Literary Ladies Research Articles

“Distinguished Irishwomen in London”: The Promotion of Professional Networks in Charlotte O'Conor Eccles' Journalism and Fiction

ABSTRACT Throughout much of her career, Irish journalist Charlotte O’Conor Eccles (1863–1911) promoted other Irish women and supported better rights for working women. Along with this support was Eccles’ belief that women should join social clubs and networks in order to excel in their own careers. Using both archival research and analysis of her journalism, this paper traces Eccles’ involvement in nineteenth-century networks as she moved between Ireland and England. Eccles’ participation in groups like the Literary Ladies’ Dinner and the Writers’ Club gave her access to various professional women, international and Irish, and influenced her writing, as indicated in this paper, in both her journalism and fiction. Furthermore, Eccles’ comparison of private “at home” events or salons versus public social clubs in her novel The Matrimonial Lottery (1906), indicates her own feelings toward women’s access to and the importance of these valuable professional networks. Tracing these networks is essential to uncovering the intricate connections Irish women, like Eccles, created as they not only succeeded in their careers but supported each other.

Hunter McKelva Cole Reminisces about Eudora Welty and Country Churchyards: An Interview

Hunter McKelva Cole Reminisces about Eudora Welty and Country Churchyards:An Interview Elizabeth Sweeney Elizabeth Sweeney: I know that you knew Eudora Welty, and I wanted to ask you how you knew about her, how you became interested in her. Hunter McKelva Cole: When I was a high school pupil in the 1950s, our eleventh-grade English class read a story by Eudora Welty, a person not known to us. As curious teenagers, the boys and girls were acquainted with Mark Twain, William Shakespeare, Franklin W. Dixon (Hardy Boys books), the author Carolyn Keene (Nancy Drew mysteries), and others. But Eudora Welty? Not at all. I still can recall the illustration placed within the text of her story. A witchy figure is bending down to pick up a coin that has fallen onto the path. By some fluke, I remember the name of the artist who created the illustration: Milo Winter. Amazed that some literary lady from our rustic state had produced something printed in a book, I told my family about this unexpected pleasure. It was unusual back then for school children to encounter fiction by living authors, much less by any Mississippi author. Although our schools were excellent, our literature books included mainly literary staples of the past—O. Henry (master of "surprise endings"), Jack London, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, "A Christmas Carol," Tom Sawyer, Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates, "The Lady or the Tiger," "Little Orphan Annie," Emily Dickinson, Helen Hunt Jackson ("October's Bright Blue Weather"), Edgar Allan Poe, and such. As a respite from diagramming sentences and deeply drilling grammar, school literature seemed to be valued as pastime entertainment rather than as serious art. When our books might include some anomaly such as Alphonse Daudet's "The Last Class," I wondered how chance had stirred a French writer, as well as Eudora Welty, into the edifying mixture. Mother told me that she had been in college with this Eudora Welty. In fact, they were in the same class at Mississippi State College for Women. Mother recalled Eudora rather casually and said that their dorm rooms were on the same floor but that they were not close friends. I was astonished that my own parent had encountered this published writer and had [End Page 183] never before bothered to mention the fact. So, I knew of Eudora Welty from the time I was midway of my high school years. I did not meet her until 1958, when I was a college student in Jackson, a time that I was bowed down in admiration of her books of stories and of her literary life. Eventually, to my good fortune, I got to know her rather well, and I knew her for about forty-two years. Occasionally, after I was living in Jackson, I would take her out to eat. We might take car rides in the country, but in late afternoons we would sit in her living room and talk. I loved listening, for she was indeed an accomplished talker, in addition to being a much admired fiction writer. Her soft voice was pleasing to my ears, and the light from the wall of windows made her eyes gleam. She got into the rhythm of her amusing narratives, by modulating her voice and gesturing broadly as though she were the comical person she was remembering. To my questions about E. M. Forster, Elizabeth Bowen, William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, and other literary friends, she customarily would recount some association or experience in which their lives crossed. Her commentaries about them and about works she admired carried me ever more deeply into the living world of literature. She shared reminiscences, insights, and droll anecdotes, preferring almost never to speak about herself but always focusing on others. Her quick wit was a delight to me. Memories, I judged from our conversations, were precious to her. In her last years, like many other old people, she repeated stories she already had told. Enjoying every word, I sat hunkered on the sofa amid an unsorted clutter of mail, magazines, and unwanted books that hopeful writers had sent. Seated there across from me, she was very dear and inspiring. As...

Laurence W. Mazzeno. The Critics and Hemingway, 1924–2014: Shaping an American Literary Icon

Laurence W. Mazzeno. <i>The Critics and Hemingway, 1924–2014: Shaping an American Literary Icon</i>

Man of Letters, Literary Lady, Journalist or Reporter?

The enormous changes wrought in the British newspaper industry during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought about a revolution in newspaper reading habits, financing and influence, all aspects of which have been well documented by historians of the press. But what of the contributor, particularly the freelance whose millions of words formed, mostly anonymously, the content of the new mass market press? How did writers negotiate changes in the literary marketplace during this time as editors demanded more ‘news’ and less in the way of whimsical paragraphing, and sketches, the traditional newspaper output of the professional man, or woman, of letters? Through the study of memoirs, correspondence and the fictional output of contributors to the press during this time, it is possible to discern the often fraught relations between writers and their most lucrative market.

William Blake’s Golden String: Jerusalem and the London Textile Industry

RECENT WORK IN ROMANTIC STUDIES--INDEED, IN ENGLISH STUDIES more broadly--has called for a renewed attention to the material-culture contexts with which literary expression is always in dialogue. In the past decade, landmark studies in Romanticism have investigated everything from advertising and economics to the science of the mind and the gastronomic pleasures of the table. (1) Increasingly, Romanticism is studied as a movement that is fundamentally engaged with and shaped by the circulation and production of commodities and the culture that they generate, and we are a long distance from the old myth of dreamy poets living in a world of the disembodied imagination. Some Romantic-era commodities have received substantial scholarly attention. We know a good deal of important information, for example, about sugar and slavery, tea and opium. (2) Print culture is now well integrated into the field of study, and the names of periodical reviews and their editors are, today, nearly as familiar as the names of the era's great cartoonists and satirists. (3) Among the widely circulated and significant commodities of the Romantic era, however, there is one that provided late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain with some of its most powerfully resonant cultural symbols: textile-based fashion. Throughout British culture, Phrygian caps and sans culottes were shorthand for 1790s radicalism, and the buff and blue colors of the Whig party--a visual allusion to the military uniforms of American revolutionaries--were a silent statement of transatlantic and national political allegiance. The revitalization of the tartan in the early nineteenth century operated as a cipher for renewed Scottish nationalism, and, to caricature an educated literary lady, one only had to refer to her imagined bluestockings. When the young Lord Byron made his maiden speech in Parliament in 1812, he had originally intended to speak on the subject of the Catholic emancipation, a topic that was unquestionably among the most urgent and divisive controversies of the Romantic half-century. Instead, he turned his attention at the last moment to a topic that was no less urgent for many of his contemporaries: the textile riots of the Nottingham weavers. (4) These impassioned artisans had been far more patient than their London counterparts, who had been rioting already for decades. Cultural engagement, of course, was Byron's signature, and the assimilation of material-culture tropes in his poetic oeuvre would surprise few scholars of the Romantic period. Likewise, there is something quite natural about the idea that the affluent middle-class writers who dominated the literary movement that we now know as Romanticism should have reflected and deployed in their work the luxury commodities with which they were surrounded as active consumers of gentility. With an artisan-class writer such as William Blake, however, the world of fashion seems less immediately relevant--perhaps especially in that avowedly spiritual and perfectly Jerusalem (1804-20). (5) Yet, nothing could be further from the case. Jerusalem is not just a poem that engages the material history of fashion and the textile industry in the early nineteenth century, but I would contend that it is perhaps essentially about that subject. Or, at least, it makes essential and direct narrative and visual use of Blake's considerable knowledge about cloth manufacture to shape its poetic narrative--a narrative that is far less mad when relocated in the context of Romantic-period material culture. In making this case for the centrality of cloth production in Jerusalem, I argue here three broad points. First, I propose that our thinking about Romantic print culture as a paper-based communication network and about Blake as a printmaker within it needs to be expanded to include the textile industry. It is an argument that some may find contentious. For the past several decades, Blake studies, in particular, has been strongly focused on what we might call a positive and minute historicism--a detailed and intensive investigation into the implications of what has been understood to be Blake's very specific training in a narrow and specialized field. …

Three Feminist Interventions

Three Feminist Interventions Esther M. Lopez Avril, Chloé . The Feminist Utopian Novels of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Themes of Sexuality, Marriage, and Motherhood. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2008. viii + 199 pp. $109.95. Cook, Sylvia Jenkins . Working Women, Literary Ladies: The Industrial Revolution and Female Aspiration. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 292 pp. $24.95. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher . Feminist Engagements: Forays into American Literature and Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 279 pp. $28.00 Each of the texts under review here contributes to feminist scholarship in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature by calling attention to understudied texts and by explaining why the concerns raised by the writers they examine are still relevant. All three studies are historically grounded, and each is centrally concerned with the way that women's bodily experience relates to gender and class expectations. In The Feminist Utopian Novels of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Themes of Sexuality, Marriage, and Motherhood, Chloé Avril explains why Gilman's views on sexuality, marriage, and motherhood, as presented in her utopian novels, still have much to offer today's feminists. In Working Women, Literary Ladies: The Industrial Revolution and Female Aspiration, Sylvia Jenkins Cook compares self-produced representations of white working-class women in literature to those by middle-class writers. [End Page 363] Spanning the early nineteenth to twentieth centuries, this study traces working-class women's response to economic independence and their efforts to define their own physical and spiritual roles, thereby demonstrating the impact these women had on each other and society in general. Shelley Fisher Fishkin's Feminist Engagements: Forays into American Literature and Culture is an engaging demonstration of why "the personal is political." It collects a series of essays, many of which were originally published in other collections or presented at conferences between 1990 and 2004, that explore how writers from the nineteenth through the twentieth century have challenged existing literary and social conventions, thereby paving the way for positive social change. One such writer was Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the subject of Avril's study and the focus of two essays in Fishkin's collection. Avril's study contributes to Gilman scholarship by focusing on the utopian novels that, with the exception of Herland (1915), have received little critical attention, and Avril explicates how they illustrate the social and political views Gilman championed in her nonfiction. After an introductory chapter that explains why the utopian novel is appropriate for Gilman's reformist purpose, Avril devotes a chapter to each theme she studies, and the connections she draws between Gilman's views and those of contemporary feminists are intriguing. However, her argument that Gilman's thinking regarding sexuality, marriage, and motherhood was often more radical than is commonly thought sometimes suffers because she does not sufficiently engage contemporary criticism of Gilman's racism and heterosexism. Avril's second chapter, "Sexuality," effectively advances her claim that Gilman was a more radical thinker than currently believed. Avril finds three areas where Gilman's views on sexuality continue to have relevance for contemporary feminists. Firstly, there is the idea that sexual liberation does not automatically result in social and political liberation; secondly, there is the idea that society still views sexual instincts as drives that must be indulged, and indulged in a heterosexual way; and finally, and most importantly, the idea that the power structure of sexual relations that Gilman critiques remains largely unchanged. Avril reads Gilman's utopian novels against second wave and modern feminist discourse as well as modern sociological studies of women's sexuality to help explicate Gilman's political views and establish their contemporary relevance. Avril distinguishes between "sex," which she defines as "the sexual act," and sexuality, which she defines as "the cultural and ideological way in which we experience and make sense of our intimately physical and emotional lives" (42). Avril does not propose using Gilman's views on sexuality, as represented in her theoretical writings and utopian novels, as a blueprint for how feminists today can solve these issues; instead, feminists may benefit from "understand[ing] the premises on which she based her analysis of (hetero)sexuality" (40-41). The "(hetero)" is important here, because although Avril advocates feminist critiques...

‘Leisure to be Wise’: Edgeworthian Education and the Possibilities of Domesticity

Abstract: In Letters for Literary Ladies Maria Edgeworth discusses the positive effects of women's exclusion from the division of labour. According to Edgeworth, their exemption from professional life grants women ‘leisure to be wise’. Drawing on Edgeworth's father's Essays on Professional Education, as well as on her novel Belinda, this article considers the extent to which intellectual capital can provide a viable alternative to the possession of either landed estate or professional skills. With reference to previous interrogations of the ‘separate spheres thesis’, this article suggests that domestic education is, in fact, informed by an ethic of professionalism.

“An invincible force meets an immovable object”: Gertrude Stein comes to Chicago

This article draws on unpublished archival material to illuminate Gertrude Stein’s visits to Chicago during the 1930s. Stein caused a sensation all over the city--especially among the city’s literary ladies--but also met with resistance at the University of Chicago. Stein’s time in Chicago reveals the complex relationship among gender, literary celebrity, and the reception of literary modernism, as well as the ways in which an avant-garde lesbian writer becomes a “great” writer in a tradition that is dominated by men. Most importantly, Stein’s reception in Chicago is central to understanding new arguments not only about Stein’s identity but also about Stein’s aesthetic, which was significantly impacted by her experiences in a city characterized by its “middle”-ness and mobility.

Working Women, Literary Ladies: The Industrial Revolution and Female Aspiration; Grotesque Relations: Modernist Domestic Fiction and the U.S. Welfare State

Book Review| March 01 2010 Working Women, Literary Ladies: The Industrial Revolution and Female Aspiration; Grotesque Relations: Modernist Domestic Fiction and the U.S. Welfare State Paula Rabinowitz Paula Rabinowitz Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2010) 82 (1): 198–200. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2009-080 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Paula Rabinowitz; Working Women, Literary Ladies: The Industrial Revolution and Female Aspiration; Grotesque Relations: Modernist Domestic Fiction and the U.S. Welfare State. American Literature 1 March 2010; 82 (1): 198–200. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2009-080 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2010 by Duke University Press2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Maria Edgeworth: nineteenth century Irish female pioneer of science education

Maria Edgeworth was a nineteenth century novelist, primarily remembered for her adult and children's novels. Yet her book, Letters for literary ladies discussed the importance of science education for girls and in conjunction with her father, Richard Edgeworth, she wrote several treatises on education. Their book Practical education advocates an inquiry approach to teaching science and also using scientific practices, such as observation and data collection, to examine and plan children's education. They emphasised the importance and the role of experimentation, observation and critical thinking in the development of children's knowledge, skills and attitudes towards learning. However, the history of science education has to date ignored this seminal work and Maria's contributions to women's science education.

A CLUB OF THEIR OWN: THE “LITERARY LADIES,” NEW WOMEN WRITERS, AND FIN-DE-SIÈCLE AUTHORSHIP

THE NEW WOMAN was both a discursive formation and a figure produced by materialist history as a result of debates over marriage, sexualities, political rights, labor conditions, life styles, and fashion. Unnamed until 1893 (Tusan 169), the “New Woman” became a lively topic in the press only in 1894 (Schaffer, “‘Nothing’” 39–40), at which point the rhetoric aimed at actual women quickly transformed into attacks on or defense of a literary phenomenon – in part, Ann Ardis suggests, because a literary controversy was less threatening than the prospect of actual social change (12). The “‘props’” attributed to the New Woman by Punch, the preeminent periodical to construct the literary stereotype, included five defining activities: “She smoked, rode a bicycle, frequented women's clubs, read voraciously and wore bloomers” (Miles 247). Scholars have long acknowledged that the New Woman did not suddenly appear but had a pre-history dating back to the 1880s (e.g., Ledger 23). A crucial part of that pre-history in life and in print was the founding of the “Literary Ladies,” a women writers' dining club, in 1889. The club not only represented significant innovation in fin-de-siècle authorship but also, more crucially, precipitated in the press the “props” (bloomers excepted) that would typify – and target – the New Woman from 1894 onward.

Feminism and Renaissance Studies

Notes of Contributors Introduction I. HUMANISM AFTER FEMINISM 1. Did Women Have a Renaissance? 2. Women Humanists: Education for What? 3. The Housewife and the Humanists 4. The Tenth Muse: Gender, Rationality, and the Marketing of Knowledge II. HISTORICIZING FEMININITY 5. Medicine, Anatomy, Physiology 6. Women on Top 7. The 'Cruel Mother': Maternity, Widowhood, and Dowry in Florence in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries 8. Witchcraft and Fantasy in Early Modern Germany III. GENDER AND GENRE 9. Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme 10. Literary Fat Ladies and the Generation of the Text 11. Margaret Cavendish and the Romance of Contract 12. Surprising Fame: Renaissance Gender Ideologies and Women's Lyric IV. WOMEN'S AGENCY 13. Women on Top in the Pamphlet Literature of the English Revolution 14. La Donnesca Mano ('The Womanly Hand') 15. Guilds, Male Bonding and Women's Work in Early Modern Germany 16. Language, Power, and the Law: Women's Slander Litigation in Early Modern London 17. Finding a Voice: Vittoria Archilei and the Florenine 'New Music' Bibliography Index

End, Impasse, Crisis: Russia and the Russians at Their Own Funeral

Not long ago I had occasion to experience a few less-than-pleasant moments. A rumor spread through literary Moscow that I … how shall I say this with some modesty? … ceased to exist, returned to my forefathers … simply, that I had died. I will say straight out, an unusual and traumatic experience. My acquaintances carefully expressed their sympathy to those close to me and to my colleagues. Someone was certain they had seen my obituary in the paper. And meeting me on the street, one literary lady started, as if she had seen a ghost: Is it you? How you frightened us! It remained unclear what had frightened her so: the fact that I had seemed to die, or the fact that I was still alive despite the rumors.

Kenya's Literary Ladies and the Mythologizing of the White Highlands

In the 1980s one of the curious aspects of the West's fitful concern with Africa has been the revival of interest in Kenya's literary ladies: Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), Beryl Markham, and Elspeth Huxley.' This revival of interest is marked by the award-gathering cinematic version of Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa, the televised record of Markham's adventures and achievements, together with the popularity of her biography, Straight on Till Morning, and the successful televised dramatization of Huxley's The Flame Trees of Thika. And while it is morbidly interesting that a revival of American and British interest in literature is marked primarily by cinema and television activity - indeed, caused by such activity - it has been graced by new editions or at least new printings of the respective memoirs of the three ladies: Out of Africa, West with the Night, and The Flame Trees of Thika.2 There is a certain amount of coincidence in the revival; the centennial of Dinesen's birth, the publication of several popular accounts of life in the white highlands (Nicholas Best's Happy Valley and James Fox's White Mischief, for example), and the discovery of Markham by the feminists are all among the contributing events. But whatever the external circumstances of the revival, it has to be understood in terms of an internal dynamic and relationship - an interrelatedness of subject, author, and audience. It is a phenomenon of both race and class. James Olney's Tell Me Africa is a study of black African autobiography. Apart from its analytical and explicatory virtues, it is important because it points toward the significance of the autobiographical

Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property

Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property

Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property

Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property

Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property by Patricia Parker

Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property by Patricia Parker

Aristotle and Logical Theory by Jonathan Lear

BOOK REVIEWS 'i.77 learning, at least, to heed the prohibitions that are so necessary, so grounding a feature of any articulated moral system. But Nozick seems uninterested in the interdictory and writes for the most part as though some kind of ideal utilitarianism were true. People are concerned with realizing values and with growth in value, and perhaps with seeing to it that value-seeking and -creation become cosmic activities. I have to quote, though I feel embarrassed to do so, and can scarcely believe that it is written by the author of the book's earlier sections, Nozick's peroration. We can envision a humanistic philosophy, a self-consciously artistic one, sculpting ideas, value, and meaning into new constellations, reverberative with mythic power, lifting and ennobling us by its content and by its creation, leading us to understand and to respond to value and meaning-to experience them and attain them anew (647). This reminds us of something, perhaps a little of Teilhard de Chardin at his most vapid, perhaps of H. G. Wells of the period of God the Invisible King, m013t of all, I fear, of the literary lady in chapter 34 of Martin Chuzzlewit, who saluted the presentation of a Program to a Hominy as follows. " Mind and matter," said the lady in the wig, " glide swift into the vortex of immensity. Howls the sublime, and softly sleeps the calm Ideal, in the whispering chambers of Imagination. To hear, sweet it is. But then, outlaughs the stern philosopher, and saith to the Grotesque, 'What ho! arrest for me that Agency. Go, bring it here! ' And so the vision fadeth." J. M. CAMERON 389 Dundas St. London, Ontario, Canada Aristotle and Logical Theory. By JONATHAN LEAR. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Pp. xi + 123. $17.50. Aristotle is "not only the father of logic, but also the (grand-) father of metalogic "; his logical programme is " one of the triumphs of human thought"· The book is intended to be "an interpretation of that programme " (ix). It consists of six chapters, dealing respectively with "Syllogistic consequence" (1-14), "Completeness and compactness" (15-33), " Hypothetical syllogisms " (34-53), " Invalid inferences" (5475 ), " Invalid proofs " (with " A note on ignorance", 76-97), " Proof by refutation" (98-114). A Bibliography (115-120) and two Indices (121123 ) are added. In every chapter the author endeavors to show-and often 278 BOOK REVIEWS with success-that Aristotle had either the modern problem in question or a problem analogous to it. The Index locorum gives an insight into the author's main interests: the most frequently quoted Aristotelian chapters are (in that order): An.Pr. A 23, Met r, An. Pr.a 22,An.Pr.A 4, B 14, B 16, and A 44. On the other hand, An.Pr.A 8-22 are not mentioned, not even A 15. The book contains a number of analyses which would merit a thorough examination. This will not be offered here. Instead some remarks will be made on two points which may be of interest to Neo-Scholastics and render the work of Mr. Lear sympathetic to them. 1. The study is completely a-historical, and indeed in two ways. First, the Organon is considered as forming one block, without any sort of evolution and change occurring, e.g. between the Topics and the Prior Analytics. Solmsen is not even mentioned, nor are other scholars who did work on the problem, e.g. Minucci. Now, while this is a method often used by the Neo-Scholastics, it is hardly defensible. And once the possibility of changes occurring in Aristotle is admitted, the results of the inquiry might become very different from what they are. This is one way in which the work is a-historical. It is also a-historical in another way: the author is not interested in the interpretations supplied by his predecessors, except some of those who wrote recently in English or have been translated into English. One striking example of this laek of interest is the fact that Theophrastus is not mentioned. Now it is true that he did not have the privilege of an education at Cambridge. But, since he was a...

Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women. Mary HaysLetters for Literary Ladies. Maria EdgeworthLetters on Education. Catherine MacaulayThe Unsex'd Females. Richard PolwheleThe Female Advocate. Mary Ann Radcliffe

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsAppeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women. Mary Hays Letters for Literary Ladies. Maria Edgeworth Letters on Education. Catherine Macaulay The Unsex'd Females. Richard Polwhele The Female Advocate. Mary Ann Radcliffe Elaine ShowalterElaine Showalter Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 3, Number 4Summer, 1978 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/493555 Views: 3Total views on this site Copyright 1978 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Two Literary Ladies: Mrs. Gaskell and Miss Brontë

AbstractOn The walls of the National Portrait Gallery in London are George Richmond's portraits of two ladies who, at the end of those now almost fabulous 40's of the 19th Century, won by their first novels, published within a few months of each other, a fame that was brilliant, sudden and lasting. Neither lady was in her first youth when her novels appeared, and such were the circumstances of their lives that it seemed hardly likely that their paths would ever cross. And yet at the time they sat to George Richmond they had learned to admire each other, had corresponded, had met in the house of a friend and had started that all too brief but sincere, if curious, friendship which was to place each under an immeasurable debt to the other and was to link their names in a lasting union.