Linda H. Peterson

Charlotte Riddell's a struggle for fame: myths of authorship, facts of the market

Abstract Critical analyses of Charlotte Riddells kunstlerroman, A Struggle for Fame (1883), have traditionally focused on the market conditions that either aided or impeded Riddells career. In terms of Pierre Bourdieus opposition between the “sub-field of large-scale production” and the “sub-field of restricted production” – fields differentiated by economic factors versus symbolic criteria of lasting value – Riddell and her heroine, Glenarva Westley, seem to fall into the former, both producing popular fiction to make money but achieving no lasting reputation. While acknowledging that the novel details conditions of the marketplace, the author also argues that Riddell reinscribes myths of female authorship made famous in Gaskells Life of Charlotte Brontë as a counterweight: myths of genius and vocation, of solitude and loneliness, of domesticity and inspiration. She does so to lay claim to the symbolic capital such Romantic myths accrue. In the first two volumes of A Struggle Glenarva Westleys career repeats key features of Brontës life, including the “parallel currents” model made famous by Gaskell – “her life as Currer Bell, the author,” and “her life as Charlotte Brontë, the woman.” In the final volume, however, Riddell tests the limits of Gaskells model for late nineteenth-century women authors and writes beyond the ending of Brontës life as Glenarva turns down an offer of marriage and also turns her back on Gaskells myth.

ALICE MEYNELL'S PRELUDES , OR PRELUDES TO WHAT FUTURE POETRY?

In 1875, the young poet Alice Thompson (soon to be Alice Meynell) published Preludes (1875), a slender volume of lyrics illustrated by her sister, Elizabeth. Given the professional musical training of the Thompson women, the title of the volume may recall Chopins musical Preludes (1838), those brief lyrical pieces composed when Chopin was twenty-seven that cover all twenty-four musical keys and demonstrate, as one critic has put it, an “astonishing variety and vividness of mood…achieve[d] in little more than a blink of an eye” (Siepman 5). Meynells Preludes , written in her mid-twenties and published when she, too, was twenty-seven, may similarly have aimed at variety and vividness of mood, achieved within the brief compass of lyric verse; this sense of the title certainly fits with a wide range of subjects, meters, and stanzaic forms in the volume. Yet whether or not the title embeds a musical allusion, Preludes suggests, more fundamentally, a first volume of poetry, a volume anticipatory of a later, larger poetic achievement and perhaps also of a new direction in lyric verse.

(re)inventing authorship: harriet martineau in the literary marketplace of the 1820s

Abstract In this re-examination of Martineaus early career, it is argued thatMartineau redefines authorship away from Romantic conceptions of originality, genius and inspiration and toward a new Victorian understanding of authorship asengagement with what Robert Darnton calls “the communications circuit” – whatshe would have called more simply “the market.” Martineau emphasizes the roleof editors in developing her work, booksellers in successfully marketing it, and ongoing relationships with periodical as well as book publishers in sustaining her career. Her reconception of authorship shows the effects of her entry into the profession of letters in the 1820s, the heyday of the literary periodical, but itincorporates as well lessons she extracted from the lives of earlier writers, whose works she reviewed during her literary apprenticeship with the Monthly Repository.

Margaret Oliphant's autobiography as professional artist's life

Abstract OliphantsAutobiographyhas often been read as split between two traditions of life writing – a professional artists account of her life and work and a family memoir of domestic incident and private recollection – and thus as displaying the tensions inevitable within the life of the nineteenth-century woman writer. In this article the author reconsiders theAutobiographyin literary historical terms and argues that Oliphant meant to write a literary life that resolved ideologically the tensions between motherhood and authorship. TheAutobiographytakes as its basis the Victorian domestic memoir and incorporates the professional artists life story within it by making that story part of a familys professional achievement. Her account, intended for “my boys”, could thus be seen not just as a private or individual document but as a collaborative or communal history, one including her own literary achievement as well as her sons’ entry into the profession of letters.

Rewriting A History of the Lyre

At the beginning of Letitia Landon’s A History of the Lyre, a male speaker looks at the portrait of a female poet and meditates on the function of memory and autobiographical self-construction: ‘Tis strange how much is mark’d on memory, In which we may have interest, but no part; How circumstances will bring together links In destinies the most dissimilar. This face, whose rudely-pencill’d sketch you hold, Recalls to me a host of pleasant thoughts, And some more serious. — This is EULALIE.1