This volume inaugurates the five-volume series British Women’s Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, 1840–1940, which decade by decade critically reassesses women’s fiction, examining the ways in which it propels and challenges discourses of realism, sensation, and the new across a century of dynamic social, cultural, and technological change. Analysing confluences and developments in women’s writing across the 1840s and the 1850s, the 16 original chapters that follow critically reconsider fiction by canonical and lesser-known women writers, redefining the landscape of female authorship during these decades. By analysing women’s fiction within the social and cultural contexts of the 1840s and 1850s, the collection distils in terms of women’s writing both how those decades are discrete and how they contain thematic and stylistic continuities. Given the nineteenth-century preoccupation with writing as intrinsically gendered, the volume also takes seriously the claim of particular authors to be writing in a feminine mode, offering insights into what a woman’s topic might look like under a female monarch.
Sharply defined historically by decade, and with chapters chronologically ordered to suggest emphases in fiction as each decade progresses, the volume is broad in terms of the range of developments in female writing it considers. It canvasses, for example, the construction of a post-Romantic tradition, the politicization of the domestic sphere, women’s involvement in publishing, the opportunities available to women as both writers and producers of literary texts, and the claim to a feminine sensational mode. It reveals that women’s writing of the 1840s was concerned with both individual mobility and social exclusion, and was enabled by anonymous periodical practices that conversely obscured its achievements. In turn, female-authored fiction of the 1850s paid nuanced attention to the lives of single women, to masculinity, and to the impediments of marriage.
Attempts to locate or define a female voice abound in discussions of literature during the 1840s and 1850s, although not necessarily in mainstream journal articles written by women themselves. As Susan Hamilton has suggested, ‘Victorian feminists did not find it a simple matter to speak out about women’s place in Victorian culture in the commercial periodicals, journals, reviews and newspapers that proliferated from the late 1850s on. And they worried about it’ (xi). However, as Linda H. Peterson argues in her introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Writing (2015): ‘If we can illumine the careers of women writers by locating them within literary, social and political networks, we can also place them within larger literary movements and recognize their contributions to established and emerging genres’ (6). Joanne Shattock similarly notes that while only a few female authors broke into major periodicals, they did seek to establish a sense of relationship with each other’s work, even before the feminist press initiatives of the 1850s and 1860s: ‘[w]omen writers had fewer opportunities than their male colleagues to participate in the interlocking networks of writers, publishers, editors and proprietors that operated in London … Networks that included women writers existed, however, from the 1830s onwards’ (31).
This volume is concerned with some of the ways in which female writers envisaged, established, and operated within this framework, in a publishing context that defined them and their activities against powerful and exclusive male networks, while at the same time finding new ways to shape a tradition of women’s relations within literary texts. As Elizabeth Barrett Browning expressed it in 1856:
The man had baffled, chafed me, till I flungFor refuge to the woman—as, sometimes,Impatient of some crowded room’s close smell,You throw a window open and lean outTo breathe a long breath in the dewy night. (Aurora Leigh [1856] IV. 347–51)
The volume is structured in two parts, each devoted to one decade so that specific trends can be identified. As the new Victorian culture started to establish itself, so writers were able to respond to a very recent past and also to anticipate the shifts in technology as well as economic and religious thought and practice that a new period might promise. Some of these explorations by early Victorian women writers would remain influential for decades to come. Yet this two-part structure also draws attention to the apparent arbitrariness of the influences here identified. Chapters in the first section on the 1840s, for example, consider women writers who pre-date or are contemporaneous with the iconic Brontë sisters, but who failed to attain the same standing; these lesser-known figures include the youngest Brontë sister, Anne, a fact that ironically is often overlooked.
Women’s Writing of the 1840s
The first half of this volume is concerned with the reassessment and repositioning of women’s writing from the 1840s, including periodical reviewing practices, the servant novel, children’s literature, and fictional treatments of political economy, as well as reworkings of Gothic and Byronic motifs in realist settings. In recovering neglected work by writers such as Mary Howitt and Christian Johnstone and placing it alongside canonical texts including the novels of Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Part I of the volume explores a range of significant issues, including considering the ways in which mid-nineteenth-century women writers contest or adapt Romantic ideas, as they seek out literary traditions or initiate new and gendered modes of their own.
The 1840s can be seen as a watershed in women’s writing, including innovations of style such as the reworking of Romantic motifs in realist settings, which both redefined literary fiction and offered new ways for women to identify themselves as writers. Female authors of the 1840s were also acutely aware of the practical and the ideological problems attending this enterprise. Several of the writers discussed in this section draw attention to the logistical and cultural difficulties faced by women who wished to travel from one location to another, while also charting the progression of female characters from states of emotional deprivation to the realization of narrative agency.
Contributors consider these issues in the context of the ‘hungry forties,’ the first entire decade of Victoria’s reign, and a period of rapid economic and social change following the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries which had instigated the mass movement of workers and their families to factory towns like Manchester and Birmingham and to the increasingly overcrowded housing in London, much of which was not by the 1840s ‘fit for purpose.’ Major events during this decade, as discussed below, suggest that it was a time of both instability and commitment to the ideal of human relations, a paradox most potently embodied in the new railways that both facilitated contact between distant family members and cut up existing domiciles, as old slums were demolished in the metropolis to make way for rapidly expanding lines.
The 1840s are associated with widespread social discontent and hardship, and literature increasingly moved away from silver-fork fiction and its preoccupation with the doings of ‘high life’ towards portraying ‘low life.’ The last years of the decade also created an appetite for new popular forms such as the railway novels and ‘yellow-backs’ produced by successful imprints such as Routledge’s Railway Library, which began publishing in 1848. While some of the most influential novels of this decade, such as Jane Eyre (1847) and Wuthering Heights (1847), return to an imagined rural past, they seem to do so more to challenge their readers than to reinstate a lost idyll.
Queen Victoria married Prince Albert in 1840 and, marking the rise of a newly literate class, the Penny Post was established in the same year, while Fox Talbot produced the first photographic collection to be published for profit in 1844. The novel was becoming the dominant literary genre and displayed, as Kathleen Tillotson notes in Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (1954), ‘a surging variety of material and method, new fashions jostling old, new ground broken in time, place, purpose, and social class,’ with the decade also seeing ‘the beginnings of serious [literary] criticism of novels’ (15, 16). The three-decker novel emerged as the standard format for the novel (as it would remain until the 1890s) with the opening of Mudie’s library to subscribers in 1842, and the demand for female higher education was acknowledged in the founding of Bedford College for Women in 1849. Legal landmarks included the Factory Acts of 1844 and 1847 (Ten Hours Act) which increased legal protections for women and young persons, as well as the repeal of the controversial Corn Laws in 1846. These marks of progress were received in the context of developing Chartist protest, which led to fears of a working-class revolution in 1848, and a major cholera epidemic in the same year, but at the same time some of the poorest children were able to obtain a rudimentary education with the opening of the first Ragged Schools in 1840, started in the most deprived parts of London by evangelizing Christians.
The 1840s also followed the end of the second-generation Romantic period, associated with the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Celebrated writers Laetitia Landon and Felicia Hemans had only recently died, while Fanny Burney lived until 1840. Caroline Norton had begun her literary career in the 1830s (against the backdrop of the First Reform Act of 1832—which extended male suffrage to include an increased number of householders, tenant farmers, and shopkeepers, but pointedly made no provision for women—and the New Poor Law passed in 1834). Highly productive women writers such as Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, silver-fork novelist Catherine Gore, Mary Howitt, and the widely popular Sarah Stickney Ellis were still publishing regularly in the 1840s, as was journalist and author Christian Johnstone, while writers including Elizabeth Gaskell, the Brontës, Harriet Martineau, Catherine Crowe, Charlotte Yonge, Geraldine Jewsbury, Elizabeth Sewell, Eliza Lynn (later Linton), Margaret Oliphant, and Harriet Maria Gordon (later Smythies) were beginning or developing their literary careers.
Mere years after poet laureate Robert Southey’s now infamous 1837 advice to Charlotte Brontë that ‘Literature is not the business of a woman’s life, and it cannot be’ (Robert Southey to Charlotte Brontë, 12 March 1837), women writers of the 1840s were demonstrably, and in a multiplicity of ways, proving him wrong. By the late 1840s, the dominance of male writers such as Charles Dickens and William Thackeray was being challenged by the success of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). These controversial—even confrontational—accounts of women’s socially disadvantaged state, and the extreme measures to which the heroines are driven in combating the limitations of their lives, form a determined opposition to the dictates of more traditional domestic realism, even as they adhere to many of its generic conventions. Yet, these canonical texts together form a minute percentage of the literary output produced by women in the 1840s. Throughout the decade, Stickney Ellis was just one of the writers of influential conduct manuals aimed at forming the next generation of middle-class young women whose assumptive expectation or aspiration was to manage a household of family and servants. Women writers, who were themselves readers and library subscribers, were inevitably concerned at this time with issues such as the ‘servant problem,’ marriage, political economy, children’s fiction, and what it means to be a reader and writer of fictional texts. The authors discussed in this section define women’s experience with varying degrees of self-consciousness. Several, such as Howitt and Gaskell, are preoccupied with the notion of ‘women’s work’ and what that might mean for themselves, their characters, and their readers. Others, including Emily Brontë, focus on the influences brought to bear on marriageable young women and seek to articulate appropriate responses to the competing voices of the upper and middle-class marriage market. All are more or less preoccupied with the underlying economic imperatives governing women’s choices and with the laws, both legislative and social, governing their lives.
In the volume’s opening chapter, ‘“Pleasant, Easy Work, -& Not Useless, I Hope,”’ Valerie Sanders reconsiders the four stories in Harriet Martineau’s The Playfellow (1841) as both ‘culturally significant and a register of the instability of children’s literature as a genre.’ Contextualizing the stories in the 1840s, Sanders notes that Martineau was one of only a few major female authors to engage with the genre of children’s literature during this decade. Martineau’s contribution to the field takes the form of a re-envisioning of class and gender roles. Exploring the dynamic relations between boy heroes and older female figures, Martineau uses disunited communities as the settings of her tales of endurance. In each of these overtly shocking stories, the boy hero must learn to renegotiate his place in the world. In common with novels of the same decade that feature child protagonists, notably Jane Eyre, ‘Martineau’s children’s stories of the 1840s share,’ Sanders shows, ‘a concern for the efforts of the weak to gain recognition, and to survive in the face of overwhelming odds.’ Above all, Sanders argues, Martineau respects children in a way that was unusual for critics and writers of the 1840s.
Offering a different perspective on vulnerable members of the community, including children, Ruth Heholt sets out the case for recovering the work of novelist Catherine Crowe in ‘“Powerful beyond all question,”’ which examines Crowe’s novels of the 1840s. Intervening in debates over women’s natural capacity and potential for mental or professional achievement, Crowe’s novels of working-class life, Susan Hopley: or the Adventures of a Maid Servant (1841), Men and Women: or Manorial Rights (1843), and The Story of Lilly Dawson (1847), show the impact of gendered training on women who are educated into positions of inferiority and weakness. Including crime, sensation, and scandal, these books also span the generic line between the Newgate novels that were pop...