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  • Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship, 1850–1914 by Alexis Easley
  • Alison Booth (bio)
Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship, 1850–1914, by Alexis Easley; pp. 273. Newark: University of Delaware Press, $75.00.

Over thirty-five years ago, the eruption of feminist studies of women writers transformed the Victorian landscape to an extent equaled in few other eras and zones of study. Alexis Easley shows what can still be discovered in these fields. The fresh material in her book derives from print culture now opened by digital access (Easley participates [End Page 154] in the thriving Research Society for Victorian Periodicals). Asserting “the instrumental role of popular print culture in shaping our understanding of the relationship between literary celebrity and national identity from 1850 to 1914” (11), Easley adds layers of periodical context to Victorian responses to literature and conservation. In what is a volume of related essays rather than a coherent argument, she presents vivid pictures of contemporary exchange, from illustrated articles such as “Our ‘100–Picture’ Gallery: Through Dickens-Land,” in the Strand Magazine of April 1907, to essays by physicians in the British Medical Journal that unite “authorial biography and the medical case study” (158), to Octavia Hill’s strategic public letters, sentimental narratives, and maps that won public support for a “green belt” of parks and open spaces in and around London (182–83). This tour of a wide range of memorial attractions is varied, efficient, and thought-provoking.

Easley gives different degrees of biographical attention to various women writers, including Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Charlotte Robinson, Mary Braddon, Marie Corelli, Mary Gillies, Jane Carlyle, and the Brontës. Several chapters offer a much-needed analysis of Harriet Martineau’s varied oeuvre, while chapter 8 allows the reader to shadow Hill’s remarkable working and writing life as housing reformer and campaigner for preserved open spaces. In comparing the reputations of these authors with those of men (including Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle), Easley makes an argument for a gender difference in literary reputations and careers. Observing that the “urban expansion and renovation” of London threatened its “literary landmarks,” she rightly claims that many came to view the city as “inhabited by literary specters,” noting further that, for women writers, “ghostly invisibility was reinforced by domestic ideology, which mandated women’s absence in the public sphere” (49). But the difficulties of locating women writers on the map of London is a matter of degree, for the lasting landmarks can be randomly distributed among writers minor or major regardless of gender. Moreover, as Easley herself recognizes, the absence of the author in any literary encounter, in tourism or text, is a spectral effect for writers of either sex.

The book has three parts: “Celebrity and Literary Tourism”; “Celebrity and Historiography”; and “Celebrity and Fin de Siècle Print Culture.” In spite of the repeated term, the book sidelines the concept of celebrity and previous studies of the construction of revered authorship in favor of close reading of relevant periodical pieces on celebrated literary figures. The introduction would have been the occasion to situate celebrity historically and to argue for this study’s approach and shape; instead this brief walk-through states rather than argues, listing a range of relevant titles. The study’s ample scope, encompassing many publications and figures from 1850 to 1914, nevertheless calls for more acknowledgment of celebrity and authorship before and since (and Martineau’s career, like that of Dickens, Carlyle, Barrett Browning, and other Victorians, begins before 1850). In chapter 6 Easley belatedly provides a historical framework: “It was during the second half of the nineteenth century that the term celebrity came into common usage in the press” (137). By the 1890s, “periodicals focused exclusively on celebrity culture were published . . . such as Our Celebrities” as well as “specialist monthlies” devoted to “authorial lives and the publishing industry, such as the Bookman (1891–1934)” (138). Easley demonstrates that this was so, and she brings together several contributing factors in this trend. This was the period of “institutionalization of English studies” and the rise [End Page 155] of homes and haunts publications and literary tourism (196), culminating in...

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