Abstract
This chapter will explore the emergence of women writers as participants in and shapers of a vibrant literary culture between 1830 and 1880, a period that witnessed the transition from Romantic to Victorian writing, and with it the transformation of what became known as the literary ‘profession’. As Linda Peterson and Patrick Leary have noted, the perception of what constituted a writing life changed significantly in the 1830s and 1840s as emphasis shifted from inspiration, imagination, and the indefinability of genius to the practicalities of writing for a living, the need for a steady income, the importance of contracts, and the working conditions that were necessary for productivity.1 This period coincided with what was also perceived to be an increase in the number of women authors—poets, novelists, and writers in a variety of prose genres—who were attracting attention.
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Notes
Linda H. Peterson, Becoming a Woman of Letters. Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), Chap. 1;
Patrick Leary, ‘Fraser’s Magazine and the Literary Life, 1830–1847’, Victorian Periodicals Review 27 (Summer 1994), pp. 105–26.
Mrs Newton Crosland, Landmarks of a Literary Life 1820–1892 (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Company 1893), p. 104.
Crosland, Landmarks, p. 153.
See Miriam Allott, ed., The Brontes: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), and
Angus Easson, ed., Elizabeth Gaskell: The Critical Heritage, 1848–1910 (London: Routledge, 1991).
S. C. Hall, A Book of Memories of Great Men and Women of the Age from Personal Acquaintance (London: Virtue and Company, 1871), 2nd ed., 1877.
S. C. Hall, Retrospect of a Long Life from 1815 to 1883 (New York, NY: Appleton & Co., 1883). The title page of the British edition published by Richard Bentley (1883) described the author as ‘S. C. Hall, FSA, Barrister of Law, and a Man of Letters by Profession’.
See Richard Salmon, The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2013), Chap. 1.
Hall, Book of Memories, p. 71.
Lee Erickson, in The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–1900 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), argues that the decline in the market for poetry at the end of the 1820s led to the periodical essay becoming the dominant literary form.
Alison Chapman, ‘Achieving Fame and Canonicity’, in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Writing, ed. by Linda H. Peterson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 73–86).
Mary Howitt. An Autobiography, ed. by Margaret Howitt, 2 vols. (London: Wm Isbister Ltd, 1889), vol. 1, p. 111.
Linda H. Peterson, ‘Mother-Daughter Productions: Mary and Anna Mary Howitt in Howitt’s Journal, Household Words and Other Mid-Victorian Periodicals’, Victorian Periodicals Review 31:1 (Spring 1998), pp. 31–54. See also Peterson, Becoming a Woman of Letters (2009), Chap. 3.
Brian E. Maidment, ‘“Work in Unbroken Succession”: The Literary Career of Mary Howitt’, in Popular Victorian Women Writers, ed. by Kay Boardman and Shirley Jones (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 28.
Howitt. Autobiography, vol. 2. p. 19.
Margaret Oliphant described Howitt’s frightening account of her babies’ deaths, which she attributed to too much mental work on her part; see An Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant, ed. by Elisabeth Jay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 40.
See Kathryn Gleadle, The Early Feminists. Radical Unitarians and the Emergence of the Women’s Rights Movement, 1831–1850 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995).
See Brian E. Maidment, ‘Magazines of Popular Progress and the Artisans’, Victoria Periodicals Review 17 (Fall 1984), pp. 82–94.
Crosland, Landmarks, p. 195.
Preface to C. R. Woodring, Victorian Samplers: William and Mary Howitt (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1952).
See the Joanne Shattock, ‘Researching Periodical Networks: William and Mary Howitt’, in Researching the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Case Studies, ed. by A. Easley, A. King, and J. Morton (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2018), pp. 60–73.
The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, ed. by J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 7, 33.
See Headnote to Mary Barton, ed. by Joanne Wilkes, in The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell. ed Joanne Shattock, 5 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005), vol. 5, pp. 1–2.
See The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. by Madeline House, Graham Storey, and Kathleen Tillotson, 12 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), vol. 6 (1850–2), p. 22.
See the Headnote to ‘Lizzie Leigh’ in Journalism, Early Fiction and Personal Writings, ed. by Joanne Shattock, The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell, vol. 1, pp. 129–30.
Gaskell, Letters, p. 577.
See Angus Easson, Elizabeth Gaskell (London: Routledge, 1979), p. 43.
For details, see Elizabeth Ludlow and Rebecca Styler, ‘Elizabeth Gaskell and the Short Story’, Gaskell Society Journal 29 (2015), pp. 12–6.
See Leon Litvak, ‘Dickens and the Codebreakers. The Annotated Set of All the Year Round’ Dickens Quarterly 32:4 (December 2015), pp. 313–37.
Blackwood’s Magazine 126 (July 1879), pp. 88–107;
rpt. in Selected Works of Margaret Oliphant, ed. by Joanne Shattock and Elisabeth Jay, 25 vols. (London: Routledge, 2011–16), vol. 3 (ed. by Valerie Sanders), pp. 192–3.
[William Blackwood and J. H. Lobban], ‘Mrs Oliphant, Blackwood’s Magazine 162 (July 1897), p. 162.
[M. Oliphant], ‘Anthony Trollope’, Good Words 24 (February 1883), pp. 142–4; reprinted Selected Works vol. 3, p. 368.
Peterson, Becoming a Woman of Letters (2009), Chap. 1.
[M. Oliphant], ‘Modern Novelists Great and Small’, Blackwood’s Magazine 77 (May 1855), pp. 554–68, in Selected Works, vol. 1, ed. by Joanne Shattock, p. 82.
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Shattock, J. (2018). The Feminisation of Literary Culture. In: Hartley, L. (eds) The History of British Women’s Writing, 1830–1880. History of British Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58465-6_2
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