Abstract
Elizabeth Robins’ White Violets (1909) illustrates the tenuous division between a Victorian and modern sensibility, and the qualities of mind and body necessary to be a writer of the first order—all rendered through the complex relationship between three women writers: Charlotte Brontë as imagined by popular legend; Selina Patching, a struggling “hack” writer of the Victorian period; and Barbara, the Wild Child, the writer for the coming age. In White Violets, we see a rendering of literary professionalism, fame, and gender that refuses to demarcate between good and bad, old and new, outmoded and newfangled, instead offering compelling textual arguments for a blending of borders, identities, and objectives that rewrites the margins by refusing the boundaries. Robins strategically appropriates the cult of Charlotte Brontë, both reinforcing the indebtedness of Victorian/modern women writers to the great Charlotte and lessening her significance, thus allowing new forms through which to imagine literary professionalism and celebrity. It is somewhat ironic, given Robins’ own success, that this unpublished novel might offer such great insight into the gendered politics of professionalization and celebrity, as well as the increasingly complicated moral and social mores that beset this moment in the margins.
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