Lecturing Women in British Fiction, Periodicals and Public Orality, 1870–1910

The First Speech

Anne-Julia Zwierlein

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040336809
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Performance Art
• Index: Literature

This book examines the emergence of women as audiences and speakers on the British metropolitan lecture circuit and in mass print representations from 1870 to 1910. Bringing together research on Victorian lecturing, periodicals, voice studies and the cultural history of feminism, it sheds new light on the interdependence of orality and print and the rise of the British women's movement.

Sifting through the archives of lecture institutions (the Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institution, the London Institution and the Royal Institution), penny fiction weeklies and feminist weeklies, New Woman and suffrage novels, autobiographical writings and rhetorical manuals, this book reconstructs the changing mediascape of late Victorian London and treats speech events, in print and on site, as catalysts for democratic participation. Undertaking an archaeology of women's presence in the lecture hall, it explores conservative fantasies in fiction of the female speaking automaton alongside new writings that transformed women orators from objects of sensation into public agents. By analysing women's collective self-education in rhetoric and elocution, this book traces the emergence in political fictions of key narrative tropes of oral performance: the surprise encounter in the lecture hall, the moment of conversion during a lecture and the symbolic 'first speech' of new suffrage recruits.

Drawing on new and extensive primary research, this book intervenes in several flourishing fields of inquiry: literary studies, oral culture studies, sound and voice studies, performance studies, periodical studies and Victorian and Edwardian cultural history.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Women in Cultures of Public Speech and Mass Print
• 1 Archaeology of Voices: Women Audiences and Speakers at London Lecture Venues
• 2 Periodical Education: Lecture-Going and Social Causeries in London Penny Weeklies
• 3 Romance and Sensation: Spicing Up the Lecture Circuit in Penny Weekly Fiction
• 4 Serial Spectacle: Getting Used to Women Lecturers in Penny Weekly Fiction
• 5 Collective Vocality: Mass Print and Speech in Anti-Feminist, New Woman and Suffrage Writing
• 6 First Speech: Training Women Speakers in Suffrage Writing, Rhetorical Manuals and Feminist Weeklies
• Coda: Transmediation – ‘Speech or Silence’
• Appendix: Archives and Central Primary Sources
• Index