Mary Cholmondeley Reconsidered

Carolyn W de la L Oulton, Carolyn W de la L Oulton, SueAnn Schatz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138663336
• eBook ISBN: 9781317315810
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book provides a necessary critical reappraisal of one of the most challenging and subversive of nineteenth-century women writers.

NOTES

Introduction

1. M. Troughton, ‘Mary Cholmondeley – An Almost Forgotten Shropshire Authoress’, Shropshire Magazine (February 1957), pp. 9–10.

2. Cholmondeley was famously the subject of an article by V. Colby, ‘“Devoted Amateur”: Mary Cholmondeley and Red Pottage’, Essays in Criticism, 20:2 (1970), pp. 213–28. This label has since been contested by critics such as E. Showalter in A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977); A. Ardis in ‘“Retreat with Honour”: Mary Cholmondeley’s Representation of the New Woman Artist in Red Pottage’, in S. W. Jones (ed.), Essays on Poetics, Politics and Portraiture (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), pp. 333–50; and L. H. Peterson in Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1999). The best-known edition of Red Pottage was published by Virago in 1985, with an introduction by E. Showalter.

3. MS Diary, 16 May 1877, Private Archive.

4. Mary Cholmondeley to James Payn, 3 January 1895, Wolff 1212b, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

5. M. Cholmondeley, ‘Preface’, The Danvers Jewels (London: Bentley, 1887).

6. M. Cholmondeley, ‘Lisle’s Courtship’, Household Words, 36 (May 1884), pp. 501–7. Cholmondeley identified herself as the author on her personal copy of the issue in which it appeared.

7. M. Cholmondeley, ‘Geoffrey’s Wife’, in Moth and Rust together with ‘Geoffrey’s Wife’ and ‘The Pitfall’ (London: John Murray, 1902), pp. 243–66; first published in Graphic (Summer 1885), pp. 28–32.

8. Mary Cholmondeley to Richmond Ritchie, 5 March [1888], Anne Thackeray Ritchie Papers, Eton College Library.

9. Mary Cholmondeley to George Bentley, 24 October 1893, L27, Bentley Archive, British Library, Mic. B.53/177.

10. Mary Cholmondeley to George Bentley, 5 December 1892, L22, Bentley Archive.

11. Mary Cholmondeley to Matthew Nathan, 1 June 1906, MS Nathan 132, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

12. Diary, 9 October 1899.

13. Diary, 20 December 1905.

14. Mary Cholmondeley to Matthew Nathan, 18 May 1907, MS Nathan 132.

15. Ufford Monthly Magazine, April 1915, S Ufford 283, Suffolk Record Office.

16. Mary Cholmondeley to Rhoda Broughton, 18 February 1919, DDB/M/C/2/14, Cheshire Archives and Local Studies.

1 ‘Social Suicide – Yes’

1. M. Cholmondeley, Diana Tempest (1893; London: Macmillan, 1909), p. 52.

2. L. Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (London: Routledge, 1992), passim.

3. Ibid., p. x.

4. A. Richardson and C. Willis, ‘Introduction’, in A. Richardson and C. Willis (eds), The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 1–38, on pp. 11, 9.

5. E. Liggins and A. Maunder, ‘Reassessing Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction by Women, 1825–1880’, Women’s Writing, 11:1 (2004), pp. 3–9, on p. 7.

6. As T. Schaffer cautions in a recent review essay on ‘British Non-Canonical Women Novelists, 1850–1900: Recent Studies’, we need to go beyond mere rediscovery that takes previous neglect as its main premise, and which may end up ‘flattening out’ complicated sets of representations to defend ‘the apparently hopelessly popular author’ (Dickens Studies Annual, 37 (2006), pp. 325–41, on p. 336). In ‘Women and Domestic Culture’, Schaffer goes further to warn against the pitfalls of traditional ‘advocacy feminism’, which ‘like Foucaldian criticism, risks incorporating all artifacts into pre-set narratives that may flatten out what is actually a much more complicated set of representations’ (Victorian Literature and Culture, 35 (2007), pp. 385–95, on p. 386).

7. B. R. Weber, ‘“Were Not These Words Conceived in Her Mind?” Gender/Sex and Metaphors of Maternity at the Fin de Siècle’, Feminist Studies, 32:3 (2006), pp. 547–72, on p. 550.

8. Ibid., p. 550. Weber compares Cholmondeley’s Red Pottage with Rhoda Broughton’s A Beginner (1894) and Elizabeth Robins’s George Mandeville’s Husband (1894).

9. L. Pykett, ‘Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman: Representations of the Female Artist in the New Woman Fiction of the 1890s’, in N. D. Thompson (ed.), Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 135–50, on p. 135.

10. Ibid., pp. 144, 148. They may seem ‘defeatist’ in contrast to the self-representations of ‘womanly’ writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Margaret Oliphant, [who] repeatedly represent themselves as reconciling the conflicts between their writing and their feminine, domestic vocations with cheerfulness and equanimity’ (ibid., p. 143). In a study of female artistic labour that focuses on domesticity’s empowering functions, P. Zakreski has recently reassessed the established connection between work, domesticity and domestic art, suggesting a careful differentiation between forms of work that hinge upon motivation as much as upon actual outp...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• I Defining Women/Defining Men
• II Creating Identities
• III Past, Present, Future
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index