Nicola Bradbury

Nicola Anne Lulham Bradbury (born 1951) is an English literary critic, lecturer, editor, and author, specializing in the 19th century novel.

Life

Bradbury was born in Weston-super-Mare, the daughter of Robin J. Bradbury and Joan Lulham, who had married in 1949. She was the middle child of a family of three, with an older brother, Peter, and a younger brother, Christopher.^[1] She was educated at the University of Oxford and then at McGill, with a Commonwealth Scholarship awarded in 1974.^[2] Bradbury later reported that in Canada she "first encountered ‘theory’ and that stood me in good stead at later stages in my career.”^[3] She graduated MA from both Oxford and McGill and is also a Doctor of Philosophy of Oxford, with a thesis entitled 'The Process and the Effect: a Study of the Developments of the Novel Form in the Later Work of Henry James'.^[4]

By 1989 Bradbury was a lecturer at the University of Reading,^[5] and from 1998 to 2005 was a Director of the Modern Humanities Research Association, English Editor for Modern Language Review, and editor of The Yearbook of English Studies,^[6] succeeding Andrew Gurr.^[7]

Much of her work has focussed on the novelists Henry James and Charles Dickens.

Selected publications

• Henry James: the later novels (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), ISBN 978-0198120964
• Filming James in Essays in Criticism, vol. 29 (1979)^[8]
• Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (Oxford: World's Classics, 1981), ed. Nicola Bradbury, ISBN 978-0192815149
• "'Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is': The Celebration of Absence in The Wings of the Dove", in Ian F. A. Bell, ed., Henry James: Fiction as History (1985)
• An Annotated Critical Bibliography of Henry James (Harvester Press, 1987) ISBN 978-0710810304
• Charles Dickens' Great Expectations (St. Martin's Press, 1990) ISBN 978-0312056582
• Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Wordsworth Classics, 1994), ed. and introduced Nicola Bradbury, ISBN 978-1853260919
• Charles Dickens, Bleak House, ed. Nicola Bradbury (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996)
• The Yearbook of English Studies: vol. 30: 2000: Time and Narrative (W. S. Maney & Son, 1999), edited by Dr. Nicola Bradbury, ISBN 978-1902653051
• Jane Austen, Emma (Wordsworth Classics, 2000), ed. and introduced Nicola Bradbury, ISBN 978-1853260285
• Henry James, The Golden Bowl (Wordsworth Classics, 2000), ed. and introduced Nicola Bradbury, ISBN 978-1840224320
• "Dickens and the form of the novel" in John O. Jordan, ed, The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens (2001)
• The Yearbook of English Studies: vol. 31: 2001: North American Short Stories and Short Fictions (2001), edited by Dr Nicola Bradbury
• The Yearbook of English Studies: vol. 32: 2002: Children in Literature (2002), edited by Dr Nicola Bradbury
• Penguin Classics Introduction to Bleak House by Charles Dickens (Penguin Books, 2003)
• The Yearbook of English Studies: vol. 33: 2003: Medieval and Early Modern Miscellanies and Anthologies (2003), edited by Dr Nicola Bradbury
• The Yearbook of English Studies: vol. 34: 2004: Nineteenth Century Travel Writing (2004), edited by Dr Nicola Bradbury
• "Dickens's Use of the Autobiographical Fragment" in David Paroissien, ed., A Companion to Charles Dickens (2008), pp 18–32
• Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (Wordsworth Classics, 2009), ed. and introduced Nicola Bradbury, ISBN 978-1840221817
• Henry James, The Ambassadors (Cambridge University Press: The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James, vol. 18, 2015), ed. Nicola Bradbury, ISBN 978-1107002838