New Media and the Rise of the Popular Woman Writer, 1832-1860

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexis Easley
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
New Media ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Women Readers ◽  
Revolutionary Change ◽  
Victorian Women ◽  
Women's Participation

The idea of ‘new media’ is nothing new. Long before Twitter and Facebook, the rise of new periodical genres and formats provided opportunities for Victorian women writers and readers to participate in popular print culture as never before. This study illuminates the relationship between the rise of the popular woman writer the expansion and diversification of newspaper and periodical print media during a period of revolutionary change. It includes discussion of canonical women writers such as Felicia Hemans, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot, as well as lesser-known figures such as Eliza Cook, Frances Brown, Eliza Meteyard, and Rose Ellen Hendriks. In addition, it explores the networks of women writers connected with cheap family magazines such as Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal during the 1830s and ’40s. It also examines the ways women readers actively responded to a robust popular print culture by creating scrapbooks and engaging in forms of celebrity worship. The book closes with discussion of the ways Victorian women’s participation in popular print culture anticipates our own engagement with new media in the twenty-first century.

Afterword

2020 ◽  
pp. 207-212
Author(s):  
Jane Bennett
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Lydia Maria Child ◽  
Mary Elizabeth Braddon ◽  
Margaret Fuller ◽  
Roll Call ◽  
Susan Fenimore Cooper

It is worth repeating the roll call: Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Caroline Norton, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Margaret Fuller, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Celia Thaxter, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Francis Wright, and Lydia Maria Child. The essays in Gendered Ecologies: New Materialist Interpretations of Women Writers in the Long Nineteenth Century...

The legacy of Lucy Snowe: reconfiguring spinsterhood and the Victorian family in inter-war women’s writing

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Liggins
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Paid Work ◽  
The World ◽  
Vera Brittain ◽  
May Sinclair ◽  
Three Sisters ◽  
Looking Back

This chapter traces women writers’ reinterpretations and re-workings of Charlotte Brontë’s ‘feminist voice’ between 1910 and 1940, considering political and auto/biographical writing by Virginia Woolf, May Sinclair and Vera Brittain, before focusing on the new spinster heroines of modernist novels such as Sinclair’s The Three Sisters and Winifred Holtby’s The Crowded Street. These prominent inter-war literary writers are worth (re-)exploring for the ways in which they challenged and reconfigured assumptions about the Victorian family, often through invoking the ‘myth’ of Charlotte Brontë. This post-Victorian mythologising of Charlotte as both dutiful daughter and champion of female singleness was important to feminists, as they traced the genealogies of the woman writer and of women’s political achievements. For women writers from the 1910s to the 1940s, Charlotte Brontë is revered as a figure emblematic of the Victorian daughter’s entrapment within the patriarchal household, and as a pioneering woman writer who created modern, rebellious heroines. Looking back to representations of solitude, independence and singleness in Charlotte’s letters and in her last novel, Villette, modernist authors used their spinster heroines to reject purely domestic identities in order to embrace the world of paid work.

CRITICAL NAMES MATTER: “CURRER BELL,” “GEORGE ELIOT,” AND “MRS. GASKELL”

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 763-781
Author(s):  
Daun Jung
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
The Public ◽  
Victorian Women ◽  
Victorian Women Writers ◽  
Naming Practices

It is a well-known fact that many Victorian women writers such as the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell adopted pseudonyms or anonymity in publishing their literary works, but few people are aware of how such naming practices had been received by contemporary readers, especially by Victorian periodical reviewers – the very first readers and mediators that presented any major literary works to the public. Since we, as modern day scholars, have become so intimate with their present forms of author names appearing on course syllabuses, school curriculums, and academic papers, we hardly ask how such naming has become possible.

Women writers: setting the terms of the debate

2019 ◽  
pp. 49-66
Author(s):  
Ann Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Political Commentary ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World ◽  
Elizabeth Carter ◽  
The 19Th Century

This chapter explores the idea of the bluestockings and other women writers and how they were partially enfranchised by the expansion of print culture in the 18th century. Many of the bluestockings were published writers. Indeed, Elizabeth Montagu and Elizabeth Carter showed that women could succeed in areas traditionally defined as areas where men excelled. Regardless of the success of these women writers — and probably as a result of it — at the start of the 19th century, the combined social and intellectual prominence of so many intelligent women was responded to with both resentment and disgust by many men. Nevertheless, the establishment of a recognized and significant presence of women in the ‘world of letters’ paved the way for a wide range of social and political commentary from women writers such as Jane Austen, George Eliot, and, later, Virginia Woolf.

The Language of Flowers in the Victorian Knowledge Age

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 136-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Molly Engelhardt
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Romantic Love ◽  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
Knowledge Age

The language of flowers is typically dismissed as a subgenre of botany books that, while popular, had little if any influence on the material culture of Victorian life. This article challenges this assumption by situating the genre within the context of the professionalisation of botany at mid-century to show how efforts to change attitudes towards botany from a fashionable pastime for the gentler sex to a utilitarian practice in service of humanity contributed to the revitalisation and popularity of the language of flowers. While scientific botanists sought to know flowers physiologically and morphologically in the spirit of progress and truth, practitioners of the language of flowers – written primarily for and by women – celebrated uncertainty and relied on floral codes to curtail knowing in order to extend the realm of play. The struggle for floral authority was centred in botanical discourses – both scientific and amateur – but extended as well into narrative fiction. Turning to works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot, I show how Victorian writers expected a certain degree of floral literacy from their readers and used floral codes strategically in their fiction as subtexts for practitioners of the language of flowers. These three writers, I argue, took a stand in the gender struggle over floral authority by creating scientific botanists who are so obsessed with dissecting plants to reveal their secrets and know their ‘life truths’ that they become farsighted in matters of romantic love and unable to read the most obvious and surface of floral codes. The consequences of the dismissal of the superficial are in some cases quite disastrous.

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