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VICTORIAN WOMEN WRITERS AND THE WOMAN QUESTION

Women writers dominated the vast novel market in Victorian England, yet twentieth-century criticism has, until now, been chief- ly concerned with a small number of canonical novelists. This collection of essays by leading scholars from Britain, the USA, and Canada opens up the limited landscape of Victorian novels by focusing attention on some of the women writers popular in their own time but forgotten or neglected by literary history. Spanning the entire Victorian period, this study investigates particularly the role and treatment of ‘‘the woman question’’ in the second half of the century. There are discussions of marriage, matriarchy, and divorce, satire, suﬀragette writing, writing for children, and links between literature and art. Moving from Margaret Oliphant and Charlotte Mary Yonge to Mary Ward, Marie Corelli, ‘‘Ouida,’’ and E. Nesbit, this book illuminates the complex cultural and literary roles, and the engaging contributions, of Victorian women writers.

nicola diane thompsonis Senior Lecturer in English at King- ston University, England. She is the author of Reviewing Sex: Gender and the Reception of Victorian Novels (1996) and a number of articles on Victorian literature and culture.

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cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture 21

VICTORIAN WOMEN WRITERS AND THE WOMAN QUESTION

cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture

General editor Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge

Editorial board Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck College, London Terry Eagleton, University of Oxford Leonore Davidoﬀ, University of Essex Catherine Gallagher, University of California, Berkeley D. A. Miller, Columbia University J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine Mary Poovey, New York University Elaine Showalter, Princeton University

Nineteenth-century British literature and culture have been rich fields for interdisciplinary studies. Since the turn of the twentieth century, scholars and critics have tracked the intersections and tensions between Victorian literature and the visual arts, politics, social organization, economic life, technical innova- tions, scientific thought – in short, culture in its broadest sense. In recent years, theoretical challenges and historiographical shifts have unsettled the assump- tions of previous scholarly syntheses and called into question the terms of older debates. Whereas the tendency in much past literary critical interpretation was to use the metaphor of culture as ‘‘background,’’ feminist, Foucauldian, and other analyses have employed more dynamic models that raise questions of power and of circulation. Such developments have reanimated the field. This series aims to accommodate and promote the most interesting work being undertaken on the frontiers of the field of nineteenth-century literary studies: work which intersects fruitfully with other fields of study such as history, or literary theory, or the history of science. Comparative as well as interdisciplinary approaches are welcomed.

A complete list of titles published will be found at the end of the book.

VICTORIAN WOMEN WRITERS AND THE WOMAN QUESTION

edited by

NICOLA DIANE THOMPSON

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City

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First published 1999 Reprinted 2000 First paperback edition 2011

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Victorian Women writers and the woman question / edited by Nicola Diane Th ompson. p. cm. – (Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture; 21) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0 521 64102 0 (hardback) 1. English fi ction – 19th century – History and criticism. 2. Feminism and literature – Great Britain – History – 19th century. 3. Women and literature – Great Britain – History – 19th century. 4. Popular literature – Great Britain – History and criticism. 5. English fi ction – Women authors – History and criticism. 6. Women’s rights – Great Britain – History – 19th century. 7. Women’s rights in literature. 8. Sex role in literature. I. Th ompson, Nicola Diane, 1961– . II. Series. PR878.F45W66 1999 823´.8099287 – dc21 98–35820 CIP

isbn 978-0-521-64102-9 Hardback isbn 978-1-107-40415-1 Paperback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of illustrations page ix Notes on contributors x

1 Responding to the woman questions: rereading noncanonical Victorian women novelists 1 Nicola Diane Thompson

2 Marriage and the antifeminist woman novelist 24 Valerie Sanders

3 Breaking apart: the early Victorian divorce novel 42 Anne Humpherys

4 Phantasies of matriarchy in Victorian children’s literature 60 Alison Chapman

5 Gendered observations: Harriet Martineau and the woman question 80 Alexis Easley

6 Maximizing Oliphant: begging the question and the politics of satire 99 Monica Cohen

7 Literary women of the 1850s and Charlotte Mary Yonge’s 116 Dynevor Terrace June Sturrock

8 Portraits of the artist as a young woman: representations of the female artist in the New Woman ﬁction of the 1890s 135 Lyn Pykett vii

viii Contents 9 Lady in green with novel: the gendered economics of the visual arts and mid-Victorian women’s writing 151 Dennis Denisoﬀ

10 Ouida and the other New Woman 170 Pamela Gilbert

11 Organizing women: New Woman writers, New Woman readers, and suﬀrage feminism 189 Ann Ardis

12 Shot out of the canon: Mary Ward and the claims of conﬂicting feminism 204 Beth Sutton-Ramspeck

13 E. Nesbit and the woman question 223 Amelia A. Rutledge

14 ‘‘An ‘old-fashioned’ young woman’’: Marie Corelli and the New Woman 241 Annette R. Federico

Illustrations

4.1 The Apple Woman, by John Millais, 1869 page 75 4.2 The Queen’s Farewell, by John Millais, 1869 76 9.1 ‘‘Female School of Art,’’ from Punch, May 30, 1874 153

Notes on contributors

ann ardis, Associate Professor of English at the University of De- laware, is the author of New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (1990). She has written numerous articles on late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century novels by women writers and is currently working on a book entitled Modernism, Modernity, Mass Culture: The ‘‘Rise’’ of English Studies and Modernist Aesthetics, 1880–1920.

alison chapman is Lecturer in English at the University of Dundee, Scotland, and is the author of Christina Rossetti and the Aesthetics Of The Feminine (1998). She has written several articles on Victorian women poets and is currently working on a new study of the uncanny.

monica cohen is Assistant Professor of English at the California Institute of Technology. She is the author of Home Inc: Domestic Work and Professional Culture in the Victorian Novel (1998), as well as a number of articles on Victorian ﬁction.

dennis denisoff has recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University and is currently Assistant Professor of English at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He has recently co-edited a collection of essays entitled Perennial Decay: New Essays on the Politics and Poetics of Decadence (1998) and is completing two book-length projects, Misleading Strangeness: Aestheticism, Sexual Identity, and Satire and Ekphrastic Passion: Identity, Portraiture, and Gender.

alexis easley is Instructor of English at the University of Alaska Southeast. Her publications include ‘‘Wandering Women: Dorothy Wordsworth and the Discourse on Female Vagrancy’’ (Women’s Writ- ing 3.1 [1996]); ‘‘Victorian Women Writers and the Periodical Press: The Case of Harriet Martineau’’ (Nineteenth-Century Prose 24.1 [1997]); x

Notes on contributors xi ‘‘Authorship, Gender and Identity: George Eliot in the 1850s’’ (Women’s Writing 3.2 [1997]); and ‘‘Harriet Martineau and the Victor- ian Periodical Press,’’ in Laurel Brake, William Bell, and David Finkelstein (eds.), Deﬁning Centres: Nineteenth-Century Media and the Con- struction of Identities (forthcoming, 1999).

annette r. federico is Associate Professor of English at James Madison University, Virginia, where she teaches Victorian literature and Women’s Studies. She is the author of Masculine Identity in Hardy and Gissing (1991) and numerous articles on Victorian literature and culture.

pamela gilbert is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Florida and 1996–97 Fellow at the Center for Twentieth-Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She is the author of Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels (1997).

anne humpherysis Professor of English at The Graduate School and University Center, the City University of New York. She is the author of Travels into the Poor Man’s Country: The Work of Henry Mayhew (1977) and chapters, articles, and reviews on Tennyson, G. W. M. Reynolds, Charles Dickens, Victorian popular culture and the press. She is currently writing a book on the impact of the 1857 divorce legislation on novels by Victorian women.

lyn pykett is Professor of English and Head of Department at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. She has published widely on nineteenth-century ﬁction and on turn-of-the-century culture. Her books include The ‘‘Improper’’ Feminine: the Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (1992), Engendering Fictions: The English Novel in the Early Twentieth Century (1995), and an edited collection, Reading Fin de Sie`cle Fictions (1996).

amelia a. rutledge is Associate Professor of English at George Mason University, Virginia. She has published articles on the science ﬁction of Olaf Stapledon, on the ﬁgure of Merlin, on philosophy in the works of Italo Calvino, and most recently an article on the use of Darwin in late nineteenth-century music criticism. Her current research centers on children’s literature and women’s poetry of the nineteenth century.

xii Notes on contributors valerie sandersis Senior Lecturer at the University of Sunderland, England, and the author of several books and articles on Victorian literature. Her publications include Eve’s Renegades: Victorian Anti-Fem- inist Women Novelists (1996), The Private Lives of Victorian Women: Autobi- ography in Nineteenth-Century England (1989), and Reason Over Passion: Harriet Martineau and the Victorian Novel (1986). She is the editor of Harriet Martineau: Selected Letters (1990).

june sturrock is Professor in the English Department at Simon Fraser University near Vancouver, British Columbia. Her mono- graph, ‘‘Heaven and Home’’: Charlotte M. Yonge’s Domestic Fiction and the Victorian Debate Over Women, was published in 1995; other publications include articles on Christina Rossetti and Charlotte Yonge. She is currently working on an edition of Mansﬁeld Park for the Broadview Press.

beth sutton-ramspeck is Assistant Professor of English at The Ohio State University, Lima, where she specializes in Victorian literature. Her current research interests focus on Victorian women writers and feminism, with particular concentration on Mary Ward.

nicola diane thompson is Senior Lecturer in the English Depart- ment at Kingston University, England. She is the author of Reviewing Sex: Gender and the Reception of Victorian Novels (1996) and has published a number of articles on gender and literature in Victorian and twentieth-century England. She is currently working on a book entitled Reading Victorian Women Writers, as well as researching Victorian children’s literature and gender issues.