Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market Maria Frawley Linda H. Peterson, Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. xv + 289, $35 cloth. Anyone who teaches Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, or George Eliot knows that discussion of anonymous or pseudonymous authorship is an inevitable (but rarely simple) way to help students begin to navigate the waters of nineteenth-century women’s writing. There are not one, but many, reasons why Austen’s first novel was published “by a lady,” or why Charlotte Brontë ventured into print as Currer Bell, or why Mary Ann Cross (aka Marian Evans) adopted the pseudonym George Eliot at a particular point in her career. Discussing “Male Pseudonyms and Female Authorship in Victorian England,” Catherine Judd long ago noted that “The discrepancy between the historical record of women writers’ publication trends in the nineteenth century and modern perceptions of those patterns indicates the existence of a cluster of mythic images surrounding the Victorian woman writer—especially the domestic novelist” (251). Judd’s piece was written for Literature in the Marketplace, the landmark collection edited by John Jordan and Robert Patten (Cambridge University Press, 1995). Linda Peterson’s Becoming a Woman of Letters, with its emphasis on the complexities of the literary marketplace and the emerging profession of authorship, belongs to this lineage and is indebted to many other valuable works of scholarship on women writers and print culture in the period as well. But it stands alone in grappling forcefully with the ways “a cluster of mythic images” were propagated—and often deliberately cultivated—by women writers in ways that worked with the “facts” of the market and in ways that were at least as “enabling” as they were “disabling” (10). [End Page 198] Peterson establishes one of her most significant premises early on, when she notes an intention to challenge the “historical arc of ‘rise and fall’” (3). If a “vastly expanded commercial press” made entry into authorship possible for a wide array of writers, male and female, women authors negotiated the passage differently and with varying degrees of success. The case-study approach that Peterson adopts works well to accentuate the individuality of the stories, while pairings between each two chapters become illuminating studies of contrast. After introductory chapters on the idea of a “profession of letters,” these chapters assess the sometimes widely discrepant histories of Harriet Martineau, Mary Howitt, Charlotte Brontë, Charlotte Riddell, Alice Meynell, and Mary Cholmondeley. Peterson inaugurates her study by putting periodicals at center stage: the emergence of new periodicals early in the century, many quickly garnering a reputation for cultural importance, offered the potential for a writer to be self-supporting. But if periodical publication provided a relatively new option for remuneration, the idea of the professional author was also relatively new. Peterson studies the “Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters” published in Fraser’s Magazine in the 1830s to undercut easy assumptions that male writers eagerly embraced the status of the professional author, or that women writers were prohibited from doing so. While portraits of male and female authors in Fraser’s underscore the importance of public personae at the early stages of professionalism and augur the celebrity journalism predominant later in the century, they also highlight anxieties and uncertainties, especially with respect to domestic roles and social status. Periodicals function in this introductory chapter, as they do throughout the book, not just as the vehicle through which entry into authorship may have been made possible, but also as a site for debates about the terms of authorship, and the differences between commercial and literary value. Crucially, though, periodical writing throughout this study is seen to function interactively with other genres, modes, and venues, as well as with institutions, such as the Society of Authors, or historical moments, such as the campaigns for copyright. Relatively early on in the study, Peterson concludes, “whether we use the language of the nineteenth century men of letters or of modern literary sociologists, the fact remains that the category of authorship was highly contested and the meaning of professionalism contested also...