The Professional Woman Writer

Abstract

Defining ‘writing’ as a profession has always been problematic and was emphatically so in the nineteenth century, when even medicine was not fully established as a profession until after 1850.1 The exploding market for print due to expanding literacy and new technologies that made print affordable, as well as the convention of anonymous publication, enabled more women than we can ever document to write non-fiction prose, from recipes to reviews, for money. Many women published only occasionally and were minimally paid if at all. Professional women writers, in contrast, wrote steadily for pay, often across multiple genres, and supported themselves through their work.2 I single out Anna Brownell Murphy Jameson (1794–1860), Harriet Martineau (1802–76), Marian Evans (later George Eliot) (1819–80), Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904), and Margaret Oliphant (1828–97) as widely read professional authors who won recognition from fellow professionals and the public. These five demonstrate what was possible to women writers despite their exclusion from the means of production or principal editorial positions in a male-dominated publishing industry, and illuminate the gendered conditions of the field they entered.