The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Writing ed. by Linda H. Peterson (review)

In her introduction, Linda Peterson deftly describes the authors and works covered in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Writing as “brimful of vigor and vitality, of imagination and innovation, of optimism and confidence in what women have achieved” (9). Indeed, we could say the same about the collection of essays itself. This new addition to the Cambridge Companion series surveys an impressive range of writers, topics, and genres from the diverse physical and ideological spaces of the Victorian period; these are placed in the context of print culture and the history of authorship, readership, and publishing. The first part, “Victorian Women Writers’ Careers,” contains five chapters that cover debuts, professional writing, working with publishers, editing, and canonicity. While attending to the difficulties female authors faced more generally throughout the period, such as social censure for entering the public sphere, substandard pay, and a critical double standard, the essays in this part characterize the diversity of women’s experiences as writers and editors in the nineteenth century with concern for era, class, and genre. The longer of the two parts, “Victorian Women Writers’ Achievements: Genres and Modes,” features twelve essays on poetry; silver-fork, industrial, Gothic, realist, sensation, and New Woman fiction; drama; life-writing; reviewing; and colonial, imperial, travel, historical, periodical, and children’s writing. Taken together, these two parts explore how focused study of the tradition of women’s writing influences our understanding of Victorian literature, print culture, and developing gender roles and opportunities for women in the nineteenth century.

As a whole, the collection navigates expertly what we might well call the Irene Adler dilemma. “The Woman,” Doyle’s ingenious heroine whom Sherlock Holmes describes as eclipsing the entirety of her sex, represents aptly the critic’s quandary when discussing Victorian women’s writing—the difficulty of offering praise for how a Victorian woman writer was remarkable without eliding the accomplishments of other women by elevating her to the status of sui generis. Peterson’s volume is notable not only for calling attention to Victorian women writers as outstanding individuals but also for embedding these individuals in the larger, frequently forgotten, contexts of other women writers. Notably, Deborah Logan’s chapter “History Writing” bridges this gap by singling out Harriet Martineau as the “only example of a Victorian woman historian whose history can be called national” (209) and then pairing her with myriad other Victorian women, such as Lucy Aikin, Elizabeth Penrose, Louisa Costello, Hannah Lawrance, the Strickland sisters, Mary Ann Green, Margaret Oliphant, Julian Pardoe, Caroline Halsted, Elise Otte, and Anna Jameson, all of whom were writing alternative histories that issued “challenges to narrow and outmoded concepts of national historiography” (219). The recuperative impulse often expressed in the volume serves as an important corrective to a viewpoint skewed by looking only at the prominent women writers of the period. In “Drama and Theater,” Katherine Newey also eloquently articulates the importance of attentiveness to the narratives scholars construct in relation to the perceived lack of women writing Victorian drama, warning that we may overlook the extraordinariness and widespread presence of “women playwrights who participated actively in the professional mainstream” if we are only seeking a “triumphalist narrative in which the women we recover and celebrate write extraordinary pieces” (156).

Perhaps the greatest value of the book comes from its consideration of connection: both networks of writers “tightly or loosely linked by region, religion, politics, or shared interests” and networks of ideas that link the book’s seventeen chapters (5). These connections lead in turn to innovative scholarship and disciplinary mapping: “If we can illumine the careers of women writers by locating them within literary, social, and political networks, we can also place them within larger literary movements and recognize their contributions to established and emerging genres,” Peterson notes (6). Joanne Shattock’s “Becoming a Professional Writer” traces the often intersecting professional networks of Eliza Meteyard, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Margaret...