Abstract
In this passage, from the novel The Heavenly Twins (1893), Sarah Grand (1854–93) depicts the press as a vehicle for women’s empowerment.2 Writing in the voice of a male character, Diavolo, she argues that modern women can use periodicals to retaliate against their detractors instead of passively enduring attacks on their lives and works. By transforming ‘magazine’ from a noun to a verb, she suggests that periodicals are not simply passive objects providing leisure-time entertainment; rather, they are sites of agency that allow modern women to assume public voices and defend themselves against their critics.
You see, in the old days, women were so ignorant and subdued, they couldn’t retaliate or fight for themselves in any way; they never thought of such a thing. But, now, if you hit a woman, she’ll give you one back promptly. [a] She’ll put you in Punch, or revile you in the Dailies; Magazine you; write you down an ass in a novel; blackguard you in choice language from a public platform; or paint a picture of you which will make you wish you had never been born.1
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Notes
Sarah Grand, The Heavenly Twins, 3 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1893), 2, p. 41.
Jean-Baptiste Michel et al., ‘Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books’, Science (16 December 2010), DOI: 10.1126/science.1199644.
Eliza Cook, ‘A Word to My Readers’, Eliza Cook’s Journal, 1 (5 May 1849), p. 1.
See Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own?: Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914 (London: Routledge, 1996).
Kathryn Ledbetter, ‘Periodicals for Women’, in The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, eds. Andrew King, Alexis Easley, and John Morton (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 260–75.
See Jennifer Phegley, Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2004), and
Beth Palmer, Women’s Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture: Sensational Strategies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Eliza Bisbee Duffey, ‘Women in Literature’, Victoria Magazine, 28 (February 1877), p. 278.
Bessie Rayner Parkes, Essays on Woman’s Work (London: Strahan, 1865), p. 121.
[Harriet Martineau], ‘The Late John Wilson Croker’, Daily News, 13 August 1857, P. 5.
[Anne Mozley], ‘Clever Women’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 104 (October 1868): p. 414; her emphasis.
See Alexis Easley, ‘Poet as Headliner: George Eliot and Macmillan’s Magazine’. George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies, 60–61 (2011), pp. 107–25, and First-Person Anonymous: Women Writers and Victorian Print Media, 1830–1870 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), Chap. 6.
Edmund Yates, ‘Miss M. E. Braddon (Mrs. Maxwell) at Richmond’, and ‘Ouidà at Villa Farinola’, in Celebrities at Home. Reprinted from The World, 1st series (London: Office of The World, 1877), p. 319 and p. 240, respectively.
[Henry Labouchere], ‘Entre Nous’, Truth, 5 (15 May 1879), p. 600.
Quoted in George Somes Layard, Mrs. Lynn Linton: Her Life, Letters, and Opinions (London: Methuen, 1901), p. 49.
Quoted in Nancy Fix Anderson, Woman against Women in Victorian England: A Life of Eliza Lynn Linton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 48.
Alaric A. Watts, Men of the Time: Biographical Sketches of Eminent Living Characters (London: W. Kent, 1859), p. 848.
The newly attributed novella is titled ‘The Black Tarn’, All the Year Round, 3 (16 June 1860), pp. 235–40; (23 June 1860), pp. 258–64; (30 June 1860), pp. 278–84.
‘Bedside Experiments’, All the Year Round, 2 (31 March 1860), pp. 537–42; ‘Gone to Jail’, All the Year Round, 7 (2 August 1862), pp. 487–93.
Anderson, Woman against Women, pp. 70, 71.
Barbara Onslow, Women of the Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain (New York, NY: St. Martin’s, 2000), p. 99.
[Eliza Lynn Linton], ‘The Girl of the Period’, Saturday Review, 14 March 1868, p. 340.
See Anderson, Woman against Women, p. 119, 120.
Clement Scott, The Drama of Yesterday and Today, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1899), 1, p. 422.
Anderson, Woman against Women, p. 135.
Eliza Lynn Linton, ‘Literature: Then and Now’, Fortnightly Review, 47, n.s. (April 1890), p. 521.
For a discussion of the Saturday Review’s reputation for slashing reviews, see Andrea Broomfield, ‘Eliza Lynn Linton, Sarah Grand and the Spectacle of the Victorian Woman Question: Catch Phrases, Buzz Words and Sound Bites’, English Literature in Transition, 47.3 (2004), pp. 259–61.
Hugh Craig and Alexis Antonia, ‘Six Authors and the Saturday Review: A Quantitative Approach to Style’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 48.1 (2015), p. 78.
Merle Bevington incorrectly states that a reprinting of ‘The Girl of the Period’ in pamphlet form was published under Linton’s name in 1868 in The Saturday Review, 1855–1868 (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1941), p. 112..
Eliza Lynn Linton, The Girl of the Period and Other Social Essays, 2 vols. (London: Bentley, 1883), p. viii.
Eliza Lynn Linton, Ourselves: A Series of Essays on Women (London: Routledge, 1869), p. iii.
See George J. Worth, Macmillan’s Magazine, 1859–1907: ‘No Flippancy or Abuse Allowed’ (Farnham: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 74–89;
Andrea L. Broomfield, ‘Toward a More Tolerant Society: Macmillan’s Magazine and the Women’s Suffrage Question’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 23.3 (1990), pp. 120–6.
Eliza Lynn Linton, ‘The Modern Revolt’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 23 (December 1870), p. 149.
‘Petitions for the Franchise’, Victoria Magazine, 8 (April 1867), p. 558.
Andrea Broomfield, ‘Much More than an Antifeminist: Eliza Lynn Linton’s Contribution to the Rise of Victorian Popular Journalism’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 29.2 (2001), p. 268;
Deborah T. Meem, ‘Eliza Lynn Linton and the Rise of Lesbian Consciousness’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 7.4 (1997), pp. 537–60.
See Lee Anne Bache, ‘Making More than a Name: Eliza Lynn Linton and the Commodification of the Woman Journalist at the Fin de Siecle’, in Women in Journalism at the Fin de Siecle: Making a Name for Herself, ed. by F. Elizabeth Gray (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 21–36.
Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 50.
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Easley, A. (2018). Gender, Authorship, and the Periodical Press. In: Hartley, L. (eds) The History of British Women’s Writing, 1830–1880. History of British Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58465-6_3
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