Abstract
While the Victorians became very familiar with the name or at least the writings of Edith Simcox in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, most modern readers know her only in the context of her passionate devotion to George Eliot. Simcox’s vigorous engagement in women’s issues and labour activism, and her complex negotiations with gender representations, were significantly undertaken through the periodical press. The range of her interests, knowledge, languages, and logic confounded those contemporaries who held, as did fellow journalist W. R. Greg, that the ‘cerebral organization of the female is far more delicate than that of man’.1
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Notes
Although many women were remunerated for them, reviews required extensive reading of books, drew very little pay, and were often published anonymously, giving no credit to the reviewer. Nevertheless, George Eliot read 166 books in 2 years (Kathryn Hughes, George Eliot: The Last Victorian (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001), 167),
and Geraldine Jewsbury reviewed over 2,300 books between 1850 and 1880 (Barbara Onslow, Women of the Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Macmillan, 2000), 70). Many women journalists averaged £2 a week when it took £4 to live (Onslow 38). Simcox hoped for at least £50 a year from her writing but apparently did not get it (Autobiography of a Shirtmaker: Edith Simcox’s A Monument to the Memory of George Eliot, eds Constance M. Fulmer and Margaret Barfield (New York: Garland, 1998), 22 Feb 1880: 116). The chapter, ‘How It Pays’ in How to Write for the Press gives specifics about salaries (An Editor, How to Write for the Press: A Practical Handbook for Beginners in Journalism (London: Horace Cox, 1899), 112–18).
Edmund Gosse, ‘George Eliot,’ in Aspects and Impressions (London: Cassell, 1922), 1–16: 1. In a voluminous literary career, Gosse’s works include Seventeenth Century Studies (1883), A History of Eighteenth Century Literature (1889), The Jacobean Poets (1894), History of Modern English Literature (1897), and English Literature: An Illustrated Record, vols. 3 and 4 (1903). He also wrote biographies on Thomas Gray (1884), William Congreve (1888), John Donne (1899), Jeremy Taylor (1904), and Sir Thomas Browne (1905).
Edith Simcox, ‘The Capacity of Women,’ Nineteenth Century 127, (Sept. 1887), 391–403.
Edith Simcox, ‘Eight Years of Co-Operative Shirtmaking,’ Nineteenth Century 15 (June 1884), 1037–54: 1040.
Constance Fulmer, ‘Edith Simcox: Feminist Critic and Reformer.’ Victorian Review 31, no. 1 (Spring 1998), 105–21: 109.
Keith A. McKenzie, Edith Simcox and George Eliot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 18.
This was part of the response Simcox (writing as Lawrenny) made in the Examiner (3349, Apr. 6, 1872: 351) to a complaint in the Pall Mall Gazette about her article, ‘Custom and Sex.’ See H. Lawrenny, ‘Custom and Sex,’ Fortnightly Review 17, no. 63, New Series, 1 (Mar. 1, 1872), 310–22.
Edith Simcox, ‘Ideals of Feminine Usefulness,’ Fortnightly Review 21, no. 161, (May 1880), 656–71: 665. The first of the two biographies is Sister Dora (1880) by Margaret Lonsdale about Dorothy Pattison who, within and without the Sisterhood of the Good Samaritans, tended tirelessly to the sick and dying poor. The other is The Life and Work of Mary Carpenter by J. Estlin Carpenter (1879). Mary Carpenter taught poor children in the United Kingdom and women in India.
Laurie Zierer, ‘Edith Jemima Simcox’ in Prose by Victorian Women: An Anthology. Eds. Andrea Broomfield and Sally Mitchell (New York and London: Garland, 1996), 523–5: 524.
Alison Valtin, ‘Clementina Black’ in Prose by Victorian Women: An Anthology. Eds. Andrea Broomfield and Sally Mitchell (New York and London: Garland, 1996), 599–601: 601.
Andrea Broomfield and Sally Mitchell, eds. Prose by Victorian Women: An Anthology (New York and London: Garland, 1996). See [Edith Simcox], ‘Autobiographies.’ North British Review 51 (Jan. 1870), 383–414. See also notes 9 and 15 above.
Simcox, Autobiography, 9 and 17 Nov 1877: 4–7. See also Edith Simcox, Natural Law: An Essay in Ethics (London: Trübner, 1877).
Gillian Beer, ‘Knowing a Life: Edith Simcox—Sat est vixisse?’ in Knowing the Past: Victorian Literature and Culture. Ed. Suzy Anger (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 252–66: 253–4.
W. Robertson Nicoll, ‘George Augustus Simcox,’ in A Bookman’s Letters, 4th edn. (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1908), 105–13: 108.
Heather James, ‘The Geography of the Cult of St David: A Study of Dedication Patterns in the Medieval Diocese’ in St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation, ed. J. Wyn Evans and Jonathan M. Wooding (Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2007), 41–83: 63.
Henry Owen, Old Pembroke Families in the Ancient County Palatine of Pembroke (London: Charles J. Clark, 1902), 108–113.
John Ruskin, ‘Of Queen’s Gardens,’ Sesame and Lilies: Two Lectures Delivered at Manchester in 1864 (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1865), 88.
Edith Simcox, ‘On the Influence of John Stuart Mill’s Writings,’ Contemporary Review 22 (June 1873), 297–318.
See John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (London: Longman’s, 1869). However, Simcox would continue to publish some of her works anonymously, even as late as ‘Rural Roads,’ in Macmillan’s Magazine 52, no. 3 (Sept. 11, 1885), 371–93.
Edith Simcox, Primitive Civilizations, or Outline of the History of Ownership in Archaic Communities (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1894). Her last publication, ‘The Native Australian Family,’ appeared a few months before her death and was published under her name, in Nineteenth Century 45, no. 269 (July 1899), 41–65.
Daniel Brown and Hilary Fraser, eds, English Prose of the Nineteenth Century (London: Longman, 1997), 21.
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 66–99.
Rosemaire Bodenheimer, ‘Autobiography in Fragments: The Elusive Life of Edith Simcox,’ Victorian Studies 44, no. 3 (Spring 2002), 399–433, Literature Resource Center, accessed Sept. 22, 2010, par. 42.
Woolf, Virginia, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 5 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1978). Vol 2, 1920–1924, Ed. Anne Olivier Bell, 292.
Alexis Easley, First Person Anonymous: Women Writers and Victorian Print Media, 1830–70 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 2.
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© 2012 Brenda Ayres
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Ayres, B. (2012). Edith Simcox’s Diptych: Sexuality and Textuality. 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_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137001306_4
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