Anna Vaninskaya spent equal portions of her life in Russia, America, and Britain. She received her doctorate in English Literature from Oxford University, worked as a research fellow at King's College, Cambridge and with the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group, and is now a Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests include nineteenth-century socialism, popular reading, and historical cultures, the history of education and the work of writers such as Morris, Wells, Chesterton, Orwell, and Tolkien.