Professional Woman Writer Research Articles

Reading the Women’s Sentimental Novel: A Romance

In “Reading the Women’s Sentimental Novel: A Romance,” Tabitha Sparks considers a large and diffuse body of mass-market fiction written by and for Victorian women. She argues that the author-focused interpretive approach that underwrites the study of the canon neglects the attraction of formula fiction, and even the robust recovery efforts of Victorian scholars have largely avoided a taxonomic reading of these novels. In an effort to uncover their objectives and appeal, Sparks reads periodical reviews and discussions of the professional woman writer to better understand the commercial – not artistic – standards assigned to the prosaic “lady’s novel.” She examines a subset of novels by Annie S. Swan, Sarah Doudney, Emily Jolly, and Adeline Sergeant to uncover a repeated subplot in which these novels’ heroines become best-selling authors. The complete elision of the content of their best-sellers reveals and confirms the sentimental novel’s self-conscious withdrawal from the literary caste wars of the day.

Eliza Lynn Linton and the Irish Question

This essay extends current scholarship on Eliza Lynn Linton by focusing on an under-examined aspect of her work—her Irish writings, in particular About Ireland (1890) and About Ulster (1892). These writings reflect the shift from her early support of radical Irish nationalism to her late advocacy of Liberal Unionism. Linton's contributions to literary and social history have been primarily discussed in terms of her position as an independent, professional woman writer who was a vociferous anti-feminist. Her Irish writings are similarly contentious, written during the historical juncture defined by the Home Rule movement (independence) and Ulster Unionism (strengthening the Union). Less an objective journalist than a provocative opinion writer, Linton in her writing reflects the period's debates about Ireland's impending break from the British Empire.

Aphra Behn: Portraiture and The Biographical Account

Abstract Scant biographical detail is known about the life of England’s first professional woman writer, Aphra Behn (d.1689), which makes it strange that scholars have shown little interest in surviving portraits of her. This article provides the first comprehensive survey of contemporaneous portraiture of Behn, outlining the provenance of these works and summarizing their various claims to authenticity. In doing so, it highlights how these visual documents of Behn’s life contradict the dominant scholarly view of Behn as a struggling writer who lived a hand-to-mouth existence. Behn herself endorsed one of her portraits, using it to promote her most significant publication up to that point, Poems upon Several Occasions (1684). This portrait neatly reflects the vision of Behn projected through the first biographies of her life which were circulated in the wake of her death. By drawing on Behn’s own ideas about the function of portraits, we can begin to account for the contradictions between two very different visions of Behn: the professional author who stressed that her skills as a writer overcame the restrictions of her gender; and the romantic heroine who promoted an image of her own feminine beauty and gentility.

Revising the Professional Woman Writer: Mary Wollstonecraft and Precarious Income

Mary Wollstonecraft's experience as a female staff writer in the publishing workplace was apparently unique in her time. This essay examines debate on the category of the professional woman writer and reconsiders its relevance to Wollstonecraft's authorial career, using correspondence with her publisher, Joseph Johnson, to argue for the applicability of the concept of the precariat. Focusing on precarious income in the literary marketplace enables a new appreciation of Wollstonecraft's feminism at the intersection of gender and class, particularly of the way she foregrounds issues of workplace sexual discrimination and harassment in her final publication, The Wrongs of Woman: Or, Maria (1798).

New George Eliot Studies: From Time's Up to the Anthropocene

Abstract It is wonderfully clear from recent work that as George Eliot rapidly approaches her bicentenary, she matters more than ever. In reading her, many of the scholars reviewed here are inclined to point out the gender inequities she experienced in life (pay inequity, for example) or the inaccuracy of gendered assumptions about her life and work which have gone unchallenged. From the ecology of Middlemarch to the character of Eliot as “Editress” of The Westminster Review, recent scholars have brought a new George Eliot into the twenty-first century, challenging old dogma (even the once sacred “death of the author”) along the way. While new attention has been paid to George Eliot's individual work as an editor, new approaches also tend to place her in the field of cultural production, often among other women, stressing the collective, social nature of women's professional experiences in, for example, the British Library's Round Reading Room, or on staff at periodicals. The now venerable field of periodical studies as well as the recent digitization of materials has facilitated a new feminist scholarship that digs deep into the collective experiences of being a professional woman writer in the Victorian period.

Haunted by the Lady Novelist: Metafictional Anxieties about Women's Writing from Northanger Abbey to The Carrie Diaries

This paper argues that the development of the identity of the professional woman writer as a ‘lady novelist’ in the mid-eighteenth century has had a lasting and detrimental impact on the status of women's writing that lingers through to the present, particularly in the critical discourse surrounding chick lit. The first part of this paper discusses the figure of the lady novelist and traces her centrality to criticisms of women's writing from the eighteenth century through to the twenty-first. The second part of this paper then examines the haunting presence of the lady novelist in the metafictional works of seven representative women writers: Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818), Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856), Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868), L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables (1908), Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), and Candace Bushnell's The Carrie Diaries (2010). By drawing a through-line that connects these texts, I argue for a renewed understanding of the ways in which Western women writers from the eighteenth century to the present are unified by a pervasive anxiety about being a ‘lady novelist’.

Landon’s Local Attachments: Urban Mobility, Literary Memory, and the Professional Woman Writer

Landon’s Local Attachments: Urban Mobility, Literary Memory, and the Professional Woman Writer Eric Eisner (bio) “Oh, London!” letitia landon effuses in an 1834 letter to novelist Anna Maria Hall, “Mr. Leigh Hunt says prettily of some Italian name, that he cannot write it without pleasure. I say the same of London!”1 Celebrity poet, enterprising editor and critic, and in the 1830s successful novelist as well, “L.E.L.” operated at the forefront of London’s literary world. From the start, her urban identifications have been understood as central to her sensibility: looking back, her friend William Howitt commented in his Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets (1847) that “city life was part and parcel of her being.”2 Despite renewed interest in Landon, however, recent scholarship often registers her “local attachments” (to borrow Charles Lamb’s phrase) only in passing, if at all, emphasizing instead the self-exoticizing verse that brought her to notice in the 1820s—poetry conjuring the faraway, not the streets outside her door.3 [End Page 27] Yet across Landon’s writing of the 1830s—in fiction, essays, letters and poems—she articulates an intimate connection between the writer’s imagination and the city’s energies, often vaunting a privileged and knowing perspective on the streetscape she inhabits. She launches her 1834 New Monthly Magazine essay “Calendar of the London Seasons” (signed “L.E.L.”) from the perspective of “a cockney, heart and soul” who, with typical Cockney chauvinism, declares she “never in my life looked over with any interest any map but the map of London” a striking comment from someone known for her verses about foreign places. “I never wish to go farther than a hackney-coach can take me; I desire nothing better than pavement beneath my feet,” she explains.4 Her 1831 silver-fork novel Romance and Reality attends to the rhythms and feel of contemporary metropolitan life, while her 1837 novel Ethel Churchill is set in the eighteenth-century city. Such poems as “The Factory” (1835) and her “Scenes in London” series (1836) take up urban life, but, as Margaret Linley points out, even gift-book poetry accompanying illustrations of rural sights, such as “Linmouth” (1833), become excuses for writing about the city.5 After her death, moreover, Landon endures in Victorian cultural memory—in London guidebooks as well as for successive London writers—not only as the sentimental “poetess” with whom we are familiar, but also as a quintessential voice of the city. This essay examines the complex exchanges with literary tradition through which Landon constructs a mode of literary authority tied to urban location as she aggressively makes the case, in both poetry and prose, for a specifically lyric mode of urban consciousness, not as a counterpoint to, but rather bound up with, the city’s motion, crowds, and noise. Anne Janowitz identifies a form of mobile lyric identity connected to urban structures of experience and available, across the nineteenth century, to “persons whose identities, like the city itself, were being forged rather than inherited”: peculiarly urban voices … who intuit a freedom which links them to a whole patchwork of urban culture where they might grasp the freedom of sublime experience.6 Though she goes unmentioned in Janowitz’s account, I argue Landon articulates a version of this democratic identity, at once passionately attached [End Page 28] to metropolitan experience and radically unmoored. Figures of urban mobility crowd into Landon’s writing in the ’30s—from solitary urban wanderers to the “most migratory multitude” of people and vehicles transiting in and out of London.7 Landon uses these figures, and in particular the figure of the woman walker—mobile but also exposed, independent but also literally outside—in order to think through the contradictory and gendered conditions of authorship as well as her relation to the city as social and political community. The woman walker is of course a charged figure in literature of the nineteenth-century city, frequently associated with sexual fallenness, the prostitute, and the urban underclass. In Landon’s writing, however, this figure concentrates the insecurity and also the sense of possibility and provisional autonomy—the activity and freedom...

“My Printer must, haue somwhat to his share”: Isabella Whitney, Richard Jones, and Crafting Books

ABSTRACTGiven Isabella Whitney’s reputation as the first English professional woman writer, her books are fertile ground for the recent material turn in the study of early modern women’s writing. Women’s engagement in book production meant that their texts were mediated through the work of booksellers, printers, and other agents in the print trade. We need to remember that writers make texts, but books are made by publishers and printers. Whitney’s own working relationship with her printer-publisher, Richard Jones, is well-known. Yet, the precise nature of Jones’s role in the production of Whitney’s books and her fashioning as an “Auctor” remains shadowy, largely because questions of agency have not been explored through the technologies of book production. To understand the ways in which Whitney’s texts were mediated through print, and her participation in this process, this essay will focus on how her books of poetry were made, starting with the role of her printer-publisher, Richard Jones.

Quixotic Legacy: The Female Quixote and the Professional Woman Writer

This essay argues that Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote or, The Adventures of Arabella (1752) served as a fulcrum in eighteenth-century literary history by providing a figuration of the female quixote for subsequent women novelists who were keen to court absorbed readers on the one hand while countering stereotypes about women's critical failings on the other. The figure of the female quixote proves to be a significant mark of literary professionalism by reifying the spectre of the professional writer’s need for absorbed readers and dramatizing the occasion by which the woman writer demonstrates her own authority, paradoxically allowing both woman novel reader and woman novel writer to lay claim to intellectual authority. Ultimately, the main character Arabella's fictional model potentially echoes more actual eighteenth-century women’s experiences than her adventures at first suggest: the female quixote emerges as less a social outcast or a freak than a figure for women’s commonality, especially their intellectual and ethical ambitions in a world inimical to their interests.

The Prince's Body. Vincenzo Gonzaga and Renaissance Medicine [I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History] by Valeria Finucci

Health & History ● 17/1 ● 2015 99 this text is derived from Worth-Stylianou’s own declaration that ‘it should be read alongside the exceptional contribution by the one professional woman writer, the midwife Louise Bourgeois’ (p.xxv). The exclusion of extracts from Bourgeois’s Observations (1626) was a lost opportunity, for it would have allowed the reader to compare Bourgeois’s findings with the five male-authored treatises included in the volume. JANE BITOMSKY UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND Valeria Finucci, The Prince’s Body. Vincenzo Gonzaga and Renaissance Medicine [I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History] (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2015). ISBN 978-0-674-72545-4 (HC). 17 B&W illustrations. vii + 273pp. Valeria Finucci, Professor of Italian and Theater Studies at Duke University, has produced a beautifully written cultural history. What, precisely, it is a history of though takes some time to grasp, because Finucci’s interests are many. She takes her readers down all kinds of intriguing pathways as she explores the health experiences and concerns of an extravagant Renaissance prince, Vincenzo Gonzaga, DukeofMantua(1562–1612),andthepowerandpotentialofamedical world opening up to the therapeutic possibilities of ‘discoveries’from anatomy to the New World pharmacopeia. Finucci argues that Vincenzo’s corporeal problems not only shaped his sense of self, but also his political affairs and strategies (a point demonstrated most convincingly in the first chapter). More broadly, it is a study of what the intersections of one well-documented individual with ‘Renaissance’ medicine can illuminate—about the aspirations and fantasies of an affluent male ruler, as much as medical techniques and political realities. Finucci’s chapters trace a series of ‘cures’ that Vincenzo sought over his lifetime for a variety of health matters he experienced. In ‘The Virgin Cure: Manual Exams and Early Modern Surgeons’, Finucci documents the fascinating circumstances of Vincenzo’s first marriage to Margherita Farnese, quickly annulled after it was concluded (against the bride’s wishes) that her hymen was impenetrable. This case powerfully articulates the impact of cultural 100 BOOK REVIEWS negotiations between the intricacies of anatomy with gendered sexual and bodily assumptions, personal and dynastic honour, and political expediency. In ‘The Aesthetic Cure: Skin Diseases, Noses, and the Invention of Plastic Surgery’, Finucci explores Gaspare Tagliacozzi’s De Curtorum Chirurgia per Insitionem (1597), in particular his innovative rhinoplastic techniques and the early modern meanings of thenoseandelitemalehonourthatunderpinnedcontemporaryurgency for a successful procedure. This chapter is less directly connected to Vincenzo than the first; although Vincenzo appears to have suffered temporarily from unsightly facial disfigurations as a result of skin diseases, there is certainly no suggestion that he required the kind of extensive plastic surgery explored in Tagliacozzi’s text and primarily the focus of this chapter. We return more concretely to Vincenzo’s sufferings and cures in Chapter 3’s discussion of ‘The Comfort Cure: Managing Pain and Catarrh at the Spa’, which considers the prince’s regular use of spa resorts in a wider discussion of the early modern culture of the spa, many of which were targeted for particular matters of contemporary concern, from arthritis, skin, and digestive complaints, to respiratory and joint troubles. Finucci demonstrates how the spa culture of elite European men also provided sources for political achievement and representational display with entertainments of wine, women, and song. Discussion of Vincenzo’s energetic sexual exploits leads neatly on to Chapter 4, ‘The Sexual Cure: Searching for a Viagra in the New World’. This final chapter documents Vincenzo’s search for youth and sexual vigour, from New World materia medica, charting the costly journey undertaken by apothecary Evangelista Marcobruno to South America and, with it, the hopes and dreams of his ageing patron Vincenzo as negotiated through their correspondence. Anchored by Vincenzo’s health experiences and activities, Finucci spirals out kaleidoscopically to far broader exploration of early modern medical ideas and imaginations, political events, and elite male preoccupations. These four absorbing chapters, however, are followed by a short epilogue, ‘Unwrapping the Body’, that feels a little unsatisfactory at tying together the strands of the study. It is not clear that the chapters aim to work together to advance an overarching argument of this sort. There is copious scholarship that sits under the surface of Finucci...

Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, and the Rise of the Victorian Woman of Letters

This essay revisits a public dispute between Harriet Martineau and Charles Dickens during the winter of 1855–56. It argues both that the nature of their quarrel has been largely misunderstood and also that its wider implications for understanding nineteenth-century intellectual and literary culture have been overlooked. The essay thus reexamines the dispute, its origins, and its aftermath, and places the event within the context of recent critical readings of Utilitarianism, the experience of industrial society, and the emergence of the professional woman writer. In so doing, it shows that a deeper exploration of the relationship between Martineau and Dickens adds considerably not only to our knowledge of the two authors themselves but also to our understanding of the ways in which nineteenth-century intellectual history interacts with the gender politics of Victorian literary culture and publishing.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning Marjorie Stone (bio) "After all it must be Rome, by the sunshine—and life is not more gloomy & uncertain than a thousand years ago. What a compliment by the way, to our wonderful nineteenth century, which pants & reels under the great lights of the Future, recoiling sometimes from them because they are strange & new!" This year brings Volume 20 of The Brownings' Correspondence opening with the Brownings in Rome, prompting EBB's reflections on present, past, and "Future" (p. 14). A new monograph on EBB and Shakespeare by Josie Billington reflects the continuing interest in matters of poetic form evident in several publications. Religion and cosmopolitan networks are also prominent themes, as in books by Karen Dielman and Christopher M. Keirstead that deal substantially with EBB on these respective subjects. Other topics include maternity and mother-want, infanticide, representations of time, and sewing as material culture and figurative thread (all in Aurora Leigh with "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" as well in the case of infanticide), and EBB in relation to portraiture, Carlyle, Trollope, Flush, Romantic Hellenism, and blindness. Much of this scholarship, treating diverse poems throughout the poet's career as well as her essay on "Greek Christian Poets," enhances understanding of the "new EBB," as Alison Chapman describes her in reviewing the 2010 Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (hereafter WEBB): a writer "embedded within her complex intellectual, literary, and cultural networks: provocative, politicized, experimental, and modern" (see the 2011 "Year's Work"). A fictional work on the Brownings suggests, however, that older versions of EBB in which mythic biography trumps the "new EBB" remain very much alive. The Brownings' Correspondence, Volume 20 and Contexts for Aurora Leigh Covering the period from November 1853 to November 1854, Volume 20 of the Correspondence (Wedgestone Press, 2013), edited by Philip Kelley and co-editors (Scott Lewis, Edward Hagan, Joseph Phelan, and Rhian Williams), resembles Volume 19 in so far as letters make little explicit reference to Aurora Leigh, even though EBB described herself as "hard at work," "very much engaged just now in a poem of considerable length" (pp. 65, 286). Nevertheless, references to subjects and contexts relevant to Aurora Leigh pervade these letters, which, as usual, include many either published for the first time, or formerly available only in part or in assorted periodicals. Several letters suggest how her experience of Rome—"a palimpsest Rome—a watering place written over [End Page 343] the antique" (p. 214)—contributed to the "double vision" of past and present, and the commitment to the contemporary central to Aurora Leigh. In a letter to Eliza Ogilvy, for instance, EBB comments that she would never "under any circumstances" have "thrown [herself] back into the past in Rome" as she might have done when "very much younger" because her "[c]hariot wheels" had "caught fire with running fast on the modern roads!" (p. 114). Other letters suggest how much her participation in networks of female artists in Rome, continuing after the Brownings' return to Florence at the end of May, 1854, contributed to her representation of a professional woman writer. The network included the "house of . . . emancipated women" inhabited by the sculptor Harriet Hosmer, "very clever & very strange," and her partner "Miss Hayes, the translator of George Sand, who 'dresses like a man down to the waist'" (p. 42). It also included the Kemble sisters, Adelaide (Mrs. Sartoris) and Fanny, celebrated for their stage accomplishments: Fanny having "come back to her old name" after her unhappy marriage to an American slave-holder (p. 146). "We see a good deal of the Kembles here," EBB told Mary Mitford of her life in Rome, describing Fanny as "looking magnificent still" (p. 142). A particularly interesting newly published letter to Anna Jameson describes "Mrs. Sartoris" in terms that speak to conflicts between "woman" and "artist" that EBB explores in Aurora, as she describes Adelaide revealing her "yearnings towards her great lost public career" after marriage, when "the artist . . . revived in the woman" and she began to feel "like a healthy person whose feet & hands are tied" (p. 327). Accounts of another "intolerable" type of "English provincial pattern" society in Rome with a "decency and...

“Some Queer Freak of Taste”: Gender, Authorship, and the “Rock Me to Sleep” Controversy

Published in 1860 under the pseudonym “Florence Percy,” “Rock Me to Sleep” quickly became one of the most popular and widely circulated poems of the nineteenth century. It also became the subject of a heated literary controversy, with multiple claimants coming forward to insist that they had authored the lyric; the most committed imposter was Alexander McWhorter Ball, a New Jersey legislator whose wealthy and powerful friends mounted a national campaign to prove his authorship. The poem’s actual author, Elizabeth Akers Allen, found herself in danger of losing her reputation and therefore her ability to place her work within the literary marketplace. Putzi argues that the poem’s sentimentality rendered it eminently reprintable but also distanced the text from its author, thus causing pretenders to imagine themselves in her place. The gendered implications of this sort of aggressive read ing were revealed most clearly in Ball’s claim to authorship, which was based on this middle-class gentleman’s emotional legitimacy as evidenced by the private circulation of (what he claimed as) his poetry. Rather than asserting her own femininity, however, Akers Allen exposed the gender and class privilege underlying Ball’s argument, claiming her own professionalism and disparaging Ball as a “poetaster” or a hopeless amateur. With publications across the United States taking sides on either side, the “Rock Me to Sleep” controversy became an important marker of the status of professional women writers in the post–Civil War era; more specifically, and perhaps more importantly, it positions one woman’s composition, publication, and circulation practices within a literary marketplace that paradoxically asked women poets to be simultaneously of and beyond the market—amateurs in a professional world.

Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850 (review)

Reviewed by: Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850 Roxanne Eberle Devoney Looser , Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. 252 pp. In Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, Devoney Looser suggests that examining the late careers of British women writers is a necessarily "compensatory gesture" for nineteenth-century critics who have focused upon issues of gender and genre without paying adequate attention to the significance of aging, particularly given the notably long lives of many of their literary subjects. As she trenchantly observes, "We have, for more than a century, comprehended the late lives of early modern British women writers too rosily, too darkly, or more often, not at all" (178). Looser unapologetically identifies the source of such misrepresentation and neglect as "ageism, whether malignant or benign" (168), and identifies some of the larger repercussions of disregarding the total arc of a literary career. Close analysis of the lives and works of nineteenth-century women writers reveals fissures — or perhaps more accurately bridges — between literary periods constructed around the lives and careers of male writers. The careers of many women writers are often incommensurable with standard literary periodizations, as critics such as Susan Staves, Anne Mellor, and Isobel Armstrong have also noted. Maria Edgeworth and Frances Burney, often identified as "eighteenth-century writers," both lived and published into the Victorian period, and it would have been impossible for Austen to have acted upon Virginia Woolf's injunction to pay homage at Burney's grave, since she died nearly two decades before her "predecessor." While the fact of the nineteenth-century [End Page 414] woman writer's longevity has been noted, Looser's book makes a truly original contribution to a comparative study of several different women writers. Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain is written as a goad to other critics. Looser tends to ask questions rather than answer them, inviting her readers to follow avenues of study towards which she directs them. The exploratory nature of her critical methodology is evident throughout the volume: she examines the differences between the careers of several writers rather than construct a single unifying narrative. Indeed, she frequently refers to the chapters as "case studies," and she explores diverse perspectives on women writers and old age. As Looser notes, there was no single model for the aging professional woman writer in the nineteenth century, since it was only in mid-century that such a group came to be known: "These long-lived writers negotiated the literary marketplace early in their lives, during a time when women authors achieved greater visibility and, for some, greater respectability. Then, in their later years . . . these authors encountered a new set of complicated prejudices for which they were largely unprepared" (1). As Looser goes on to demonstrate, women writers chose various paths as they sought to sustain their cultural authority as authors, shape their posthumous reputations, or simply make enough money to guarantee themselves a relatively comfortable old age. Steadfastly committed to her contention that there is no single story to be told about old age and women writers, Looser synthesizes a variety of primary and secondary sources in order to construct a picture of the conflicting attitudes towards aging, gender, and authorship at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. She describes the multiple ways in which women writers responded to the range of unattractive representations of them in their culture, where they appear as rouged and bitter crones, benevolent and bespectacled wise women, or, more commonly perhaps, anachronistic nonentities. Much of the success of the Introduction, which is both compelling and persuasive, lies in its inclusion of a large group of women writers, ranging from Charlotte Lennox (whose prosperous career did not protect her from an impoverished old age) to Joanna Baillie (who publicly renounced writing for philanthropy) to Lady Morgan (who concealed her true age and refused to abandon an image of sexual desirability well into her eighties). The sweeping survey in the Introduction usefully situates the more detailed case studies that follow. In the first chapter of the volume, Looser contrasts...

"Write a little bit every day": L.T. Meade, Self-Representation, and the Professional Woman Writer

"Write a little bit every day":L.T. Meade, Self-Representation, and the Professional Woman Writer Janis Dawson (bio) In the autumn of 1898, the readers of the Girl's Realm (1898-1915), a new middle-class girls' magazine, were given an opportunity to win a "£20 Lady's 'Swift' Bicycle" by submitting a list of "the six most popular living writers of stories for girls, given in the order of their popularity" ("Grand Prizes," Girl's Realm 1: 89). As Mary Cadogan and Patricia Craig observe, "The bicycle was a happy choice for this prize, suggesting modernity and liberating athleticism to girls on the threshold of the new century" (55). L.T. Meade, the competition's favourite, was herself a happy choice for similar reasons. Arguably, no writer of her day made a greater contribution to the development of girls' culture and the idea of the "New Girl" than Meade, the author of close to three hundred books and countless short stories and essays, and editor (1887-93) of the highly regarded middle-class girls' literary magazine Atalanta. In the same year as this contest, Meade was ranked by the Strand Magazine as a literary "celebrity" along with H.G. Wells; she was described as one of the magazine's most popular contributors and "one of the most industrious modern writers of fiction" ("Portraits" 674). Eight years later, Meade was still ranked among the top five authors in a survey of girls aged fifteen to eighteen (Low 278-87). By 1929, however, Meade's name appeared on the "not to be circulated" lists of public libraries, and her books, once given as school prizes in Britain and North America, were removed from the shelves because they were believed to lack literary value (Mitchell 14). Despite Meade's considerable literary presence in her own time, the subsequent devaluation of her work has contributed to a lack of interest in her life and career. Although Sally Mitchell's New Girl has done much to rehabilitate Meade's reputation, critics have, with a few exceptions,1 disparaged Meade's work, citing her "feminist shortcomings" (including her tendency to give more attention in her school stories to cocoa parties and dormitory furnishings than to academic studies), and even her commercialism (she produced as many as eleven books a year) as her offences.2 Nor have critics explored the other genres that Meade exploited so successfully.3 Despite her remarkable versatility as a writer and editor, Meade is now primarily remembered for her girls' fiction. To date, there is no full-length biography, no published collection [End Page 132] of letters, no documented collection of papers, and no comprehensive bibliography of her work. Significantly, almost everything known about Meade is derived from her writings and from information she provided about herself to numerous interviewers. I argue in this essay that Meade, as one of the nineteenth century's most popular authors, carefully constructed and controlled her public image as a professional woman writer. By focusing on the ways in which Meade represented herself in the literary marketplace, I argue that Meade was a savvy professional who legitimized her claim to professional authority by drawing on earlier models of Victorian authorship like those of Harriet Martineau and Anthony Trollope. She also took advantage of sensational incidents and current debates in the periodical press—such as baby farming and infanticide—to frame her work for a popular audience.4 Meade also exploited popular genres, from the New Journalism to science fiction and detective fiction. Indeed, my analysis of Meade's career not only reveals her professionalism and canny market sense but also suggests how fin-de-siècle women writers exploited current debates and popular literary genres to build professional careers. Presenting the Literary Woman Although Meade left no memoirs, she offered autobiographical "tit-bits" in her interviews and writing. Notably, much of the information she provided centred on her methods of work and her views on writing, editing, and professionalism; what information she revealed was shaped to enhance her public persona. In this respect, Meade's carefully constructed autobiographical revelations reflect the professionalization of women's writing in the nineteenth century. As the expansion of...

Joseph Johnson: Webmaster

Over forty-eight years, Johnson published and marketed 2700 books or fifty-six books a year, 1242 in the stormy 1790's alone, as Leslie Chard observed in Joseph Johnson in the 1790s (TWC, XXXIII:3 [summer, 2002]100) He read few of them, edited even fewer, and, except for one recently discovered letter book, left almost no record of his thoughts, dealings, motivations, humor, character, conversations, connections. However successfully he gathered authors, fed them, introduced them to a community, inspired admiration and even affection in some, he was not social himself, and, according to some of his authors, even those most indebted to him, he was demanding, critical, remote, austere, abrasive, withdrawn, laconic (common terms authors apply to publishers). And, except for a remark to Barlow that he would not hang for him (which may be apocryphal), he said little quotable to my knowledge. Still, because of his association with famous and successful authors, he has always been an appealing subject--the topic of four panels in only ten years. 1998, at Strawberry Hill, in a combined meeting of BARS and NASSR, Kenneth Johnston assembled a panel on Johnson, the papers were published in ER. 2001, the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association sponsored two panels on Johnson at the Modern Language Association in New Orleans--where the MLA gone to heal after 9/11, and before that healing place was destroyed by a hurricane Katrina. The time and the place, like Johnson's, were perilous, but the papers were exceptional, the authors among the best, ranging, diverse, provocative, published in a special issue of The Wordsworth XXXIII:3 (Summer, 2002), and soon out of print (but available on line through various search engines). Every essay opened a new line of inquiry. It began with Nicola Trott's keynote address, Framing Romanticism, an exploration of the idea of frame in the evolution of Romanticism itself and concluded with Seamus Perry's In Praise of Puny Boundaries, considering the various ways that the circle, its coherence and incoherence overcome the puny boundaries, the imponderables of literary classification. Continental Literature, Translation and the Johnson Circle Angela Esterhammer conveyed how translations and reviews, his dissemination in Europe of his various publications made him a catalyst, a mediary, an ambassador in British and European intellectual life. the 1790's alone, according to Chard, Johnson published fifty-three books in French, German, Italian, Spanish, twenty in Latin, and 110 translated from French, German, Latin and Greek into English (100). William Godwin and the Johnson Circle: The Evidence of the Diaries, Beth Lau recovered from Godwin's unpublished diary an image of Johnson as caring, altruistic, and sociable, and named dozens of people Godwin identifies as attending dinners--suggesting here that more information about Johnson lay in unpublished, un-found, unread diaries of what are often considered peripheral figures. Laura Mandell in Johnson's Lessons for Men; Producing the Professional Woman Writer identifies contributions to education through text books by women such as Anna Letitia Barbauld, Sarah Trimmer, and Maria Edgeworth, published for women who were responsible for educating the young, and how his practice in turn influenced other publishers. Alan Richardson, Darwin and the Fungus School highlights contributions to the literature of science, radical science, focusing on Erasmus Darwin whose Zoonomia; or The Laws of Organic Life, which Johnson published in 1794-96, had an impact on the scientific, philosophical and literary culture of the era that has yet to be fully grasped. Debbie Lee's Johnson. Stedman, Blake and the Monkeys identifies Blake's subtle contributions to the works that Johnson engaged him to illustrate, in this case, the mock-mimicry of sixteen engravings for John Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam. …

Luise Mühlbach’s Aphra Behn (1849): Auto/Biography of a Woman Artist

This article explores the liberal German author Luise Muhlbach’s fictional biography of the English Restoration author, Aphra Behn, England’s first professional woman writer, as an autobiographical and aesthetic statement. Previous critics have analyzed Aphra Behn as a social novel and historical novel. Exploring this text as an artist novel and examining the intersections between artistic and historical discourses can shed light on Muhlbach’s artistic identity. Muhlbach constructs an authorial profile for her female artist as politically engaged and socially critical, that also inscribes her own self-representation or authorial persona as a socially committed woman artist. Muhlbach combines the ideals of engaged, activist artistry with Romantic, transcendent concepts of divinely inspired creativity to legitimize female artistic activity and to criticize gender relations in the literary marketplace that result in the self-alienation of the woman artist. Muhlbach problematizes the connection between sexuality and creativity in the female artist’s subjectivity to highlight the materiality of the female body and the economic and psychosocial effects of prejudice against women writers. Through the engaged artist persona Muhlbach asserts the authority to reinterpret Behn’s controversial personal and literary reputation.

Charlotte Mary Yonge and Tractarian Aesthetics

Charlotte Mary Yonge and Tractarian Aesthetics Elisabeth Jay (bio) Charlotte Yonge's reputation rests upon her role as Tractarianism's leading novelist, but the sheer weight of her fiction has served to obscure other facets of her productive literary career and the role she believed prose to play in the Tractarian aesthetic. Despite the much-bruited tale of the family conclave that decided, before the publication of her first novel, Abbeychurch, or Self-Control and Self-Conceit (1844), that it would only be permissible if any profit were devoted to charity, "it being thought unladylike to benefit by one's own writings,"1 her brother's financial ruin in 1876 allowed her to assume openly the mantle of the professional author she had long been in all but name. One mark that distinguished the professional women writers of Yonge's generation was their willingness and ability to turn their hands to a variety of literary tasks. George Eliot had been a translator and reviewer before becoming a novelist and poet; the novelist, Margaret Oliphant, was also a translator, as well as reviewer, essayist, and biographer; the Brontë sisters' first venture into professional authorship took the form of a poetry collection; the poet, Christina Rossetti, tried out various forms of fiction early in her career, wrote several exegetical works, and expressed herself happy to take up literary biography.2 Yonge had also diversified her output at an early stage, writing educational articles for magazines directed at the daughters of the working classes, as well as for the wealthy private schoolroom, in addition to a steady flow of fiction. In due course she became by turn historian, biographer, etymologist, and versifier, all the while acting as sole editor, from 1851 to 1893, of the Monthly Packet. It was in this journal, in September 1892, that Yonge published an article of practical advice on writing as a profession for women.3 The comparative lack of distinction she makes as to whether the writer's genre is to be prose or poetry reflects, in part, the hybrid nature of many contemporary magazines and periodicals, and her lifelong habit of seeing the two as so intimately related that it came naturally to her to further Tractarian poetics through the medium of prose fiction. By the fin de siècle, the article noted, writing had become increasingly professionalized and thus a pre-publication apprenticeship was now advisable. Translation and careful letter-writing were useful exercises, but writing poetry was the basic building block for teaching "rhythmical expression" [End Page 43] and accurate observation. Furthermore, without a sound knowledge of prosody, the aspirant writer's achievements would never become more than a pastime: "To put down verses as they rise in the mind or fancy, by the ear, is a very pleasant occupation, and even more, it often relieves the mind of strong feeling, whether high, meditative, or sorrowful." The echo of John Keble's definition of the function of poetry as the "power of healing and restoring overburdened and passionate minds" was not accidental.4 It would indeed have been surprising if Yonge, who acknowledged Keble, author of The Christian Year (1827) and Oxford's Professor of Poetry (1831-1841), as one of the two great influences in her life, had not tried her hand at verse. Although it was not to prove her preferred métier, Yonge was a thoroughly proficient versifier, adept over a range that included both narrative and lyric poetry, and at ease with a variety of metrical forms. Despite, or perhaps because of this very facility, her poetry never yields up an unmistakably personal voice or timbre. In part this seems to have been dictated by her proficiency as a translator of others' poetry. In one sense Yonge's capacity to lose herself in the act of translation conformed to a mid-nineteenth-century preconception of woman's literary role as necessarily better suited to providing a secondary conduit for male intellect and creative energy: this ideologically determined formation doubtless gained further cogency from, and was in turn fed by, a middle and upper-class education differentiated according to gender. A male education that set such store by proficiency in the...

The production of a female hand": professional writing and the career of Geraldine Jewsbury

Those workers who participated in novel production and exchange in Victorian Britain were themselves often obscured by competing definitions of literary value and domestic labor. The career of Geraldine Jewsbury - novelist, reviewer, and publisher's reader - demonstrates that the work of the professional writer comprised more than the production of literary texts, and that textual commodities were themselves produced and circulated through a complex system of literate and social practices. If commodification can be said to alienate the worker from the product of her labors, then Jewsbury's thousands of anonymous reviews, publisher's reports, and ghost writings are evidence of such disjunctions between literacy and authorship within the professional work of writing. Jewsbury's efforts to construct and live out a definition of the professional woman writer encourage us to re-evaluate our own understandings of the ways in which literacy can be both empowering and alienating.

Aphra Behn and the Roundheads

The unacknowledged fact is that Aphra Behn frequently identified herself s a prophet. In the dedicatory pistle to The Roundheads (1682), for example, she begged the priv ileges of the Prophets ... of old, to predict the future and admonish the populace. To the newly ascended James II she boasted, Long with Prophetick Fire, Resolved and Bold,/ Your Glorious FATE and FORTUNE I foretold.^ When the Whigs drove James from power and installed William of Orange in his place, she represented herself standing mournfully, like the Excluded Prophet on the Forsaken Barren Shore.3 In these and other instances, Behn clearly and consciously drew upon a long-standing tradition in English letters of associating poets with prophets. But the figure of the prophet cannot be isolated to that literary tra dition at this time in England, particularly when are talking about a woman struggling to assert her own literary authority. We often remember Behn as the first profession al woman writer, but more frequently forget that she wrote in the wake of several hundred religious women writ ers, self-styled prophetesses, and visionaries who had been publishing in the burgeoning capitalist marketplace for many years before her. Although the poet herself remarked of religion, we have scare other Theme; 'tis grown so gener al a Mode, that even the Sword-men are now fiercer dis putants than heretofore the lazier Gown-men were, most