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• W1498053537 abstract "Previous articleNext article FreeLinda H. Peterson, Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market. Linda H. Peterson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. Pp. xv+289.Alison BoothAlison BoothUniversity of Virginia Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreLinda Peterson’s comprehensive study of the professionalization of women writers in Victorian Britain provides an occasion to reflect on—and celebrate—more than thirty years of concerted scholarship in this field. A short review can only point to some of the palpable gains that Peterson builds upon in this substantial book. Most notably for this project, today we have the means and predilection to construct more accurate historical narratives concerning careers and publishing markets, as the allusion to “facts” in Peterson’s subtitle would suggest. Peterson recruits complex evidence about a range of figures and genres, whereas comparable studies in the past might have forfeited the thick as well as broad description for the sake of a driving polemic about exclusionary gendered discourses, anxiety of authorship, or subversive textual strategies in one or several novelists or poets. Becoming a Woman of Letters portrays in close-up the careers and circumstances of various writers across the decades, emphasizing periodical writing more than poetry and fiction while highlighting social networks and other factors that contributed to success or struggle, lasting renown or obscurity.The book presents other welcome signs of the continuing vitality of Victorian women writers as a field of study. First, Peterson participates in the periodical and publishing studies that thrive in a digital era (with some reference to the history of the book). The excellent illustrations throughout are symptomatic of her attention to the many phases of literary production, from portraits of authors and Anna Mary Howitt’s illustrations to the covers of Alice Meynell’s books. Second, Becoming a Woman of Letters proves, if proof is still needed, that literary history has moved beyond the canons of male and female Victorian writers that prevailed two or three decades ago. Here are groundbreaking inquiries into the careers of Mary Howitt and Anna Mary Howitt, Charlotte Riddell, Alice Meynell, and Mary Cholmondeley, as well as fresh treatments of Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Brontë, and Elizabeth Gaskell. Each chapter, moreover, ranges through the main figures’ literary relations, filling in a historical canvas that will be widely useful. And third, though the methodological orientation is more tacit than developed within Peterson’s multidimensional studies of diverse careers, the book shows that today’s female literary history has come to terms with the scandal of separate spheres and is conversant with the sociology of literature à la Bourdieu as well as recent histories of the rise of the professions. Along with considerable information about royalties, print runs, and sales, there is some exploration of reviews and reception. The best pages serve as a form of professional biography, especially on such admirable and lesser-known writers as the Howitts (I for one have gained from Peterson’s valuable discoveries about these authors in previously published articles). In general, then, this is not a publishing history or an examination of the material or audience end of the “communications circuit” (63), but a study of authors who dealt with expectations of their gender and opportunities of their times.In a sort of posttheory light of common day, this book gets down to the business of being a British woman writer as it evolves from the 1830s to the turn of the twentieth century. Peterson judiciously draws upon and differs from previous contributions to women’s literary and publishing history by Gaye Tuchman and Nina E. Fortin, Norma Clarke, Barbara Onslow, Betty A. Schellenberg, Clare Pettitt, and others in order to retrace the emerging definition of literature as a profession and the rise of “professional women of letters…simultaneously with their male counterparts during the nineteenth century” (3). This rise was largely through the “burgeoning of print culture and the opening of new genres,” namely, “the essay, the literary review, the periodical column, the biographical portrait and historical sketch, the travelogue, and the serialized tale” (4). She retraces the debates concerning the status of authorship as a profession—Could one earn a respectable living and status by writing for the press? Was it a trade or a higher calling?—and the emergence of journals, societies, awards, and other professional apparatus along with the widespread term “man” or “woman of letters” by 1880. Through “six case studies” (aligned in pairs of contemporaries) Peterson shows that the “honorific designation” “woman of letters” depended on a woman writer’s “economic success, critical esteem, and lasting reputation” (6), based in turn on how she negotiated the existing myths of female authorship in presenting her own persona and on how she worked the literary market. Harriet Martineau’s heroic model of solitary achievement contrasts with Mary Howitt’s “model of literary production as an extension of a woman’s domestic duties and social responsibilities” in collaboration with husband and daughter (6–7). Elizabeth Gaskell’s midcentury strategy, in contrast, creates “parallel streams” in Charlotte Brontë’s career as novelist of genius and her life as good woman. Later women writers such as Charlotte Riddell, faced with the divided markets for popular and high fiction and the greater scrutiny of literary celebrities, could no longer aspire to Gaskell’s myth of female authorship (8). Women at the fin de siècle worked within very different publishing conditions after the death of the three-decker novel and the diversity of ephemeral periodicals aimed at mass markets or aesthetic elites. Peterson represents different negotiations of the 1890s and beyond in the careers of Alice Meynell and Mary Cholmondeley (8–9).This broad outline of the book appears in the introduction, which along with the first chapter provides a panorama of examples rather than a structured history of the Victorian publishing market or a historical analysis of the impact of gender on the reception of women writers. The comprehensiveness of this panorama leads to some repetition and lack of conceptual focus, though readers will find interesting information about negotiations among writers and publishers and about influential figures such as William Jerdan and Walter Besant. I have published a reading of the author portraits in Fraser’s “Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters” that differs from that of Peterson, who rightly reveals some symptoms of gender panic in the portrayal of men of letters; it is worth adding that the Fraserians were considered by later Victorians, including the temperance advocates Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall, to be rather rowdy fellows.1Readers of Peterson’s book are likely to gain most from the subsequent chapters on writers of interest to them. They will be glad to learn, for example, that Harriet Martineau adapted precedents for Illustrations of Political Economy (1834) and later published misleading recollections of the beginnings of her career and that The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) derives its split model of the woman of genius from earlier biographies (e.g., Specimens of British Poetesses [1825]) and novels such as Geraldine Jewsbury’s The Half Sisters (1847) (132–33). Most illuminating is Peterson’s recovery of the middle career of Alice Meynell. This frequently mentioned Catholic poet becomes a counterpart to Margaret Oliphant as we learn of her period of compelling, original prose, widely admired at the time. Peterson summarizes the pattern of such a career: “In the years 1875 to 1895 Meynell began as a Sapphic poetess, became a top-tier journalist and critic…and earned the status of an Englishwoman of letters of ‘distinction’ (in the estimate of Patmore and Meredith), ‘the new sibyl of style’ (in the phrase of Oscar Wilde)”; yet her essays and poems on women’s social roles “remade her into a late Victorian ‘angel in the house’” and her self-presentation as shepherdess lost her the “canonical status that she had apparently won” (201). Mary Cholmondeley (something of a one-hit wonder with Red Pottage [1899]) presents a more extreme case—someone who set out as an amateur, emerged from the popular ghetto to some distinction, but never sustained professional status. Peterson’s interpretation of this career pattern expresses the justification of her project: “Rather than put the burden of failure solely on Cholmondeley and her art, we might consider the market conditions that she [and all women authors] faced at the turn of the century” (219). A history (condensed, well footnoted) of Bentley’s journal Temple Bar (1860–1906) ensues. Many pages in Becoming a Woman of Letters display such thorough archival retrieval—an impressive scholarly achievement.In part because the chapters retain some effects of their different original occasions, the reader may wish for more interconnection between the case studies or more reference to the argument or concepts posited in the introduction. Within chapters, subdivided by headings, the discussion is clear and efficient. But the sheer complexity of the competing myths of authorship, the individual strategies, and the continuing reputations challenge the terms of analysis. Chapter 4, for instance, begins, “Charlotte Brontë was not a professional woman of letters—at least not in Victorian terms” (131), and yet “as a literary figure” she “had remarkable influence on mid-Victorian conceptions of women’s authorship” (131)—and of course on our own ideas about Victorian women writers. It is indeed worth remarking that Brontë “never wrote articles, columns, or reviews” (131), but it can be an effort to retain the specialized definitions of “professional” and “woman of letters” that exclude this preeminent Victorian writer.At one point Peterson draws upon Robert Darnton’s “communications circuit” model for the printed book. Darnton’s diagram provides a “non-individualist account of writerly activity,” acknowledging many forces, including editors and readers (63). This model is given little play, however. Peterson’s study is not in fact a publishing history as I have suggested; her authors emerge as biographical individuals in their networks of fellow writers, but there is little mention of several features of Darnton’s chart, from suppliers and printers to shippers and booksellers (or the comparable entities in periodical publishing). An author-centered approach has served studies of Victorian women writers very well for some time, and Peterson adds dimensions of the literary marketplace and the rise of the profession. Her book avowedly contributes to the goal of a complete literary history of women’s writing in the nineteenth century. Becoming a Woman of Letters is a major contribution to that history. Notes 1See Alison Booth, “Men and Women of the Time: Victorian Prosopographies,” in Life Writing and Victorian Culture, ed. David Amigoni (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 41–66. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 110, Number 3February 2013 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/668585 Views: 244Total views on this site © 2013 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected].PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article." @default.
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