Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer, and: Frances Power Cobbe and Victorian Feminism (review)

In her chapter on Frances Power Cobbe in Victorian Feminists (1992), Barbara Caine remarks, "despite the interest in Cobbe's ideas . . . now evident, she still awaits a biographer" (104). That omission has now been filled by Sally Mitchell in a biography certain to remain standard for decades. Cobbe scholarship has also benefited from Susan Hamilton's analysis of Cobbe's feminist writing in the "established" press. Both Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer and Frances Power Cobbe and Victorian Feminism clarify Cobbe's cultural and historical significance for nineteenth-century suffragism, journalism, and reform and demonstrate how she acquired public influence.

Cobbe was born in 1822, the same year as Matthew Arnold, who treated her theological volume Broken Lights (1864) condescendingly in "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" (National Review, November 1864). Comparing their careers as public intellectuals underscores Cobbe's achievements and her very different afterlife in scholarship. Arnold, educated at Rugby and Balliol, was the son of a prominent intellectual and historian. Cobbe, the daughter of a privileged Anglo-Irish family occupying an estate just west of Dublin, had two years of expensive high school education but lived principally at home until she was thirty-five. Both Arnold and Cobbe entered the field of higher journalism in their early forties having previously published book-length works; the Wellesley Index credits Arnold with 90 essays in the periodicals it indexes, Cobbe with 107. Arnold influenced generations with his poems and criticism contending that high culture could elevate and unify a society. As a direct result of Cobbe's "Wife-Torture in England" (Contemporary Review, April 1878), Parliament passed the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1878 enabling working-class women to obtain child custody and legal separation from abusive husbands (remedies formerly restricted to the affluent). A sought-after writer and public speaker on theology, feminism, and social reform, Cobbe nonetheless faded from view after her death in 1904. The different prestige accorded to poetry and journalism in twentieth-century English studies is one factor in Cobbe's eclipse, as is the uneven attention to writing by men and women. (My mentioning Arnold in a review of scholarship on Cobbe when the reverse almost never occurs ironically extends the pattern.) Cobbe's fame and significance, however, are far more complex than this brief comparison implies.

Hamilton convincingly argues that Cobbe was marginalized within feminist studies, paradoxically, by her major achievement: the ability to articulate and promote feminist views in the mainstream rather than feminist press. The majority of Cobbe's publications were in periodicals targeting a mixed, often predominantly masculine, audience, including Fraser's Magazine, known for its openness to progressive views; the Echo, London's first halfpenny evening paper aimed initially at laboring men; and the Contemporary Review, a journal closely associated with members of the Metaphysical Society (from which Cobbe, though a regular contributor to Theological Review, was excluded on grounds of sex).

Cobbe thus has scant visibility in studies of the Victorian feminist press or scholarship that approaches Victorian feminism as a marginalized formation. Hamilton's point of departure is an alternative, highly generative question: what did it mean for Cobbe to write as a feminist in the established (that is, mainstream, nonfeminist) press? Hamilton brings to bear upon the question key theoretical assumptions from periodical studies. The first is that the press did not "reflect" opinion but was a site of negotiation and contestation that helped construct Victorians' sense of reality. Adopting theories of seriality advanced by Laurel Brake and Mark Turner, Hamilton situates Cobbe's feminist discourse within dailiness and recurrence, means by which feminism could become an accepted frame of reference even in periodicals not specifically aligned with feminist reform. Hamilton's other principal approach is rhetorical analysis. She tracks Cobbe...