Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship, 1850–1914 by Alexis Easley (review)

Alexis Easley’s Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship, 1850–1914 is a testimony to the wealth of new discoveries available through periodicals studies. Originally published in 2011, it was recently released in paperback. Through careful attention to a wide range of British and American periodicals, guidebooks, works of history, biography, and autobiography, Easley demonstrates how the phenomenon of literary celebrity intensified alongside developments in popular print culture, and she persuasively connects journalists’ and readers’ fascination with literary celebrity to anxieties about national identity. Easley’s first book, First-Person Anonymous: Women Writers and Victorian Print Media, 1830–1870 (2004), explored how women created authorial identities within the system of anonymous publication. Literary Celebrity investigates the politics of women’s authorial self-fashioning by discussing how celebrity could enhance a woman writer’s marketability or reduce her to an ephemeral commodity.

The book is divided into three parts, focusing on celebrity and literary tourism, historiography, and fin de siècle print culture. Although the emphasis sometimes shifts between gender issues and national identity, each chapter builds a scaffold for the next. For example, Chapter 1 demonstrates how literary tourism at the end of the century developed in response to the changing urban landscape. Easley shows how tourists attempted to define a British cultural heritage in the remnants of “Dickens’s London” as reformers knocked down buildings and widened roadways. As landmarks of British heritage were becoming increasingly difficult to locate, guidebooks often used ghostly discourse to point to the old haunts of London authors. Chapter 2, “The Haunting of Victorian London: Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and George Eliot,” demonstrates how these spectral metaphors effectively wrote women out of literary London. In contrast to these examples, chapter 3 highlights Harriet Martineau’s ability to capitalize on the emerging tourist industry to enhance her celebrity status.

Given the complex relations between this book’s many subjects and themes, Easley takes the fin de siècle as her reference point because it marks the “emergence of celebrity media as a major cultural preoccupation” (17). This approach allows her to move backward and forward to examine contradictory and surprising details that would be elided in a more linear history. For example, because the first chapter presents the literary tourism industry at its height in the 1890s, we can fully appreciate the innovations of Martineau’s “self-conscious attempts at self-memorialization” in the 1850s that are discussed later (95).

Part 2, “Celebrity and Historiography,” also juxtaposes slices of time to reveal connections between publishing trends and women’s celebrity authorship. Chapter 4 focuses on the 1850s to read Martineau’s History of England during the Thirty Years’ Peace and her Autobiography as “complementary texts [that] illustrate Martineau’s efforts to authorize herself as a contemporary historian and literary celebrity” (95). Chapter 5 widens its scope to connect the popular media’s promotion of architectural education for women during the 1830s and 1840s to “the historic preservation movement and the activities of literary societies in the 1890s” (114). This chapter discusses reformist periodicals, including Howitt’s Journal, highlighting the journalism of Mary Gillies and, once again, Harriet Martineau. Indeed, Martineau figures in four of the book’s eight chapters and provides another organizing locus for the various threads of Easley’s argument: she was a celebrity woman writer whose home was a destination for literary tourists; she wrote guidebooks as well as works of history that helped incorporate women’s experiences and reformist ideals into the national identity; and although she was a conscious manipulator of her celebrity image, her “authorial body” was nonetheless objectified by the fin de siècle press (163).

In part 3, Martineau serves as an example of the unfortunate consequences of literary celebrity, particularly for women. This section returns to the fin de siècle, tracking new uses of celebrity images for such diverse projects as professionalizing medical discourse and preserving open spaces as part...