Famous, infamous, or anonymous?

Who was the Victorian woman author?

»Who was the Victorian woman author?« This question guides Alexis Easley’s enlightening and inspiring study First-Person Anonymous. Since over the last decades, the Victorian Age has taken centre-stage in literary studies, being scrutinised from almost every possible angle and approach, notions of authorship as well as notions of gender seemed to have been explained once and for all. The profile of the masculine author as celebrity and sage as well as the gendered domains of private and public that excluded women writers from a male-dominated profession had mostly been taken as a given. At the same time, the disproportionately rising number of women writers during the 19th century had primarily been explained as depending on certain popular and didactic genres which were open to women because they were regarded as ›feminine‹ and therefore as proper domains for the female author.

Those women writers which populated the Victorian Age, however, were far from defined and often could not even be immediately recognised as such, because many of them resorted to anonymous publication, particularly to unsigned periodical essays in well-known journals. Alexis Easley convincingly traces women writers’ crucial contributions to Victorian journalism as well as their careers as professional authors and shows how these two areas are closely intertwined; that indeed their book-length works of poetry, fiction and non-fiction cannot be understood without their texts written for the periodical press, when questions of gender and authorship are concerned.

In this context, First-Person Anonymous draws attention to the fact that debates about gender and authorship are constitutive for the Victorian Age, its book-market and the emergence of literary criticism. Easley convinces by meticulously researching the reception of literary works through tracing the discussions about gender and authorship in reviews, thus offering a historical perspective rather than assessing the Victorian Era from today’s gender expectations and preconceptions. The book deals with well-known authors, such as Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Christina Rossetti, as well as with the only recently reappraised Harriet Martineau and the comparatively unknown Christian Johnstone. While each chapter is focused on one of the authors, the study as a whole documents the changes in periodical publication and in the duties and roles of the author from the 1830s to the close of the 19th century.

Anonymity destabilises gender roles

Women writers in the Victorian Age were faced with two possibilities for proliferating their texts: the first consisted of the establishment of high-profile literary careers as authors and »cultural sages«, while the second was a career in periodical journalism which meant that most texts were published anonymously. Whereas the first option, if successful, allowed the authors to achieve fame and to visibly influence literature and culture, at the same time it created many obstacles, because literary celebrity for women was contrary to notions of ›female propriety‹ and of normative gender roles. Women writers who overstepped this boundary ran the risk of having their lives and persons publicly scrutinised and criticised.

In addition – and this also becomes clear in Easley’s study – women writers, if they were accepted at all, were subject to restrictions on their subject matter. While women were ›allowed‹ to write on domestic and moral subjects, political, philosophical, and scientific topics were considered ›masculine‹. In order to address such topics and also specific controversial issues, such as the Woman Question, slavery, industrialism or parliamentary reform, anonymous periodical publication became an important mouthpiece for authors who wanted to keep their privacy and their good reputation.

Easley justly regards the periodical press as vital for the emergence of the women’s movement: »As an anonymous forum for political debate, the periodical press provided women with opportunities for self-advocacy that would lead to the development of an organized women’s movement in the late 1850s« (p. 3). Since this form of anonymous publication – in contrast to signed texts – was seen as low-brow form of literary production, it often served as an accessible »back-door entry« (p. 5) into the literary establishment for women authors, which in turn caused a destabilisation of cultural notions of literary authority. During the 19th century, debates about gender and writing became prevalent, which was also due to the increasing number of women writers who utilised diverse forms of literary distribution and wrote in different genres:

Since cultural authority has been historically associated with male authorship, the participation of women in debates over public issues disrupted the expected gendering of the authorial role and called into question the ideology of different spheres. At stake was the notion of cultural authority itself: Who had the right to participate in public debates and under what circumstances? How was the right to participate in these debates determined by issues of gender? (p. 5)

In First-Person Anonymous it becomes clear that female authors were not simply the victims of such restrictions and were not solely determined, defined, and classified as objects of these restricting views. Instead, they participated in these debates and thereby fundamentally transformed gender roles in writing, while especially destabilising the notion of the male sage. Easley, however, not only focuses on periodical publication – as the hitherto neglected field of study – but connects these anonymous texts with the well-known œuvre in different genres that has made these women writers famous.

Debates about authorship

Following the historically and theoretically convincing introduction, the first chapter deals with the debate over the role of the author in post-Romantic literary culture. This debate, initialised in the 1830s and connected with Carlyle, Thackeray and lesser known journalists, was fuelled by the growing mechanisation that also affected literary production: literature became an industry with the author producing commodities. In the centre of this discussion were the usefulness and the duties of the author, who was called to distance himself from a Romantic sensibility which was judged as decadent, as well as from radical journalism. Literature, more than ever, had to have a clear moral or economic purpose and had to lead to social improvement.

While in the course of this debate, the periodical press regularly launched attacks on female authors and at the same time assisted in the canonisation of male authors, this masculinisation was by no means absolute and uncontested. The increasing number of women writers in the 1830s, who were characterised by an involvement in social concerns, testifies to this counter-force. Apart from that, Easley demonstrates that even Carlyle’s essays, although exclusively focusing on the male writer, expose an indeterminacy in gender categories that pervaded the 1830s.

In order to illuminate the connections between notions of domesticity, class, and the woman author, Easley explores the historical context that led to this particular situation for the woman writer. She traces the development from the popular print culture in the 1790s as well as the feminist attempts to create a discourse of a more rational femininity and more important social roles which avoided associations of women with low-brow cultural production. Mary Wollstonecraft, Germaine de Staël, as well as bluestocking authors (Elizabeth Montague, Elizabeth Carter, Hannah More) were central to this attempt to mediate between women’s domestic role, public writing, and social engagement.

Women’s texts on topics considered a masculine prerogative (social, economic and political) invalidated all attempts at keeping women in the private sphere by harsh attacks on women’s writing. Anonymous publication first and foremost meant a freedom from such gender restrictions: »Disguised behind the collective ›editorial we‹, women to some extent lost the privileges of fame: copyright protection and artistic control. However, as they shed their identities, they gained freedom, at least partly, from the gender stereotypes attached to the feminine authorial name« (p. 30).

Harriet Martineau’s depersonalised voice

This becomes visible in Harriet Martineau’s strategies in dealing with the Woman Question while avoiding personal attacks and criticism. Chapter 2 deals with the fascinating career of Harriet Martineau, who wrote in many different genres in order to make herself heard on various, often ›unfeminine‹, topics – such as economy and politics. In her remarkable career, anonymous publication served as a mouthpiece to circumvent gender restrictions and keep issues of gender out of the topics that she chose to address: »Anonymity enabled Martineau to express what she saw as a de-personalized and disinterested perspective on the Woman Question« (p. 9). But anonymous publication was not the only medium Martineau utilised: she also addressed the Woman Question in the sociological study Society in America and in the accompanying guidebook How to Observe Morals and Manners, as well as in the domestic novel Deerbrook.

Thus, Easley not only analyses Martineau’s clever use of periodical publication, where she even adopted the perspective of a middle-class male journalist to hide her real gender under the male pseudonym Discipulus, but addresses the complex relationship between anonymous journalism, sociological texts and fiction published under Martineau’s name. While she attempted to establish an objective, depersonalised but gender-sensitive point of view in her sociological texts, Martineau’s concern with the Woman Question also influenced the domestic novel Deerbrook. Fictionality here served as a ›veil‹ behind which radical standpoints could be hidden. In addition, domestic fiction was held to lower critical standards and was deemed acceptable for women writers. Easley’s analysis makes it clear that Martineau’s techniques of establishing a depersonalised voice that can speak out ›objectively‹ on gender-sensitive topics in anonymous periodical publication were also carried over into other genres with great success.

Christian Johnstone’s silent reform

Chapter 3 illuminates the central social role of the reformist periodical press in the 1830s and 1840s and Christian Johnstone’s influence on the establishment of this new medium. Johnstone became the first woman to hold the post of paid editor of a major Victorian periodical (Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine). Her career is remarkable in so far as she – in contrast to Martineau – remained anonymous in most of her texts (which is unfortunately also the reason for the fact that today she still remains comparatively unknown) and by that built a career as influential editor and reviewer. Under her editorship, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine provided an important forum for woman writers. Johnstone cleverly made use of the habitual gendering of the role of the editor in mainstream magazines as masculine. Under this cover, she managed to introduce the topic of social reform as well as promoting the careers of other women writers: »Though as an editor Johnstone attempted to suppress her own identity and to construct Tait’s as a male literary community, she also instituted editorial changes that seemed intended to disrupt the implied masculinity of the periodical as a whole« (p. 69).

From working-class issues
to the Woman Question: Elizabeth Gaskell

Chapter 4 explores the contribution of Elizabeth Gaskell to the 1840s social upheavals, which lead to the development of the middle-class radical press and also entailed a more active and politically influential role for the middle-class female author. While her novels, particularly her first novel Mary Barton (1848), are famous as Condition-of-England novels today, Easley illustrates how reading Mary Barton as an extension of Gaskell’s texts in the reformist periodical press leads to new results as to Gaskell’s ideological point of view on working-class issues. Unlike the previously discussed Martineau and Johnstone, Gaskell was initially not interested in the Woman Question. However, her central contribution consisted of widening the range of topics the woman writer could address by her promotion of middle-class women’s engagement in raising awareness for social problems.

The chapter also deals with the shift of focus in Gaskell’s later career (during the 1850s): from an engagement with class issues and the Condition of England Question she moved to the Woman Question. This shift has to be regarded in the context of new emerging roles for the woman writer and the ongoing debates about women’s writing over the three decades: »While during the 1830s and ‘40s women’s participation in political debates was justified by their usefulness in stabilizing class relations, by the 1850s social conditions no longer seemed to warrant such philanthropic activism« (p. 10).

But in Gaskell’s time, class became the point around which discussions revolved, and Gaskell’s writing was instrumental in constructing and presenting the lower class as a class that justifies (and requires) middle-class reform efforts, especially by women. Apart from exploring Elizabeth Gaskell as a journalist, an analysis of Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë sheds light on how the discourses on the female author manifested in other genres such as the biography.

George Eliot and gender ambiguity

A great change in the definition of the woman author became initialised by George Eliot’s appearance on the literary scene in the 1850s, which is addressed in Chapter 5. For George Eliot, anonymous and pseudonymous publication (she kept her pseudonym even when her real identity was discovered!) provided her with a means to distance herself from expectations of female authorship and from discourses of feminine writing. Especially the connection between Eliot’s essay Silly Novels by Lady Novelists and the novel Amos Barton (serialised anonymously in Blackwood’s Magazine) hints at Eliot’s deliberate gender confusion of authorship.

In Silly Novels, she presents a new approach to matters of gender and culture:

By defining culture as a characteristic that is located outside gender-defined literary genres, Eliot establishes a role for the woman author that is similar to the authorial role of the anonymous woman journalist: she is not limited by confining definitions of appropriate feminine subject matter but by her own level of self-cultivation. (p. 119)

In the 1860s, the controversies about signature in periodicals and the debates about women’s enfranchisement influenced Eliot’s texts, particularly Felix Holt and the connected essay »Felix Holt’s Address to Working Men«.

Christina Rossetti:
anonymous publication versus fame

Chapter 6 focuses on Christina Rossetti’s poetic contributions to the Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ (four issues published in 1850). This journal made it impossible for Rossetti to develop as an artist in ways other than the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and more particularly her brother as editor envisioned. Again, Easley introduces diverse genres into her comprehensive analysis; in this context, Rossetti’s authorial identity is based on both poetry and fiction. The conflict between her wish for authorial fame and her anxiety of negative reactions to such a self-display connects her poetry published for The Germ and her contemporaneously written novella Maude.

In The Germ, Rossetti – according to Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics – was anonymously given the image of the self-effacing woman author dreading publication, while in fact Rossetti was far from passive, shy or reluctant to have her poetry published. The gendering of writing styles can be observed very clearly in Rossetti’s case: while the poetry that was published anonymously in the first issue of The Germ was in some sense gender ambiguous, the subsequently published poetry became more explicitly feminine after the signatures of the contributors were published in the second issue (Rossetti used the pseudonym ›Ellen Alleyn‹). Her ensuing ›identity‹ more and more corresponded to that of the stereotypically dejected and repining women characters of the time.

Of course, the pseudonym still prevented Rossetti from achieving the literary success and fame she sought for. Rossetti’s desire for literary fame and self-expression thus led her to publish not only in women’s periodicals, but especially in Macmillan’s Magazine, which emerged as one of the first periodicals that promoted signed publications. Soon this became regarded as a sign of literary value, but again this caused problems with the conflation of literary persona and private life – a problem mainly for women writers.

Famous, infamous, or anonymous?

In the Afterword, Easley further expands her timeline to incorporate the changes in the definitions and conditions of authorship in the final decades of the 19th century. She, for example, investigates the changing evaluations of Martineau’s texts and of her personality after her death and also sheds light on the connection between the women writers of the 19th century and later women writers who were then readers of their works, for example Virginia Woolf.

This readable and lucid study broadens the horizon of Victorian studies. In contrast to many other publications, it pays attention to different and hitherto neglected genres, in particular the Victorian periodical, and works out the relationship between now canonised novels and poems and rarely read journal articles. With this focus, it also becomes clear that the notion of the ›woman writer‹ remained complex rather than serving as a well-defined label: this becomes visible by the reassessment of what has often been regarded as a meek self-effacement of many women writers.

The study shows the contrary to be true, illustrating that Victorian women authors did not necessarily have to be victims of a gendered exclusion from writing and of the marginalisation of women writers: »As they moved between forms of signed and unsigned publication, they discovered ways to capitalize on the conventions of various print media as a way of alternately managing, controlling, publicizing, and suppressing their authorial identities« (p. 173). Far from contributing to their own self-effacement, Victorian women writers, by experimenting with anonymous and pseudonymous voices and writing strategies, avoided being labelled ›infamous‹ for stepping outside of the normative gender role, but instead paved the way for becoming famous.