Abstract
Those familiar with Eliza Lynn Linton (1822–98) as the vitriolic author of the ‘Girl of the Period’ essays will most likely find this description of her life and autobiography surprising — perhaps even as unsuspected as Linton believed it to be amongst her contemporary audience. Linton’s self-identification as a downtrodden woman trying to withhold and mask her suffering is at odds with the shrill, abusive antifeminist with whom literary critics have struggled in their assessments of Linton as Britain’s first salaried female journalist.3 As critics of Linton have emphasized since the nineteenth century, Linton’s published opinions often sought to ‘impose restrictions where she had insisted upon freedom for herself’,4 demanding more self-restraint than she ever exhibited. The foundational feminist recovery work on Linton, largely biographical in methodology, has focused on just such inconsistencies, particularly between her boundary-breaking career and her advocacy for a conservative, separate spheres ideology.5 It would be easy, then, to dismissively identify the surprising disparity between Linton’s persona in print and her representation of the ‘underlying truth’ of her life as one of the many hypocrisies for which she has been censured both by her own contemporaries and by feminist literary critics. However, I argue that attending to, rather than dismissing, the structuring opposition of Linton’s melodramatic self-presentation — the opposition between reticence and self-revelation, between the author’s private self and the public’s knowledge of her authorial persona — allows us critical insight into concerns endemic for women journalists at the fin de siècle.
It [Linton’s autobiography]1 was an outpour no one hears me make by word of mouth, a confession of sorrow, suffering, trial, and determination not to be beaten, which few suspect as the underlying truth of my life.
Eliza Lynn Linton to Miss Bird2
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Notes
George Somes Layard, Mrs. Lynn Linton: Her Life, Letters, and Opinions (London: Methuen & Co., 1901), vii.
For an account of the difficulties of recovering Linton see Valerie Sanders, ‘Eliza Lynn Linton and the Canon,’ in Rebel of the Family, ed. Deborah T. Meem (Orchard Park, NY: Broadview, 2002), 457–487.
I am thinking here particularly of Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Robin Lauterbach Sheets, and William Veeder, The Woman Question: Defining Voices, 1837–1883, vol. 1 of The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America, 1837–1883 (New York: Garland, 1983);
Nancy Fix Anderson, Woman Against Women in Victorian England: A Life of Eliza Lynn Linton (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1987);
and Deborah T. Meem, ‘Eliza Lynn Linton and the Rise of Lesbian Consciousness,’ Journal of the History of Sexuality 7, no. 4 (1997), 537–60.
For this new attention to Linton in terms of the history and form of periodical publication see Andrea Broomfield, ‘Much More than an Antifeminist: Eliza Lynn Linton’s Contribution to the Rise of Victorian Popular Journalism,’ Victorian Literature and Culture 29, no. 2 (2001), 267–83;
Andrea Broomfield, ‘Eliza Lynn Linton, Sarah Grand and the Spectacle of the Victorian Woman Question: Catch Phrases, Buzz Words and Sound Bites,’ English Literature in Translation 1880–1920 47, no. 3 (2004), 251–72;
Laurel Brake, ‘Writing Women’s History: “The Sex” Debates of 1889,’ in New Woman Hybridities: Femininity, Feminism, and International Consumer Culture, 1880–1930, ed. Ann Heilmann and Margaret Beetham (London: Routledge, 2004), 51–73;
Susan Hamilton, ‘Marketing Antifeminism: Eliza Lynn Linton’s “Wild Women” Series and the Possibilities of Periodical Signature,’ in Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel: Rereading Nineteenth-Century Women Writers, ed. Tamara S. Wagner (Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2009), 37–55. All of these pieces share Broomfield’s key critical assumption: ‘Rather than continuing to focus on reasons for the contradictions between Linton’s lifestyle and her prescriptions for other women, we should also pay attention to how her essays worked within journalism itself, how her pronouncements helped define new journalism’ (2004: 261).
While this particular transition in Linton’s career is underexamined, her life and career have often been studied as symptomatic of the period. For example, Vineta Colby called Linton ‘a faithful register of the times in which she lived’ (Vineta Colby, The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1970), 22). Deborah Meem similarly described Linton’s complicated life and career as a ‘mirror of the inconsistencies of the Victorian Age’ (1997: 537).
Stephen Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain, vol. 1 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1981), 343.
Kate Campbell, ‘W. E. Gladstone, W. T. Stead, Matthew Arnold and a New Journalism: Cultural Politics in the 1880s,’ Victorian Periodicals Review 36 (Spring 2003), 20–40: 20.
Eliza Lynn Linton, ‘Literature Then and Now,’ Fortnightly Review 53 (Apr. 1890), 517–31: 520.
As Barbara Onslow notes, by the end of her career and life Linton was ‘noticed as a major journalist and author in articles highlighting men and women of the day and one [sic] of the first women members elected to the governing council of the Society of Authors’ (Barbara Onslow, Women of the Press in the Nineteenth Century (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 184).
Layard, Her Life, 145. This battle for recognition continued even after Linton’s death. Following the publication of his biography, Mrs. Lynn Linton: Her Life, Letters, and Opinions (1901), George Somes Layard found it necessary to respond to accusations he overstated Linton’s authorship of the Saturday Review articles, including one still insisting that the ‘Girl of the Period’ article was ‘from the pen of a clergyman still living’ (Layard, ‘Mrs. Lynn Linton and the Girl of the Period,’ Saturday Review 91 (June 1901), 771).
Tighe Hopkins, ‘Anonymity? II,’ The New Review 2 (Mar. 1890), 265–76: 268. Hopkins, the compiler/author of the articles, called Linton an ‘uncompromising opponent of the signature’ (268).
Alexis Easley, First-Person Anonymous: Women Writers and Victorian Print Media, 1830–70 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 5.
Eliza Lynn Linton, ‘A Retrospect,’ Fortnightly Review 45 (1886), 614–29: 624.
Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own?: Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914 (New York: Routledge, 1996), 123–26.
Eliza Lynn Linton, ‘Mrs. Grundy’s Kingdom,’ Forum 8 (Feb. 1890), 697–704: 697.
Ethel Brilliana Tweedie, ‘A Chat with Mrs. Lynn Linton’, Temple Bar 102 (July 1894), 355–64: 362.
Helen C. Black, Notable Women Authors of the Day (1893; reprint, Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1972), particularly 8.
Hilary Fraser, Stephanie Green, and Judith Johnston, Gender and the Victorian Periodical (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 28.
Nancy Fix Anderson, ‘Autobiographical Fantasies of a Female Anti-Feminist: Eliza Lynn Linton as Christopher Kirkland and Theodora Desanges,’ Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 14 (1985), 287–301: 290.
Margaret Beetham, ‘Periodicals and the New Media: Women and Imagined Communities,’ Women’s Studies International Forum 29 (June 2006), 231–40.
Beatrice Harraden, ‘My Fatal Visit to an Editor,’ Belgravia 64 (Feb. 1888), 82–91: 82.
Beatrice Harraden, ‘Mrs. Lynn Linton,’ The Bookman: a Review of Books and Life 8 (Sept. 1898), 16–17: 16.
Eliza Lynn Linton, The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1885), 1: 266.
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© 2012 Lee Anne Bache
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Bache, L.A. (2012). Making More than a Name: Eliza Lynn Linton and the Commodification of the Woman Journalist at the Fin de Siècle. In: Gray, F.E. (eds) Women in Journalism at the Fin de Siècle. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137001306_2
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