Women Writers and the Artifacts of Celebrity in the Long Nineteenth Century ed. by Ann R. Hawkins and Maura Ives, and: Women and Literary Celebrity in the Nineteenth Century: The Transatlantic Production of Fame and Gender by Brenda R. Weber (review)

In her contribution to Women Writers and the Artifacts of Celebrity in the Long Nineteenth Century, Linda H. Peterson observes of the poet and essayist Alice Meynell that, as she “came to realize, it mattered not only what a poet wrote, but also how she presented herself in public. Literary success required talent and genius, but also a keen sense of the marketplace” (181). These two volumes from Ashgate—the first a collection of essays edited by Ann R. Hawkins and Maura Ives, the second a monograph by Brenda R. Weber—explore the myriad ways in which women writers were represented in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary marketplace. Some, such as Meynell, Marie Corelli, Louisa May Alcott, and Fanny Fern, were in positions to shape and adjust their own self-representations. Others, such as Jane Austen, Lady Blessington (Marguerite Gardiner), Charlotte Brontë, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Ellen (Mrs. Henry) Wood, were at the mercy of friends (or enemies) and relatives whose memoirs and posthumous critical appraisals sometimes fundamentally altered their reputations.

As the titles suggest, these two volumes are tied together by an interest in how “celebrity”—defined by Ives (a little ungrammatically) as “a media-driven phenomenon in which a celebrity’s personal life becomes as important (if not more so) than their achievement”—complicated the roles and perceptions of writing women during the nineteenth century (1). Ives notes that celebrity as an academic focus initially concentrated on twentieth-century mass media, especially visual media, but has since expanded to account for the effects of earlier technologies: from the late eighteenth century on, “faster, cheaper printing, along with the commercialization of photography, played a crucial role in creating and sustaining the audience for celebrity” (2). Particularly when applied to the nineteenth century, celebrity studies appears in many respects to be a postmodern stepchild of what Marxist/cultural materialist scholars would call the study of commodification, a point underscored by the analytic language employed in a number of the essays in the edited volume, as well as by the title of one of the chapters (Lizzie White’s “Commodifying the Self: Portraits of the Artist in the Novels of Marie Corelli”), and by the subtitle of Weber’s monograph. The buying and selling of art and artist, genre and gender, and reputation and status set competing values in conflict; to emerge from the tumult with personal and artistic integrity intact was a challenge for anyone, but especially, as these volumes testify, for women of the period.

The implicit thesis of Hawkins and Ives’s volume is stated explicitly in Weber’s monograph: both works ask “how attitudes toward women’s popularity as famous writers might have given rise to new ways of conceptualizing social norms for women in the nineteenth century” (5). In an era in which women were expected to fulfill largely domestic roles but were simultaneously establishing themselves as a significant force in literature, the phenomenon of the celebrity woman writer unsettled comfortable ideological categories. Reconciling these categories often meant carefully disentangling “celebrity,” “woman,” and “writer” as concepts and attaching different personae and values to each one. As Weber explains, in most cases “fame could be had but it should not be sought. If a woman were passive in her celebrity (it simply came to her without her bidding), she could be forgiven her fame. But if she schemed and plotted to achieve her fame, the avarice for celebrity was a scathing social stigma” (18). Thus, many women writers shielded their personal...