UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Literary Sensations: Victorian Women Writers and Celebrity Culture Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/22b8627k Author Moore, Rory Michelle Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Literary Sensations: Victorian Women Writers and Celebrity Culture A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Rory Michelle Moore March 2013 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Susan Zieger, Chairperson Dr. Joseph Childers Dr. Adriana Craciun Copyright by Rory Michelle Moore 2013 The Dissertation of Rory Michelle Moore is approved: ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgements I have many people and institutions to thank for their support over the course of researching and writing this dissertation, and I must begin with Dr. Susan Zieger. I wouldn’t even be writing this page for this project without Dr. Zieger’s frank response to my first project attempt, suggesting I return to the drawing board and start over. Start over I did, and with her encouragement and helpful guidance I combined two of my enduring passions: women’s writing and celebrity gossip. Inspired by Talia Schaffer’s Forgotten Female Aesthetes—recommended by Dr. Zieger—I rather quickly drew up and began writing “Literary Sensations.” I will be forever grateful that Dr. Zieger was willing to chair my committee, and thank her for her insight on the dissertation, on publishing, and on the job market. I am lucky to have such an invested advisor. I also wish to thank Dr. Joseph Childers, one of my favorite scholars, teachers, deans, and people. He took an interest in my development my first year in the English Department, providing me opportunities for research and professionalization and always looking out for sources of funding for which I might be qualified. He was always available and eager to discuss scholarship, sharing his own and helping me with mine. Equally humorous, compassionate, and critical, Dr. Childers greatly enhanced my graduate school experience. My final committee member, Dr. Adriana Craciun has been someone whose research I’ve admired since 2005, years before she (and I) would join UCR’s English Department. Her attention to detail and willingness to help—either by bouncing off ideas !"# or providing professional advice—has helped considerably as I navigate academia, and I am thankful. Although not committee members, I have other UCR faculty I’d like to thank, whose support did not go unnoticed: Drs. Heidi Brevik-Zender, John Briggs, Andrea Denny-Brown, John Ganim, and George Haggerty, and from California State University, Northridge, Dr. Ranita Chatterjee. I must also thank the English Department and University Writing Program staff at UCR, especially Tina Feldmann, Linda Nellany, Susan Brown, Cynde Sanchez, Jill Cantonwine, and Teri Carter. As friends and colleagues Dr. Maggie Gover and Katy Johnston were especially indispensible. Collectively and in their own ways, they have all made writing this dissertation and completing the degree possible. My dissertation was completed with the help of a 2010-2011 University of California President’s Dissertation-Year Fellowship. Presenting at the 2011 British Women Writers Conference while on fellowship provided me feedback on my chapter on Edna Lyall, as well as allowed me to meet Dr. Karen Bourrier, whose thoughtful comments on Dinah Mulock Craik were indispensible in writing the opening chapter devoted to the author and its article-length version. I must also thank Yale’s Beinecke Library, whose staff helped me to locate Love Letters, an unpublished Florence Marryat manuscript in the Marryat Family Papers, one of many archives in their extensive collections. Thanks must also go to Dr. Beth Palmer, who, despite not knowing me, replied to an email query to confirm my hunch that it was there. Versions of Chapters One and Three have appeared in academic journals. “A Mediated Intimacy: Dinah # "# Mulock Craik and Celebrity Culture,” Women’s Writing 20:2 (Forthcoming 2013); and “‘The Penalties of a Well-Known Name’: Ouida, Celebrity, and a Sensational Friendship,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 33:5 (December 2011): 483-497. With thanks to the publishers, Taylor and Francis (http://www.tandfonline.com), for permissions. Images in Chapters One and Four are from nineteenth-century source material, in the public domain, and are being used under the “fair use” code of the U.S. copyright law, section 107. Finally, I’d like to thank my family, and most importantly, my colleague, best friend, and husband, Alan Lovegreen. I could not have completed this dissertation without his help, from assisting me in editing down chapters for article submissions, to hearing me drone on about my project at dinner, to blocking out time at the expense of his own, he has been instrumental to this project. # "!# For Alan and Beatrix # "!!# ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Literary Sensations: Victorian Women Writers and Celebrity Culture by Rory Michelle Moore Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English University of California, Riverside, March 2013 Dr. Susan Zieger, Chairperson This dissertation analyzes the role of celebrity in determining the lives and literary productions of bestselling female authors in the nineteenth century. It identifies celebritydom as a compelling factor in a woman author’s development of her literary persona, which affects both her public identity and the literature she produces in accord with that identity. By focusing on Dinah Mulock Craik, Florence Marryat, Ouida (Maria Louise Ramé), and Edna Lyall (Ada Ellen Bayly) “Literary Sensations” considers how star status confers new opportunities and new challenges for women writers in the publicity spotlight. Examining works of published and unpublished fiction, essays, # "!!!# memoir, and stage entertainment alongside contemporary periodical reviews, personal interest stories, gossip, interviews, and author images, I explore how Victorian women writers come to view themselves as celebrities who both shape and are shaped by the various engagements with their publics. My project pays special attention to Craik, Marryat, Ouida, and Lyall to facilitate the larger argument that as celebrity authors women writers embodied a new position in public life in the Victorian period, with the ability to affect theirs and others’ domestic and political existence augmented by innovations in journalism and print and media technology. # !$# Table of Contents List of Figures xi Introduction 1 Chapter One 26 Dinah Mulock Craik Among the Masses: “The Author of John Halifax, Gentleman,” The Ogilvies, and Celebrity Culture Chapter Two 77 Reading Love Letters in a “Low-Necked Dress”: Florence Marryat on Tom Tiddler’s Ground Chapter Three 121 “The Penalties of a Well-Known Name”: Ouida, Celebrity, and a Sensational Friendship Chapter Four 156 Edna Lyall, New Journalism, and Reputation Management at the Fin de Siècle Bibliography 206 # $# List of Figures Figure Number Description Page 1.1 Joseph Severn, John Keats, 1819. Oil on ivory. 48 4.1 Churchill, Edna Lyall, Age Thirty-five, ca. 1892. Photograph. 182 4.2 Unknown, Edna Lyall in Her Study, ca. 1895. Photograph. 185 4.3 Unknown, Edna Lyall’s Study, ca. 1895. Photograph. 187 # $!# Introduction I will keep this [one silver coin], madam, if you please as a memento that I once had the honor of being useful to Mrs. Siddons.—Dinah Mulock Craik, John Halifax, Gentleman 93 [The author] must keep in the society which is so necessary to his worldly prospects— he must be seen in those haunts which are to others amusement, to him business…to act. It is merely creating a new self as he does a new character…—Dinah Mulock Craik, The Ogilvies 350 While the notion of celebrity and its cultural inundation seem relatively new, the phenomenon actually begins to assert itself in important ways in earlier historical periods. The appearance of the acclaimed eighteenth-century actress Sarah Siddons in Dinah Mulock Craik’s (1826-1887) Victorian bestseller John Halifax, Gentleman (1856) illustrates that fervor surrounding a celebrated person was in full swing by the 1790s when the fictional John Halifax meets Siddons.12 By 1849, when another of Craik’s novels, The Ogilvies, first uses celebrity in its modern form to describe “a celebrated person: a public character” (OED "Celebrity, N."), authors knew that popular success depended upon taking cues from the acting world in making themselves into marketable !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! "!This point is convincingly argued in Felicity Nussbaum, Rival Queens : Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theater (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 2 New scholarship by Maura Ives supports this argument. See Maura Ives, "Introduction: Women Writers and the Artifacts of Celebrity," Women Writers and the Artifacts of Celebrity in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Maura Ives Anne R. Hawkins (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012) 1. ! 1! commodities. Pairing these novels in my introductory epigraph manifests important features of celebrity culture in the Victorian period—which is the focus of my dissertation—and to the larger