Nineteenth-Century Girls and Authorship: Adolescent Writing, Appropriation, and Their Representation in Literature, C

Nineteenth-Century Girls and Authorship: Adolescent Writing, Appropriation, and their Representation in Literature, c. 1860–1900. Lois Margaret Burke A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Edinburgh Napier University, for the award of Doctor of Philosophy June 2019 Abstract During the final decades of the nineteenth century girls’ culture flourished. As recent scholarship has shown, this culture pivoted on an engagement with fiction and particularly the periodical press. Magazines such as the Girl’s Own Paper and the Monthly Packet provided spaces where girls could benefit from being part of a larger network of contributors. The reciprocal reading and writing culture accessed through periodicals epitomised the experience of a creative and intellectual adolescence for many girls during the late-Victorian era. This thesis explores a discrete girls’ culture that was also cultivated in diaries and circulated manuscript magazines during this period. As these writings were shared with family or peers respectively, they can be viewed as tools of socialisation or ‘apprenticeships’ in writing, as well as in girlhood. Yet girls’ writings were also sites of resistance; in responding to the model literary and print culture in which they were immersed, girls cultivated an autonomous writing culture which hinged on strategies of adaptation and appropriation. Sociological theories of youth culture have demonstrated that young people actively contribute to cultural reproduction and change. When combined with theories of literary appropriation in this thesis, these insights shed light on the specific types of authorship which reflect girls’ simultaneous participation in and exclusion from a dynamic literary and print culture. This thesis analyses the development of girls’ literary culture in the late-Victorian manuscript writings. Moreover it contextualises girls’ appropriative writing culture in broader debates concerning late-Victorian literature and publishing, gender and Girls Studies. Through considering little- or never-before-studied girls’ manuscripts and texts as integral to late-Victorian literary culture, this thesis makes a significant and original contribution to these flourishing research areas. It contributes to the lively debate in childhood studies which seeks to assign agency to children in the archive, as well as the ongoing feminist project to incorporate female writings into the study of literary history. Acknowledgements Thanks are due to my supervisory team at Edinburgh Napier University: Sarah Artt, Linda Dryden and Anne Schwan. Three years of PhD research has been incredibly enjoyable thanks to their excellent and sustained support. I must acknowledge the brilliant cohort of academics who have made my PhD experience so memorable, specifically Kate Simpson, Duncan Milne, Pankhuri Jain, Helena Roots, and Anna Klamet. Thanks must also go to Scott Lyall and Chris Atton for their unerring research support, and to Gráinne Barkess for accepting me onto every one of her writing retreats! I would also like to acknowledge the invaluable guidance given to me by Simon James and Helen Davies prior to my move to Scotland. Thanks must also be given to the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities for their continued support of my research, particularly during my doctoral internship at the Museum of Childhood. I am grateful to Alice Sage for introducing me to the marvellous world of museum curation, as well as Lyn Stevens, Susan Gardner and Gillian Findlay. I would also like to acknowledge the various institutions which have helped me on my way: the National Library of Scotland; Lady Margaret Hall College, Oxford; the Freud Museum, Vienna; the British Library; Palace Green Library at Durham University; Seven Stories; the Library of Congress, Washington D. C. This thesis is dedicated to Margaret and Chris Burke. Volume I Contents List of figures………………………………………………………………………….p. i Introduction…………………………………………………………………………...p. 1 Chapter 1: A Methodology for Approaching Girls’ Writing Culture………………..p. 14 Chapter 2: Contextualising Girls’ Culture: Writings and Gender in the Long Nineteenth Century……………………………………………………………………………….p. 62 Chapter 3: The Girl Writers of the Barnacle: Appropriating Authorship in Manuscript Magazines…………………………………………………………………………p. 102 Chapter 4: The Jebb Sisters: Peer Culture, Diaries and Manuscript Magazines, 1885 to 1891……………………………...…………………………………………………p. 138 Chapter 5: A Girls’ Manuscript Magazine of the 1890s: Originality and Imitation in the Evergreen Chain…………………………………………………………………....p. 176 Chapter 6: ‘Meantime, it is quite well to write’: girls’ writing in fiction and fin de siècle gender politics………………………………………………………………………p. 212 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………….p. 266 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………..p. 273 List of figures Figure 1: A front cover of the Michaelmas 1867 volume of the Barnacle, 823.99 311– 322…………………………………….…………………........................................p. 102 Figure 2: An image of a poem and illustration based on the story of ‘Lenore’ in the Michaelmas 1867 volume of the Barnacle, 823.99 311–322....................................p. 114 Figure 3: A front cover of an 1865 volume of the Barnacle, 823.99 311–322………p. 135 Figure 4: The front cover of an 1891 volume of the Briarland Recorder, depicting a ‘Parody on the Battle of the League’, 7EJB/A/01/02…………….……………….…p. 155 Figure 5: An image of the ‘News of the Week’ column in the Briarland Recorder, 7EJB/A/01/02………………………………………………………………….........p. 157 Figure 6: An image of Eglantyne Jebb’s ‘Story of Anna Hooks’, 7EJB/A/01/02….p. 168 Figure 7: A picture from the July 1914 volume of the Pierrot, MC 86 86………...p. 184 Figure 8: A photograph included in an 1895 volume of the Evergreen Chain, showing the editor Olive Johnstone Douglas, MC 2018.059...................................................p. 195 Figure 9: An image of the poem ‘The Despairing Sister’, from the April 1897 volume of the Evergreen Chain, MC 2018.059……………………………………..………....p. 199 i Introduction In the late nineteenth century, girlhood became seen as a specific period of life, separate to adulthood and childhood. Recent studies by Sally Mitchell, Beth Rodgers and Kristine Moruzi have acknowledged that girls had their own specific culture during this time.1 Girls had access to new freedoms; they rode bicycles, read magazines, and cultivated peer friendships. As well as this interest in Victorian ‘New Girl’ culture, there has been significant recent academic interest in children’s cultures, Girls Studies, and archival approaches to studying nineteenth-century history and literature. Whereas some girlhood studies have focused purely on fiction for girls, and archival enquiries have been applied broadly to the Victorian ‘child’ reader, these disparate studies are brought together in this thesis, which makes an important diversion from previous work. I apply a mixed theoretical approach to archival girls’ writings and published fiction depicting girl writers. Studies on Victorian girls’ writings are few, and they usually focus on diaries of girls either in America, such as Suzanne Bunkers’ Diaries of Girls and Women: A Midwestern American Sampler (2001) or in France, Philippe Lejeune’s Le moi des demoiselles: enquête sur le journal de jeune fille (1993).2 By instead adopting a fresh approach and focusing on British girls’ manuscript magazine culture as well as diaries, this thesis adds new perspectives to the field. This thesis looks specifically at girls’ writings and writing culture during the ‘New Girl’ era, and how these related to broader changes in print and literary culture, as well as developments in women’s rights and education. It utilises three different archival collections representing girls’ writings from 1 Sally Mitchell, The New Girl: Girls’ Culture in England, 1880–1915 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); Beth Rodgers, Adolescent Girlhood and Literary Culture at the Fin de Siècle: Daughters of Today (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Kristine Moruzi, Constructing Girlhood in the Periodical Press, 1850–1915 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). 2 Suzanne Bunkers, Diaries of Girls and Women: A Midwestern American Sampler (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001); Philippe Lejeune, Le moi des demoiselles: enquête sur le journal de jeune fille (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993). 1 the 1860s to the 1890s, namely the Barnacle written by the Gosling Society, the Briarland Recorder and other writings by the Jebb family, and the Evergreen Chain, a manuscript magazine circulated between girls. These case studies consist of girls’ manuscript magazines, diaries, and other writings, which collectively illustrate middle-class girls’ collaborative writing culture in Britain. Although the contents of the writings vary, in my analysis I focus on two primary themes which can be identified across each of the case studies in different forms. Firstly, I contend that adolescent girls experienced a unique writing culture which manifested in peer collaboration. Secondly, I assert that this shared participatory culture drew upon strategies of adaptive and appropriative writing. Finally, I compare the archival examples of girls’ literary culture to fictional representations of writing girls, in which this writing culture is modified to represent the plight of female artists in New Woman narratives of the late-Victorian era. In order to acknowledge the diverse disciplinary approaches to the study of childhood cultures, girlhood, and nineteenth-century

Load more