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Confronting the 1840s: Christian Johnstone in Criticism and Fiction

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British Women's Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, Volume 1

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Abstract

Christian Johnstone’s fiction and critical writing stands as a reminder that regardless of the ways in which writers chose to position their narrators in the domestic realm, they themselves were professionals operating across public and private spaces. Johnstone not only reviewed work by and about other women writers, including the collected diaries and letters of novelist Fanny d’Arblay (née Burney), she also co-edited Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, making her the first woman in Britain to edit a periodical aimed at a general audience. Notably, she used this position both to recruit other female writers, enabling new networks, and to comment on the position of women in the 1840s.

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Correspondence to Joanne Wilkes .

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Wilkes, J. (2018). Confronting the 1840s: Christian Johnstone in Criticism and Fiction. In: Gavin, A., de la L. Oulton, C. (eds) British Women's Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, Volume 1. British Women’s Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, 1840-1940, vol 1. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78226-3_5

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