Library Standard font titles are available elsewhere in the U of T Library system
Altick, Richard D. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800-1900. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957.
——. Writers Readers Occasions: Selected Essays on Victorian Literature and Life. Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 1989.
Armstrong, Nancy, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987.
Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982.
Basch, Françoise. Relative Creatures: Victorian Women in Society and the Novel. New York: Schocken Books, 1974.
Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.
Byerly, Alison. Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.
Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. Realism and Consensus in the English Novel: Time, Space and Narrative. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1998.
Garrigan, Kristine Ottesen, ed. Victorian Scandals: Representations of Gender and Class. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1992.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth- Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.
Homans, Margaret. Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing. London: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Houston, Gail Turley. Royalties: The Queen and Victorian Writers. Charlottesville: U Press of Virginia, 1999.
O’Gorman, Frances, ed. The Victorian Novel. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002.
Shaw, Harry E. Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1999.
Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. London: Virago, 1999.
Sutherland, J.A. Victorian Novelists and Publishers. London: The Athlone Press, 1976.
Tuchman, Gaye, with Nina E. Fortin. Edging Women Out: Victorian Novelists, Publishers, and Social Change. London: Routledge, 1989.
Williams, Ioan. The Realist Novel in England: A Study in Development. London: Macmillan, 1974.