This talk will serve as a preview of–and invitation to–‘New Directions’, the 26th Annual 18th- and 19th-Century British Women Writers Conference to be held at UT April 11-15, and an occasion for Carol MacKay to review her contributions to some of its previous conferences. She will identify the recurring need to recover little-known women writers and also highlight cutting-edge approaches to such canonical authors as Jane Austen and George Eliot–and take us into the early 20th century with Annie Besant and Virginia Woolf. Carol MacKay is the J.R. Millikan Centennial Professor of English Literature and an Honorary Junior Fellow of British Studies. She teaches and publishes on Victorian fiction, women’s and gender studies, and life-writing. Her most recent book-length publications are Creative Negativity: Four Victorian Exemplars of the Female Quest (2001) and a critical edition of Annie Besant’s 1885 Autobiographical Sketches (2009).