What is the Victorian Short Fiction Project?
The VSFP is a digital literature anthology that includes a wide variety of fiction from the 19th century. The project was created by my friend and colleague, Dr. Leslee Thorne-Murphy at Brigham Young University. From 2020 to 2022, I filled several roles, including Managing Editor.
Story Webpages
Each story included on the VSFP began as a transcription from an original document published in the 19th century. But the process started long before the story could be copied down, with the sourcing of the original documents. Then, following transcription, I researched & wrote hundreds of Victorian literature guides, contextual footnotes & content advisories to help readers navigate each story. Check out several stories I’ve spearheaded below:
Editing & Management
As an academic publication, the VSFP also requires the extensive legwork of editing and peer-reviewing, as well as collaborating with libraries, other editors & web developers to create & display scans of the original documents on the Victorian Short Fiction Project’s WordPress site. As Managing Editor, my hands were present in these efforts at every level. To get a sense of my editorial involvement, take a quick glance through the number of pages where my name is credited on the VSFP website:
Literature Guides
I developed and wrote the VSFP‘s first guides to Victorian authors and journals. Each guide is aimed at an audience with varying degrees of exposure to literature and is designed to convey a large amount of unbiased information in a short space. Their information is drawn from both modern academic research and unexplored historical documents. A few of my favorites are:
Research Behind the Scenes
A friend once aptly nicknamed my work for the VSFP, “short story detective.” This project required me to sleuth my way through original journals and primary documents such as census records. I frequently read through entire volumes of 19th c. journals in order to give an accurate picture of their content. In some cases, this involved creating detailed spreadsheets to keep track of and mathematically evaluate the sheer immensity of information I was assessing. You can learn more about the fruits and labor of that endeavor in below, in this panel I presented in for the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Conference:
Alexandra Malouf 
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