Geraldine Jewsbury: The Power of the Publisher's Reader

Abstract

HE STUDENT OF VICTORIAN LITERATURE will be familiar with Geraldine Jewsbury beyond just her connection with the Carlyles. Her name appears in the letters of Mrs. Gaskell, Mrs. Browning, and Emerson, in Ruskin's diaries, and in the biographies of George Eliot, Thackeray, Huxley, and Froude.1 Her biography by Susanne Howe Nobbe has long been available,2 and her novels have been given critical attention by careful scholars and literary historians.3 Only her importance as the author of 1600 A thenaeum reviews over a period of thirty years, just touched on in the following discussion, has yet to be assessed.