Abstract
Arnold Bennett, editor of the late-nineteenth-century periodical Woman, produced in 1898 Journalism for Women, an advice volume that contained as much spleen as guidance.
Unlike doctors who are women, of the dwellers in Fleet Street there are not two sexes, but two species—journalists and women-journalists—and the one is as far removed organically from the other as dog from cat.4
[Ruskin] is very glad I am engaged, but very sorry I am going to be a Reviewer as it is a profession impossible to follow with honour unless I were an archangel ‘and he will not go beyond angel even for me’. … [He] ends by wishing me a happy marriage ‘and a better trade’
(letter from Alice Thompson to Wilfrid Meynell)1
Her scorn, when it is roused, is lightly phrased, her wit glances, her irony is invisible, though it slays; and if she admires she withholds exclamations. Intemperateness, redundancy, the ampoulé and pretentious, are discarded by her, nor may her heroes be guilty
(George Meredith).2
… I read her praise, while, sweet,
She smiles in contemplation
Of her fame and her small feet. (Coventry Patmore)3
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Notes
Quoted in June Badeni, The Slender Tree: A Life of Alice Meynell (Padstow, Cornwall: Tabb House, 1981), 65. Emphasis in the original.
George Meredith, ‘Mrs. Meynell’s Two Books of Essays,’ The National Review 27, no. 162 (August 1896), 762–770: 763.
Coventry Patmore, Seven Unpublished Poems by Coventry Patmore to Alice Meynell (London: Pelican Press, 1922), 8.
Arnold Bennett, Journalism for Women: A Practical Guide (London and New York: John Lane, 1898), 5.
Philip Waller, Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 117.
Wilfrid Meynell reported in 1880 that ‘a long book review in a literary weekly, which required reading several volumes, would earn £2 at the very most’ (Journals and Journalism: With a Guide for Literary Beginners, quoted in Sally Mitchell, ‘Ephemeral Journalism and its Uses: Lucie Cobbe Heaton Armstrong 1851–1907,’ Victorian Periodicals Review 42, no. 1 (2009), 81–92: 82).
Frances Low, Press Work for Women: A Text Book for the Young Woman Journalist (London: L. Upcott Gill, 1904), 12.
Kimberly Jo Stern, The Victorian Sibyl: Women Reviewers and the Reinvention of Critical Tradition (Unpublished PhD dissertation, Princeton, 2005), 1. Lewis Roberts, in contrast, suggests that anonymous reviewing was largely unrewarded and not accorded respect as literary writing — only part of the apparatus surrounding literary writing (see “The Production of a Female Hand: Professional Writing and the Career of Geraldine Jewsbury,’ Women’s Writing 12, no. 3 (2005), 399–418: 413).
‘Authoresses.’ Saturday Review 16 (10 October 1863), 483–484: 484.1 am indebted for this quote to Elizabeth Mansfield, ‘Articulating Authority: Emilia Dilke’s Early Essays and Reviews,’ Victorian Periodicals Review 31, no. 1 (1998), 75–86.
In 1998 Victorian Periodicals Review produced a special issue on the subject of Victorian Women Editors and Critics (31, no. 1). Within the issue Eileen Curran examined Mary Margaret Busk’s reviewing, Barbara Onslow examined Mrs. Oliphant’s art and society criticism, and Elizabeth Mansfield looked at the early reviewing of Emilia Dilke. Since that time there have been regrettably few scholarly treatments specific to women’s reviewing: see Monica Fryckstedt, Fionnuala Dillane, and Kimberly Jo Stern. Most recently, Joanne Wilkes has examined the critical reviews of eight nineteenth-century women, with a particular focus on the critical reception of Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Eliot (Joanne Wilkes, Women Reviewing Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010)).
Marysa Demoor, Their Fair Share: Women, Power and Criticism in the Athenaeum from Millicent Garett Fawcett to Katherine Mansfield, 1870–1920 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 8.
Blanche Leppington, ‘Review of Amiel’s Journal,’ Contemporary Review 47, no. 279 (March 1885), 334–352: 338–339.
Dallas Liddle, The Dynamics of Genre: Journalism and the Practice of Literature in Mid-Victorian Britain (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 104.
Liddle calls ‘Worldliness and Other-Worldliness: The Poet Young’ (Westminster Review January 1857) George Eliot’s most severe ‘slashing’ article (her most well known is certainly ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ (October 1856)). For a fuller discussion of Marian Evans’ reviewing, see Fionnuala Dillane, ‘Re-Reading George Eliot’s “Natural History”: Marian Evans, “the People,” and the Periodical,’ Victorian Periodicals Review 42, no. 3 (2009): 244–66.
Dillane, ‘Re-reading George Eliot,’ 252. Monica Fryckstedt quotes an anonymous 1863 pamphlet called The ‘Athenaeum’ Exposed, which decried the slashing reviewer thus: ‘he indulges at once, by rude attacks and abuse, his own peculiar tastes and vulgar appetite for slander … with the true spirit of a literary garrotter, he takes a mean advantage of the darkness of “anonymous” to publish what he would not dare to put his name to’ (Monica Fryckstedt, ‘Geraldine Jewsbury’s Athenaeum Reviews: A Mirror of Mid-Victorian Attitudes to Fiction,’ Victorian Periodicals Review 23, no. 1 (1990), 13–25: 25).
Seeley notes how Meynell blurred the boundaries between the familiar and the polemical essay; this was particularly the case in those essays which contained review and literary critical material (Tracy Seeley, ‘Alice Meynell, Essayist: Taking Life “Greatly to Heart”,’ Women’s Studies 27 (1998), 105–130: 113).
Viola Meynell, Alice Meynell: A Memoir (London: Jonathan Cape, 1929), 120. Meynell was suggested again, with considerable public support, following Alfred Austin’s death. T. P.’s Weekly ran a poll in 1913 in which Meynell came second only to Kipling; Robert Bridges, of course, was eventually named Laureate.
Alice Meynell, The Flower of the Mind: A Choice Among the Best Poems (London: Grant Richards, 1897), vii–viii.
Alice Meynell, John Ruskin (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1900), 17.
Alice Meynell, ‘Children in Burlesque,’ The Children (London and New York: John Lane, 1896), 69–71: 69.
Alice Meynell, ‘Introduction,’ Prometheus Bound and Other Poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (London: Ward, Lock and Bowden Ltd., 1896), xiv.
Linda Peterson, Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 178.
Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1993), 36.
Anne Kimball Tuell, Mrs. Meynell and her Literary Generation (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1925), 186.
Katharine Tynan Hinkson, The Middle Years (London: Constable & Co., 1916), 112. From April 1896, Meynell began writing the Wednesday column. Wilfrid Whitten wrote of the youthful keenness of himself and his friends to pick up the latest National Observer: ‘How we shouted and wrote each other notes about Mrs. Meynell’s “Rejection”…’ quoted Viola Meynell, Alice Meynell, 74.
George Meredith, The Letters of George Meredith to Alice Meynell: With Annotations Thereto, 1896–1907 (London: Nonesuch Press, 1923), 8.
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Gray, F.E. (2012). Alice Meynell, Literary Reviewing, and the Cultivation of Scorn. 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_5
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