Women & Criticism in the Athenaeum

Book Reviews Women & Criticism in the Athenaeum Marysa Demoor. Their Fair Share: Women, Power and Criticism in the "Athenaeum", from Millicent Garrett Fawcett to Katherine Mansfield, 1870-1920. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000. χ + 164 pp. $79.95 MARYSA DEMOOR'S careful, scholarly study focuses on the significant group of women reviewers writing as "anonymous" for the Victorian literary journal Athenaeum. DeMoor's analysis of the reviewers named only in the editorial "marked files" of this prestigious literary journal is thorough and astute. She groups the reviewers thematically, exploring the place of women in the literary life of England while carefully attending to scholarship of the period; she adds much and gives credit where credit is due. Often in surprising ways, DeMoor's wealth of detail uncovers the ties between cultural and editorial policy in England , as Victorian sensibilities gave way to twentieth-century modernist ones. DeMoor writes: "This book is about criticism. It deals with criticism and the gender of the critics; but it is also about structures of power influencing the changes in cultural production." Their Fair Share in its detail and thoughtful analysis is an impressive achievement, an essential book for scholars of this period—whether in literature, history, or gender studies. DeMoor's project arose from her work as co-editor on the Athenaeum Indexing Project. The Athenaeum (1828-1921), a weekly literary journal , had as policy reviewer anonymity. Only editors were privy to the identity of the writers, writing a reviewer's name across the articles for their own files. DeMoor discovered that women in great numbers became contributors to the journal from the 1870s until its demise in 1921—with occasional large-scale reductions when a new editor came forth. The sheer number of reviews recorded in the marked file and DeMoor 's scholarly attention to them provides valuable statistical and qualitative information. For example, Geraldine Jewbury contributed 2300 reviews from 1849-1880, while Katherine de Mattos contributed 1300 reviews over twenty-two years, and Emily Thursfield wrote over 1300 reviews over twenty-six years. The careful research of the Athenaeum 's marked files is to DeMoor's credit. 175 ELT 46 : 2 2003 Collating and analyzing the data must have been a daunting task in itself, but to provide comparative information, DeMoor additionally analyzed the Spectator's "marked files." The marked files of both journals show the clear presence of women reviewers, paid equally as well as male reviewers; still the files display male preferences for certain "hard" topics like economics and politics. Of the seven illustrations in DeMoor's book, a figure of the Athenaeum's marked file is replicated, as is the Spectator's neat list of contributors, substantiating visually the wealth of primary sources Demoor used in writing her book. "The Woman of Letters in Transition" functions as the first chapter after a comprehensive and descriptive introduction; "Gender, Criticism and the Anticipation of Modernism," the final chapter, concludes one of DeMoor's projects of tracing the Victorian woman writer to the "advent of the New Woman journalist." Their Fair Share includes several particularly virulent cartoons and jokes from Punch to expose the sneering prejudice against the "real menace" of the New Woman. In juxtaposing these snide public presentations to her research, DeMoor suggests the foolishness of such cultural distrust and concludes that if "we may rely on the few testimonies by women reviewers about their professional practice, disguising their gender seemed the right (and only) course to adopt." In writing the anonymous reviews, the writers found the respect and income they sought in their careers. In the "overlap period between the modernist period and the Victorian era," ironically the success of women writers came simultaneously with the "victimisation of the feminine in society." Feminine decadence was seen to threaten masculinity. DeMoor traces the misogynist trends of the period, as well as the way in which women writers increasingly found support for their endeavors. She credits scholar Nigel Cross for "succinctly" sketching the prevailing attitude: "women were designed to be kissed or to serve mutton chops"; DeMoor then embarks on a historical review of the "at homes," "house-warming parties," women's "salons" and "clubs" that provided intellectual stimulation instead of mutton. These...