author
Michael Sadleir
1888–1957
A sharp-eyed lover of Victorian literature, he moved easily between publishing, collecting, scholarship, and fiction. Best known today for Fanny by Gaslight, he also helped shape how later readers understood 19th-century books.
2 Audiobooks
Excursions in Victorian Bibliography
by Michael Sadleir
Desolate splendour
by Michael Sadleir
About the author
Born in Oxford in 1888, Michael Sadleir was a British publisher, novelist, bibliographer, and major collector of 19th-century fiction. Early in his career he joined Constable & Co., where he later became a director, while also building a reputation as one of the leading authorities on Victorian literature.
His writing ranged from fiction to literary scholarship. He is especially remembered for the novel Fanny by Gaslight (1940), and for bibliographical and critical works on 19th-century authors, including Anthony Trollope. His collecting and cataloging work helped preserve and organize a huge body of Victorian popular literature that had often been neglected.
Sadleir died in 1957. For readers who enjoy authors with one foot in storytelling and the other in literary history, his life is a good example of how publishing, scholarship, and imagination can all belong to the same career.