"The Limits of the Imaginable": Women Writers' Networks during the Long Nineteenth Century

The rapid rise of the digital humanities over the past decade has transformed literary study, helping us to discern broader patterns in print culture and media history. Franco Moretti's and Matthew Jockers's respective introductions to distant reading and macroanalysis have fundamentally altered the way in which many scholars now approach literary research.¹ In light of their impact on the digital humanities field, I wondered how these methodologies might help us address longstanding critical questions regarding women's social and literary networks during the long nineteenth century. To what extent were women's relationships with fellow women writers—their networks of connectivity—important to their success in a male-dominated publishing marketplace? If, as some researchers have suggested, women formed "alternative networks" to the masculine clubs, universities, and editorial establishments that informed patriarchal print culture, how might we begin to understand these relationships on a broad scale (Easley 112–13)? As Joanne Shattock observes, "Women's literary networks were less obvious and less public" than men's and are therefore more difficult for current scholars to trace and assemble ("Professional Networking" 134). To date, studies of individual writers have revealed the ways in which women's clubs, salons, and other social relationships informed their engagement with popular print culture.² To understand the ways women functioned within a complex network of private and professional relationships, however, it is necessary to go beyond a single case study approach, which often has the effect of rounding up the usual suspects—canonical women writers—and interpreting their experiences as representative of the field.

Literary scholarship has historically tended to focus on a small canon of writers, leaving their "rivals," as Moretti terms them, to become part of the "great unread" (66–67). Following the work of John Burrows, I hope to bring to light those writers who have "escaped our attention because of [the] sheer multitude" of existent women within the publishing industry in the nineteenth century and to discover why some writers succeeded more than others in creating connections with fellow female authors and in achieving canonical status over the long term (Jockers 26). While outlining his introduction to network visualization, J. Stephen Murphy surmises that "any medium that groups writers together has the potential to turn writers into conduits through which other writers can be discovered" (iv). Indeed, my macroanalytic approach to network analysis aims to increase our appreciation of the highly influential, hyperconnected writers who often operated behind the scenes of print culture.

Engaging with various digital humanities methodologies such as data mining, distant reading, and network analysis, my essay investigates what new insights can be gained from viewing women's relationships with each other on a comprehensive scale rather than simply viewing the individual network or the network of "important" or "canonical" writers associated with a particular literary period or movement. My macro-network graph reveals how certain women writers functioned as highly visible and centrally located "nodes" within these publishing networks and how these heretofore overlooked writers have been surprisingly influential in the history of women's authorship. Studying women's social and professional networks on a broad scale leads to a deeper understanding of the various ways in which they connected with each other and with print culture during their careers and how this might be correlated with their canonical status, past and present. Of course, any visualization of women's literary and social networks is necessarily a partial one; I conclude with a brief reflection on the gaps and silences encoded in my digital archive source and issues of canonicity in the continually evolving field of digital humanities.

Methodology

In their quantitative study of reviewer-contributor connectivity in modernist periodicals, J. Stephen Murphy and Mark Gaipa define the term "network" as "a structure of relationships among entities" (52; my italics), and Friedrich Kittler likewise delineates a network as "a structure, the technic whereby cultural exchange takes place" (qtd. in Brake 116; my italics). However, invoking the notion of structure in reference to relationships suggests a state of static kinesis and rigidity. Nathan K...