Women in the Walkplace: Tracking Bloomsbury’s Female Pedestrians

Ingleby, Matthew

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-54600-5_5

Matthew Ingleby³

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture ((PNWC))

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Abstract

Due to Virginia Woolf’s noted residency in the area, Bloomsbury maintains a strong association in the popular imagination with female writing and feminism. Scholars such as Lynn Walker have widened our understanding of the area’s material role in the history of women’s emancipation in Britain by drawing attention to the concentration in Bloomsbury of figures involved in the suffrage movement, while a blue plaque commemorates Millicent Fawcett’s residency in Gower Street. Anna Snaith and Terri Mulholland have shown how early twentieth-century Bloomsbury and its bohemian, cosmopolitan boarding houses heralded particular challenges and opportunities for writing women such as Dorothy Richardson and Jean Rhys, among many other lesser-known names. But Bloomsbury’s material importance to feminist discourse can be dated much further back in history, as far as the eighteenth century even, given that Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) while living in apartments in Store Street.

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Notes

1.
Lynn Walker, “The Feminist Remapping of Space in Victorian London,” in The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space, ed. Iain Borden, Joe Kerr and Jane Rendell (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2002), 296–311.
2.
Snaith, Modernist Voyages, 20; Mulholland, British Boarding Houses in Interwar Women’s Literature, 118–150.
3.
Hoberman, “Women in the British Museum Reading Room.”
4.
Ashton, Victorian Bloomsbury, 215–48.
5.
Walker, “The Feminist Remapping of Space in Victorian London,” 303.
6.
Emily Hobhouse, “Women Workers: How They Live, How They Wish to Live,” Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review, 47 (1900): 483. See Sally Mitchell, “The New Woman’s Work: Past, Present and Future,” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 3 (2007): www.ncgsjournal.com/issue32/roundtable.htm
7.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, ed. Michèle Barrett (1929; London: Penguin, 2000), 28.
8.
Bernstein, Roomscape, 147–83.
9.
Woolf, Room of One’s Own, 38.
10.
Rachel Bowlby, Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 207.
11.
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12.
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13.
Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin-de-Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 150.
14.
Lyn Pykett, The “Improper” Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (London: Routledge, 1992), 10.
15.
Pykett, The “Improper” Feminine, 84.
16.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Eleanor’s Victory (1863; Stroud: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1996), 84.
17.
Braddon, Eleanor’s Victory, 85–87.
18.
Braddon, Eleanor’s Victory, 88.
19.
Braddon, Eleanor’s Victory, 92.
20.
Braddon, Eleanor’s Victory, 94.
21.
Braddon, Eleanor’s Victory, 94.
22.
Braddon, Eleanor’s Victory, 96.
23.
This novel was initially published in periodical form as Dorothea (1873) and then as Vagabondia (1884), each change of title being unaccompanied by all but the most minor of revisions.
24.
Frances Hodgson Burnett, Dolly (London: Frederick Warne & Co., 1893), 111 and 118.
25.
Burnett, Dolly, 121.
26.
Burnett, Dolly, 174.
27.
Burnett, Dolly, 175.
28.
Burnett, Dolly, 136.
29.
Collins, Heart and Science, 1:14.
30.
Collins, Heart and Science, 1:14 and 1:18.
31.
Collins, Heart and Science, 1:17–18.
32.
Collins, Heart and Science, 1:18.
33.
Collins, Heart and Science, 1:28.
34.
Collins, Heart and Science, 1:34.
35.
Collins, Heart and Science, 1:36.
36.
Collins, Heart and Science, 1:37.
37.
Rachel Malane, Sex in Mind: The Gendered Brain in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Mental Sciences (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 111–56.
38.
Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson, The Dynamiter (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1885), 138.
39.
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40.
Stevenson, The Dynamiter, 179.
41.
Stevenson, The Dynamiter, 179–80.
42.
Stevenson, The Dynamiter, 180.
43.
Stevenson, The Dynamiter, 183.
44.
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45.
Stevenson, The Dynamiter, 188.
46.
Stevenson, The Dynamiter, 189.
47.
For a discussion of this novel’s complex political positioning, see Matthew Ingleby, “Double Standards: Reading the Revolutionary Doppelgänger in The Prophet’s Mantle,” in Victorian Fiction beyond the Canon ed. Daragh Dowes and Trish Ferguson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 181–200.
48.
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49.
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50.
Bland, The Prophet’s Mantle, 50.
51.
Bland, The Prophet’s Mantle, 51.
52.
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53.
Rutledge, “E. Nesbit and the Woman Question,” 225.
54.
Mrs. [Margaret] Oliphant, A House in Bloomsbury (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1894), 148.
55.
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56.
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57.
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58.
Oliphant, A House in Bloomsbury, 151.
59.
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60.
Rita S. Kranadis, Subversive Discourses: The Cultural Production of Late Victorian Feminist Novels (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 66. For more about Marcella as an anti-feminist novel, see Valerie Sanders, Eve’s Renegades: Victorian Anti-Feminist Women Novelists (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996). For a reading of Ward’s work that positions her less clearly as an anti-feminist, see Beth Sutton-Ramspeck, “Shot out of the Canon: Mary Ward and the Claims of Conflicting Feminism,” in Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question, ed. Nicola Diane Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 204–22.
61.
Ward, Marcella, 337.
62.
Ward, Marcella, 343.
63.
Ward, Marcella, 418.
64.
Ward, Marcella, 424.
65.
Ledger, The New Woman, 150–76.
66.
Isabella Ford, On the Threshold (London: Edward Arnold, 1895), 10–11.
67.
Matthew Beaumont, Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England 1870–1900 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 93.
68.
Ford, On the Threshold, 45.
69.
Ford, On the Threshold, 45.
70.
Ledger argues that the novel consistently fails to make good on the utopian optimism it initially promises: “Time and again in On the Threshold, a very utopian impulse is thwarted […] The only utopia available, it seems, involves emigration – a recurrent ‘fall back’ position in innumerable novels produced in the second half of the nineteenth century.” The New Woman, 56.
71.
Ford, On the Threshold, 46.
72.
Ford, On the Threshold, 129.
73.
Ford, On the Threshold, 131.
74.
Ford, On the Threshold, 133.
75.
Ford, On the Threshold, 135–36.
76.
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77.
Claire Tomalin, afterword to Clara Hopgood, by Mark Rutherford (London: Hogarth Press, 1985), 299.
78.
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79.
Stephen Merton, Mark Rutherford (William Hale White) (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1967), 120–21.
80.
Linda K. Hughes, “Madge and Clara Hopgood: William Hale White’s Spinozan Sisters,” Victorian Studies 18 (1974): 58.
81.
“Clara Hopgood,” Athenaeum, 15 August 1896, 220.
82.
“Fiction,” Speaker, 10 October 1896, 397.
83.
“Two Novels,” Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, 27 June 1896, 653.
84.
Mark Rutherford, Clara Hopgood (1896; London: Hogarth Press, 1985), 159.
85.
Rutherford, Clara Hopgood, 159.
86.
Rutherford, Clara Hopgood, 226.
87.
Rutherford, Clara Hopgood, 227 and 229.
88.
Rutherford, Clara Hopgood, 229.
89.
Rutherford, Clara Hopgood, 231.
90.
Rutherford, Clara Hopgood, 231.
91.
“Two Novels,” Saturday Review, 653.
92.
Anna Snaith, Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 28.
93.
W. H. Mallock, The Individualist (London: George Bell and Sons, 1899), 33.
94.
Mallock, The Individualist, 45.
95.
Mallock, The Individualist, 32–33.
96.
Mallock, The Individualist, 30.
97.
See David Trotter, The English Novel in History 1895–1920 (London: Routledge 1993), 40–41.
98.
Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 68–69.
99.
George Gissing, New Grub Street, ed. Bernard Bergonzi (1891; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 140.
100.
For a more thorough discussion of Gissing’s complex representation of women in the metropolitan context, see Emma Liggins, George Gissing, the Working Woman and Urban Culture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006).
101.
Maria Carlo Martino, “Woman as Writer/Writer as Woman: George Paston’s A Writer of Books,” Victorian Literature and Culture 32 (2004): 232. See also Ann Ardis, New Women, New Novels (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), which also sees Cosima’s “art as an act of political engagement” (160).
102.
George Paston [Emily Morse Symonds], A Writer of Books, ed. Margaret D. Stetz (1898; Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1999), 18.
103.
Paston, A Writer of Books, 21.
104.
Paston, A Writer of Books, 113.
105.
Paston, A Writer of Books, 134. A. P. Baggs, Diane K. Bolton and Patricia E. C. Croot, “Islington: Growth, South-east Islington,” in A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 8, Islington and Stoke Newington Parishes, ed. T. F. T. Baker and C. R. Elrington (London: Victoria County History, 1985), 20–24, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/middx/vol8/pp20-24
106.
Paston, A Writer of Books, 95.
107.
Paston, A Writer of Books, 205.
108.
Paston, A Writer of Books, 237.
109.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 99.

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Department of English, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK
Matthew Ingleby

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Ingleby, M. (2018). Women in the Walkplace: Tracking Bloomsbury’s Female Pedestrians. In: Nineteenth-Century Fiction and the Production of Bloomsbury. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54600-5_5

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54600-5_5
Published: 06 November 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-54599-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-54600-5
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