Mary Orr is Professor of French and Director of Postgraduate Research in the School of Humanities at the University of Southampton. She is the author among others of Flaubert: Writing the Masculine (OUP, 2000) and Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts (Polity, 2003) as exemplifying her wide-ranging, interdisciplinary publications on Flaubert, gender, intertextuality and the modern French novel. Her most recent publications and current research are on the dissemination of nineteenth-century French science through intertextual and interpersonal relations.