Abstract
Defining ‘writing’ as a profession has always been problematic and was emphatically so in the nineteenth century, when even medicine was not fully established as a profession until after 1850.1 The exploding market for print due to expanding literacy and new technologies that made print affordable, as well as the convention of anonymous publication, enabled more women than we can ever document to write non-fiction prose, from recipes to reviews, for money. Many women published only occasionally and were minimally paid if at all. Professional women writers, in contrast, wrote steadily for pay, often across multiple genres, and supported themselves through their work.2 I single out Anna Brownell Murphy Jameson (1794–1860), Harriet Martineau (1802–76), Marian Evans (later George Eliot) (1819–80), Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904), and Margaret Oliphant (1828–97) as widely read professional authors who won recognition from fellow professionals and the public. These five demonstrate what was possible to women writers despite their exclusion from the means of production or principal editorial positions in a male-dominated publishing industry, and illuminate the gendered conditions of the field they entered.
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Notes
My thanks to Samantha Moore and Heidi Hakimi-Hood for research and editorial assistance.
See Nigel Cross, The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth-Century Grub Street (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 2–3;
Judith Johnston and Hilary Fraser, ‘The Professionalisation of Women’s Writing: Extending the Canon’, in Women and Literature in Britain 1800–1900, ed. by Joanne Shattock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 231–50;
Linda H. Peterson, Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 1–7.
Joanne Shattock, ‘Becoming a Professional Writer’, in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Writing, ed. by Linda H. Peterson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 30.
Quoted in Fionnuala Dillane, Before George Eliot: Marian Evans and the Periodical Press (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 24.
Deborah A. Logan, The Hour and the Woman: Harriet Martineau’s ‘Somewhat Remarkable’ Life (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002), pp. 201–3.
Clara Thomas, Love and Work Enough: The Life of Anna Jameson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967), pp. 4, 139, 158–9.
Dillane, Before George Eliot, pp. 29, 62, 89; Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 102, 106, 124–5.
Sally Mitchell, Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2004), pp. 76–7, 82.
Elisabeth Jay, Mrs. Oliphant: ‘A Fiction to Herself’. A Literary Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 41.
[Margaret Oliphant], ‘Modern Light Literature—Art’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 78 (December 1855), pp. 708–9.
Lynne Vallone, ‘Women Writing for Children’, in Women and Literature in Britain 1800–1900, ed. by Joanne Shattock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 276.
Sarah Stickney Ellis, The Women of England: Their Social Duties, and Domestic Habits (London: Fisher, 1839)
See also Claudia Nelson, Family Ties in Victorian England (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007), p. 26.
[Anna Jameson], A Lady’s Diary (London: R. Thomas, 1826), reissued anonymously as The Diary of an Ennuyée (London: Henry Colburn, 1826); Thomas, Love and Work Enough, pp. 23–4
Judith Johnston, ‘Fracturing Perspectives of Italy in Anna Jameson’s The Diary of an Ennuyee’, Women’s Writing 11.1 (2004), pp. 11–12, 20–2;
Hilary Fraser, Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 2, 21–2.
Cf. Judith Johnston subtitle: Anna Jameson: Victorian, Feminist, Woman of Letters (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997).
Cheri L. Larsen Hoeckley, Introduction, in Shakespeare’s Heroines by Anna Murphy Jameson, ed. by Cheri L. Larsen Hoeckley (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2005), pp. 9–37 (p. 9).
Anna Jameson, Characteristics of Women./Moral, Poetical, and Historical./With Illustrations from the Author’s Designs, 2 vols. (London: Ibotson and Palmer, 1832), vol. 1, p. 8.
Anna Jameson, Social Life in Germany, Illustrated in the Acted Dramas of Her Royal Highness the Princess Amelia of Saxony. / Translated from the German, with an Introduction and Notes, Explanatory of the German Language and Manners, 2 vols. (London: Saunders and Otley, 1840), pp. xxiv–v, xxix.
See Kimberly VanEsveld Adams, Our Lady of Victorian Feminism: The Madonna in the Work of Anna Jameson, Margaret Fuller, and George Eliot (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2001), pp. 50–71.
Harriet Martineau, Autobiography (London: Smith, Elder, 1877); rpt. ed. by Linda H. Peterson (Peterborough, Ont: Broadview Press, 2007), pp. 110–11.
Discipulus [Harriet Martineau], ‘Female Writers on Practical Divinity’, Monthly Repository 17 (October, December 1822), pp. 593–6, 746–50.
George Saintsbury, A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780–1895) (London: Macmillan, 1896), p. 166.
John North, ed., The Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800–1900, 20 vols. (Waterloo, Ont: North Waterloo Academic Press, 2003).
see also Hilary Fraser with Daniel Brown, English Prose of the Nineteenth Century (Harlow: Addison Wesley Longman, 1996), p. 4.
See Robert Kiefer Webb’s index of 1500 Martineau leaders in Harriet Martineau in the London Daily News: Selected Contributions, 1852–1866, ed. by Elizabeth Sanders Arbuckle (New York, NY: Garland, 1994), pp. 316–430.
Sally Mitchell, Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2004), p. 6.
See Alexis Easley, First-Person Anonymous: Women Writers and Victorian Print Media, 1830–70 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 4, 7.
Susan Hoecker-Drysdale, Harriet Martineau: First Woman Sociologist (Oxford: Berg, 1992), pp. 1–2.
Harriet Martineau, Society in America, 3 vols. (New York, NY: Saunders and Otley, 1837), vol. 1, 148.
Deborah A. Logan, ed., Writings on Slavery and the American Civil War by Harriet Martineau (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University, 2002), pp. 89–90.
See Caroline Roberts, The Woman and the Hour: Harriet Martineau and Victorian Ideologies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), pp. 147–62;
Alexis Easley, Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship, 1850–1914 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), pp. 83–90, 95–107.
Peterson, Becoming A Woman of Letters, p. 62.
M. A. E., ‘Knowing that Shortly I must put off this Tabernacle’, The Christian Observer (January 1840), p. 38.
See Wendy S. Williams, George Eliot, Poetess (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 59–60.
See Rosemary Ashton, George Eliot: A Life (New York, NY: Allen Lane, 1996), p. 53.
Lori Chamberlain, ‘Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation’, Signs 13.3 (1988), pp. 454–72 (p. 455);
Oana-Helene Andone, ‘Gender Issues in Translation’, Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 10.2 (2002), pp. 135–50 (pp. 142, 147, 149).
See also Sherry Simon, Gender in Translation. Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (London: Routledge, 1996).
Lesa Scholl, Translation, Authorship and the Victorian Professional Woman: Charlotte Bronte, Harriet Martineau and George Eliot (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 2–7;
Judith Johnston, Victorian Women and the Economies of Travel, Translation and Culture, 1830–1870 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 44, 53–54, 110.
[Marian Evans], ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’, Westminster Review, 66 (October 1856), pp. 442–61; ‘The Natural History of German Life’, Westminster Review, 66 (July 1856), pp. 51–79.
Hilary Fraser, Stephanie Green, Judith Johnston, Gender and the Victorian Periodical (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 26–8.
[Frances Power Cobbe], An Essay on Intuitive Morals (London: Longman, 1855).
Cobbe, Life of Frances Power Cobbe as Told by Herself(1894; rpt. London: Swan Sonnenschein and Co., 1904), pp. 111–12.
See Peterson, ‘Women Writers and Self-Writing’, in Women and Literature, ed. by Shattock, pp. 224–26.
Frances Power Cobbe, ‘The Evolution of Morals and Religion’, Manchester Friend (15 January 1872
Cobbe, ‘Wife Torture in England’, Contemporary Review 32 (April 1878), pp. 55–87.
See also Susan Hamilton, Frances Power Cobbe and Victorian Feminism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 125–43.
See, for example, [Frances Power Cobbe], ‘The Consciousness of Dogs’, Quarterly Review 133 (October 1872), pp. 419–51;
Frances Power Cobbe, ‘The Moral Aspects of Vivisection’, New Quarterly Magazine 4 (April 1875), pp. 222–37.
See ‘Moir, David Macbeth (1798–1851)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) <http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezproxy.tcu.edu/view/article/18890>.
[Margaret Oliphant], ‘Mary Russell Mitford’, Blackwood’s Magazine 75 (June 1854), pp. 658–70.
Barbara Onslow, Women of the Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 71, 62.
Marysa Demoor: Their Fair Share: Women, Power and Criticism in the Athenaeum, from Millicent Garrett Fawcett to Katherine Mansfield, 1870–1920 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000).
See also John Stock Clarke, Margaret Oliphant: Non-Fictional Writings, Victorian Fiction Research Guide 26 (Brisbane: University of Queensland Department of English, 1997), pp. 2–8.
Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship & the Heroic in History (London: James Fraser, 1841), p. 1.
See also David Amigoni, Victorian Biography: Intellectuals and the Ordering of Discourse (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), pp. 92–106.
See also Rohan Maitzen, Gender, Genre, and Victorian Historical Writing (New York, NY: Garland, 1998), pp. 33–60.
David Finkelstein, Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), pp. 11, 120;
Kerry Powell, ‘Saturday Review, The’, British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837–1913, ed. by Alvin Sullivan (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), p. 380.
Joanne Shattock, ed., Part I: Literary Criticism and Literary History, Volume I: Literary Criticism, 1854–69, in The Selected Works of Margaret Oliphant, ed. by Joanne Shattock and Elisabeth Jay (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), pp. xxvii–xviii, 141–2, 155–6.
[Margaret Oliphant], ‘Modern Novelists—Great and Small’, Blackwood’s Magazine 77 (May 1855), pp. 554–68 (pp. 557, 559).
Merryn Williams, ‘Feminist or Antifeminist? Oliphant and the Woman Question’, Margaret Oliphant: Critical Essays on a Gentle Subversive, ed. by D. J. Trela (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1995), p. 165.
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Hughes, L.K. (2018). The Professional Woman Writer. 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_4
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