Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market (review)

Becoming a Woman of Letters is a model book. This is not at all surprising; Linda Peterson's career-long research in nineteenth-century British women's autobiography has made her one of the foremost experts in Victorian modes of identity-fashioning. In this book, she turns her focus from autobiography to the periodical press to explore the nineteenth-century "social ideology" of authorship in general and to focus on its significance for women in particular (p. 20). Particularity is the book's hallmark; Peterson's stated interest throughout is to add complexity and nuance to our unexamined critical assumptions. She punctures familiar binaries—those predictable oppositions to which our minds seem drawn (in which, for instance, we think male and female authors only compete with each other for status or bread, never face shared challenges). Peterson asks us to rethink such easy antagonisms as "literature versus journalism, priestly vocation versus business or trade, high art versus commercial production, literary classic versus ephemeral writing. For all the apparent familiarity," she writes, "I want to pause over this debate . . . to understand it not in simple binaries but in the complexities and confusions with which it unfurled" (p. 54). Peterson's invaluable study unfurls out of this method and the deep and rich scholarship supporting it.

Peterson uses "the instability of the female author as a critical construct" to complicate modern notions of literary professionalism as it emerged in Britain in the nineteenth century (p. 30). Her extensive endnotes record the interest critics have taken in this category (and those endnotes are not only extensive, but exhaustive: from A. S. Collins's early study of literary professionalism in 1929 to the work in the last decade of Betty Schellenberg, Jennifer Ruth, and Susan Colón on the professional woman writer, Peterson cites them all). Indeed, one of the things Peterson does so well is to relocate our recent critical concerns within their long and detailed critical history. She thoroughly documents the full range of the discussion of the professional writer that took place within Victorian periodical literature, exposing our debt to the Victorians for our understanding of professionalism but also demonstrating how much more fine-tuned and sophisticated that understanding can become if we recognize the debt and attend to it carefully.

The myths that Peterson considers—the scripts according to which nineteenth-century women could consider themselves writers—are much more multifaceted than we usually credit. Though traditional criticism ordinarily sees these scripts only as constraints, Peterson's fresh look discovers them as "more enabling than disabling" (p. 10). She explores the various questions that conditioned women's "careful negotiation of . . . myths of authorship and trends in the market" (p. 208): what in particular for women structured the tension between commercial and literary success? Should men and women advance similar or different versions of literary production (might women's be more collaborative, for instance)? Should women explicitly acknowledge the struggles of the marketplace (such as over copyright)? The excitement and originality of Peterson's study lie in how she shows that Victorian women writers had to make their way in an economic field in which each one of the various, complicated, and conflicting answers to these questions could take on the status of a "myth"—or, as Peterson is careful to qualify, "more accurately, a cluster of myths"—some of which were more successful than others (p. 149). Hence, the ground-breaking importance of the figures she treats, not the "usual suspects" (p. 6)—the ones that first come to mind when we think of important Victorian women of letters, such as George Eliot or Margaret Oliphant—but instead writers who exemplify paths to authorship not quite as obvious to us now: writers such as Mary and Anna Mary Howitt, Charlotte Riddell, Alice Meynell, and Mary Cholmondeley.

Peterson's project is a stunning success. The book embodies all that...