Their Fair Share

Women, Power and Criticism in the Athenaeum, from Millicent Garrett Fawcett to Katherine Mansfield, 1870–1920

Marysa Demoor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315363394
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Their Fair Share identifies and contextualises many previously unknown critical writings by a selection of well-known turn-of-the-century women. It reveals the networks behind an influential journal like the Athenaeum and presents a more shaded assessment of its position in the field of cultural production, in the period 1870-1920. The Athenaeum (1828-1921) has often been presented as a monolithic institution offering its readers a fairly conservative, male oriented appreciation of a wide variety of contemporary publications. On the basis of archival and biographical material this book presents an entirely new analysis of the reviewing policy of this weekly from 1870, when it came into the hands of the politician Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, up to and including 1919-1920 when John Middleton Murry became its editor. Dilke, and his editor Norman MacColl, are here revealed to have been committed feminists who enlisted some of the most influential women of their time as critics for their journal. The book looks more specifically at the contributions by, a.o., Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Emilia Dilke, Jane Harrison and Augusta Webster.

Chapter 1
Introduction

The 'Marked File'

In the course of my work as co-editor of the Athenaeum Indexing Project I spent hours in the company of the 'marked file', the editor's copy of the Athenaeum (1828-1921) which reveals the names of the anonymous reviewers of this Victorian weekly (see figure 1.1). From about 1830, the year Charles Wentworth Dilke assumed control over the paper's management, up to 1919, when the new editor, John Middleton Murry, introduced signed reviews, the successive editors (or their assistants) scribbled the name of every contributor in their copy of the weekly. Only a limited number of volumes during the early years of its existence, and some of the contributions published in the war years, were left unmarked.¹

The pale green leather-bound volumes of this 'marked file' were carefully preserved first in the offices of The New Statesman and then in the Special Collections Room of the City University Library. One of my responsibilities in the late 1980s was to copy the names of the anonymous reviewers in long hand on index cards, so as to identify those writers by means of all the available reference works, biographical dictionaries, library catalogues, and so on.² The job was not always a very exciting one. Occasionally I came across the names of Victorians whose fame survived or even grew during the twentieth century. Overall, however, it appeared that the successive editors preferred to stick to a relatively small group of not always very well-known reviewers on whose competence and honesty they could rely. When reaching the 1870s, however, I noticed a significant growth in the number of reviews by women. Of course, the weekly had not been totally without its women contributors up to then; in fact, Geraldine Jewsbury (1812-1880) had been one of its most prolific reviewers in the 1850s and 1860s with some 2,300 book reviews to her 'marked name'.³ Her subject matter and that of her female colleagues was mainly restricted to literature, local history and social matters. Other women reviewers who contributed more than just the odd review for the weekly in those first decades were Hannah Lawrance, Lady Morgan and Jane Williams.* In the 1870s, however, and even more clearly in

Figure 1.1 The 'marked file' of the Athenaeum, October 1898

the 1880s and 1890s, the 'marked file' shows a noticeable increase of reviews by women on a much broader variety of subjects.

My findings at the time intrigued me. The fact of women contributing to periodicals is not ail that surprising,³ Yet most research done so far has, of necessity, concentrated on the women's magazines and signed reviews. Indeed, it is almost impossible to investigate the degree to which the sphere of influence of women reviewers extended beyond subjects that were deemed proper for them. Most Victorian journals upheld the policy of anonymous reviewing. The unlocking of some treasures of those periodicals by the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals 1824-1900, has so far failed to change the current assumptions about the gender of the typical Victorian reviewer. Besides, the above-mentioned women reviewers do not figure prominently in its columns: the prolific Geraldine Jewsbury, for instance, is listed in volumes II and III for one and three articles respectively.

I began my research for this book by compiling a list of all the contributions by women, arranging the reviews under the names of the reviewers so as to find out exactly how frequently they reviewed and which subjects were assigned to them. Apart from that I tried to identify those reviewers precisely and to reconstruct the lives behind the names for, in spite of the influence of the Athenaeum, its reviewers were not always as well known as a present-day researcher would want them to be.⁶

Curiously enough, even those women who eventually did achieve some fame, have been left unmentioned by Leslie Marchand in his seminal work on the journal. But then Marchand concentrated his research on the early period of the journal, up to 1846, when Charles Wentworth Dilke (1789-1864) was still its editor. The criticism published during Norman MacColl's (1843-1904) editorship and Dilke's grandson, Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke's (1843-1911) proprietorship, was only cursorily glanced at,' Since Marchand there have been several laudable attempts by different researchers at studying the Athenaeum, its critical views and its reviewers. One notable concerted effort was the special issue of the Victorian Periodicals Review in 1990, devoted to the weekly and presenting it from several angles.⁸

So far, however, the gender issue has been left out of the picture and very little is known about the critical writings of the poet Augusta Webster or the art critic Emilia Strong.⁹ Hence, their part in the cultural discourse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century has hitherto been disregarded. Of course, as stated above, this is not the first book to concentrate on the phenomenon of the growing numbers of female professional writers at the end of the nineteenth century.¹⁰ Women's informal networks have been touched upon in several recent studies. Martha Vicinus's Independent Women. Work and Community for Single Women 1850-1920 (1985) is possibly the best known and certainly one of the most valuable analyses.¹¹ Yet women's part in the critical reception of the age has remained largely undisclosed because of that policy of anonymity mentioned earlier. Finding that more women wrote criticism than is generally surmised one automatically wants to find out whether their gender had indeed been obliterated in their writings, had become invisible to their readers. In other words, did these anonymous women reviewers who contributed to the Athenaeum disappear behind a male-encoded review? Or did they reveal their gender in the language they used, the views they defended, the subjects they broached or the kind of books they accepted to review?

Another line of my research has led me to (re)construct a paradigmatic woman reviewer of the Athenaeum. Who were the women chosen to assess new publications of their age, why were they chosen, and did they derive any benefit from this part of their professional activities?

Finally, I hoped to relate the woman reviewer of the Athenaeum to her colleagues writing for other journals such as the Spectator, to the early and mid-Victorian woman of letters and to the generation who took up the banner after the First World War.

Aims and Scope

Automatically, the above aims led me to concentrate on the life and writings of a few representative women reviewers. The women selected were chosen on the basis of the quality of their reviews or the quality of the works they had been assigned. There was a natural correlation in that important books were nearly invariably treated by important reviewers. To be allowed to open a new issue was an honour not normally granted to women contributors. But most of the reviewers dealt with in the following pages were occasionally responsible for the opening columns.

As might be expected, the 'soft subjects' were the first in which women were allowed to have their say: prose fiction, 'new novels', and the gossip column probably being the most readily accessible ones. Prose fiction, as has been indicated, was 'women's field' from the very beginning, with the Jewsbury sisters, Maria and Geraldine, writing many of the reviews in the first decades of the journal's existence. Women's proficiency in the field of poetry was not as easily recognised; poetry remained a male-encoded topic for a long time. Indeed, Laurel Brake feels confident enough to classify poetry in the Victorian age alongside politics, science, psychology, classics and drama as an area of knowledge 'associated with men."" When women infiltrate this field one may interpret this in two ways: as women acquiring their fair share of the market, or as a feminisation (read 'devaluation') of poetry as genre. If poetry was, by the end of the century, almost entirely women's province, with quite successful writers like Augusta Webster, Mathilde Blind, Edith Nesbit and Rosamund Marriott Watson (alias 'Graham Thomson') articulating their opinions in the Athenaeum's pages, other fields were clearly hard-won bastions which were soon recaptured by male colleagues. Millicent Garrett Fawcett was to author several reviews on political economy in the 1870s and early 1880s, yet she relinquished that position after the death of her husband and the subject became Reginald Palgrave's. Similarly, Jane Ellen Harrison was asked to write on the classics with a certain frequency around the turn of the century, but she never really turned the subject into her rightful column, and Ernest Gardner colonised the field in the years preceding the First World War.

In the course of my research I have tried not to be too much influenced by certain commonly-held preconceptions about reviewing in general and the Athenaeum in particular. In fact, I have had to adapt my own (and other people's) views of the 'fabric' of the Athenaeum to my findings, depending on the reviews I was looking at, the year I was dealing with. It soon dawned on me that it was very hard to make sweeping statements about such a thing as 'the' Athenaeum. This journal had been a living composition, and its components had been constantly changing. Its contributors grew older, changed their opinions and were eventually replaced by others. Controlling, regulating and influencing this 'living matter' were, on the one hand, the editor or the weekly's editorial management, and on the other hand, the reading public and the market mechanism associated with that. Pierre Bourdieu tries to frame the living matter when stating that it is 'impossible to understand how dispositions come to be adjusted to positions (so that the journalist is adjusted to his newspaper and consequently to that paper's readership, and the readers are adjusted to the paper and so to the journalist) unless one is aware that the objective structures of the field of production give rise to categories of perception which structure the perception and appreciation of its products',¹³ He believes it is the 'place', 'the site' which is of importance. In our case, this signifies that the Athenaeum points to a certain readership because of the homology between what Bourdieu calls the 'field of production' and the 'field of consumption'. Yet the interaction between the parties involved is difficult to assess. It is obvious that authors anxiously awaited the reviews of their books in the Athenaeum and, indeed, after the event sometimes sent letters to the weekly in the hope of correcting the reviewer's judgement and swaying the public's opinion, but it is all but impossible to find out the extent to which reviews actually boosted or decreased book sales. Nor do reviews always anticipate the popular reception of a book, although Vernon Kendall, the editor of the Athenaeum in the first decade of the twentieth century, once offered this rather dejected view of the overall quality of literary reviews and the general public's alleged dependence on them:

The public moves slowly, but surely; some day, perhaps, it will learn that advertisements and achievement are different things. At present it has, perhaps, got so far as to realise that most criticism is biased and comparatively worthless, thus rendering nugatory the efforts of the honourable minority to assist on the choice of books. (Athenaeum, 1 January 1910)

'Advertisements and achievement' are different things, yet they may at times point to overlaps in the field of cultural production, in the case of publications they may reach the same audience, for instance. So the textual content of the one item may give a clue as to the composition of the reading public of the other. Because advertisements seem to conjure up a more precise picture of the readership they want to influence, their relevance seems beyond doubt. Monica Fryckstedt has already pointed to the unique position of the Athenaeum as...