The Social Life of Criticism: Gender, Critical Writing, and the Politics of Belonging

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Chapter 1 Reimagined Communities An Introduction In 1864 a writer for the London Review (1835–36) observed that “though there are some good feminine writers now living, there is hardly a single first-rate female critic.”1 Fraser’s Magazine (1830–82) went further: “We see no occasion for increasing the number of designing women. Neither do we want a race of female critics and female pedants, instead of those good-natured, acquiescing creaturesВ .В .В . whose criticism scarcely ever ventures beyond the phrase,—“How exceedingly pretty!”2 Although assuming an especially sardonic tone in this passage, the underlying claim is one that appeared with startling frequency within the pages of the major nineteenth-century reviews. The female critic was a creature to be derided or, as Charlotte O’Conor Eccles observed in an essay for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1817–1980), “a nuisance, an untried unfledged being, very much in the way, and to be got rid of at all hazards.”3 For many years, female critics were indeed forgotten. To some extent, this reflects a recognized trend in the history of women’s writing. In The Work of Writing (1998), Clifford Siskin suggests that publishing conditions at the brink of the nineteenth century precipitated the erasure of countless women writers from the literary tradition—what he calls the “Great Forgetting”—as emerging critical institutions classified traditionally masculine discourses (such as politics or trade) as “professional” while labeling women’s writing as amateur. “Forgetting,” Siskin Page 2 →remarks, “in this case, was neither causal nor natural; it was, rather, the result of what was reproduced, for whom, and how.”4 In other words, the marginalization of women writers was at least in part occasioned by the periodical firms, critical circles, and print networks responsible for dispensing literary judgment—precisely those communities female critics wished to join. In recent years, scholars have challenged the presumption that women were truly excluded from these networks and only achieved professional status with the radical expansion of the market and readership in the nineteenth century. Betty A. Schellenberg, for one, notes that by classifying women writers as “destined to failure,” scholars risk reinforcing “an oppositional and inevitably value-laden explanatory model of male and female, mediator and supplicant, surface and depth, orthodox and subversive, appropriated and feminist.”5 In short, the supposed erasure of women writers from the canon threatens to oversimplify the relationship between gender politics and writing, relegating women to a marginal position that breeds either silence or subversive rhetoric. As a corrective to this narrative, Schellenberg, Norma Clarke, Susan Staves, and others have placed women writers within a more dynamic culture of literary production—one that broached female participation “in a spirit of facilitation that was fostered, rather than doled out toward subordinates.”6 Such accounts helpfully invite us to perceive women as important players in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultures of writing. But while women undoubtedly played a significant role in the world of letters, the remarks presented in the opening paragraph of this book—remarks published in some of the most popular critical outlets of the nineteenth century—suggest that the figure of the female critic warrants special consideration. After all, female critics did not merely seek out the patronage of literary networks; they sought to become gatekeepers in their own right—to join the very networks deemed responsible for differentiating between the literary professional and the neophyte. Given that female aspirants were so often classed among the latter, what did it mean for a woman writer to claim a place at the center of these communities and to assume the role of critical judge? Did the female critic harbor a sense of belonging within these circles, or was she cast aside as little more than a cultural “nuisance”? The answer to this question is more complicated and, I think, more revealing than might at first appear. The nineteenth-century critical landscape, so far from being static or homogeneous, was composed of networks that were shifting, variable, and often fraught with internal conflict.Page 3 → In contrast to fiction or poetry, criticism

was consistently and explicitly presented as a collective enterprise. Female critics were consequently required to navigate the politics of belonging with special care—a condition that yielded critical writings marked by discursive tension. Pierre Bourdieu has described the field of literary production as a “site of struggles” where the power to determine who can claim membership is always of vital concern. Such struggles are by nature ideological, for any attempt at delineating the arena of legitimate aesthetic or intellectual production “predetermines the hierarchy by determining the population deemed worthy of helping to establish it.”7 For Bourdieu, the boundary of this arena is a site of intensified contest, and the terms of the dispute often reveal much not only about the historically situated claims of the field but also about the cultural position of those seeking admission. One of the underlying premises of this book is that nineteenth-century critical networks constituted a site of discursive struggle, the limits of which help to illuminate and challenge our understanding of the gender politics of intellectual work. If we are to clarify the relationship between gender and professional writing in the nineteenth century—and if we wish to understand the conditions that brought about the “Great Forgetting” in the first place—we must consider how the female critic negotiated these boundaries, as well as how she imagined the professional community she was so eager to join. The Social Life of Criticism helps to illuminate what has hitherto remained somewhat elusive—a social and historical understanding of female critical consciousness—while also enriching our grasp of how gender shaped nineteenth-century literary networks. It was through the imaginative instantiation of literary networks in the periodical, the critical dialogue, and the formal essay that criticism came to absorb and purvey a subtle yet powerful ideology of gender. Seen this way, the network or collectivity became more than a practical necessity of professional life: it was a rhetorical and political concept that could be engaged, disputed, and even reinvented. That female critics should adopt the collective as a rhetorical trope bespeaks not merely the subversion of existing forms of intellectual sociability but aggressive and highly stylized attempts to redraw the lines of professional affiliation and inclusion. Taking the gender politics of critical exchange as a central focus, my chief claim is that nineteenth-century female critical consciousness depended implicitly upon a social and at times even sociological understanding of the profession. To that end, the following chapters argue that social work—astute sociological critiques as well as the development of innovative new social Page 4 →imaginaries—was a vital concern and discursive subject for nineteenth-century female critics. In other words, their attempts at theorizing critical community were often synonymous with efforts to become a part of that community, and women writers deliberately called upon familiar forms of intellectual congress (the coffeehouse, club, salon, dialogue, etc.), as well as a growing archive of sociological literature (including the work of Herbert Spencer, Jeremy Bentham, J. S. Mill, William James, and others) to vindicate their own acts of critical prowess. The work of aspiring female critics thus depended upon more than the material conditions and connections afforded by actual literary networks: it depended upon imagined and, perhaps more crucially, upon reimagined communities of writers. Rather than presenting an exhaustive survey of the female critic or her work, this book presents a series of case studies that illustrate the different ways in which women responded to the sociology of critical exchange, from the staging of elaborate fictions to theoretical interventions that questioned the very foundations of intellectual sociability. In contrast to existing scholarship, which has often treated female critics as either approved participants in the profession or as outsiders to it, The Social Life of Criticism proposes that they operated within a liminal space—navigating, negotiating, and reimagining the contours of the field itself. In the end, evaluating the history of the female critic through this lens—treating it less as a narrative of progress than as one of sociological transformation and discursive tension—allows us to reevaluate our understanding of how intellectual communities work and, I shall argue, provides us with new insight into the state of feminist criticism at the present time. While it may seem only natural that female critics should reflect on the business they were so determined to enter, it is striking that they should do so by invoking and often reinventing the social forums that facilitated critical exchange. Mounting objections to female learning in the nineteenth century threatened to overload the welleducated woman with damaging and often contradictory social meanings. On the one hand, the woman who made forays into the world of public discourse threatened to become more social than her position warranted: she was regarded as pathologically extroverted. On the other hand, by abdicating the social roles prescribed to her by

conduct literature—the role of hostess, helpmate, or mother—she also risked being perceived as deeply antisocial. As Nina Auerbach observes in Communities of Women (1978), groups of men have traditionally been defined by explicit codes and rituals,Page 5 → conveying a coherence and unity that female communities, lacking such institutional legitimacy, cannot. For Auerbach, female community accordingly tends to be transient, mutable, interior, and fractured, “a furtive, unofficial, and often underground entity.”8 But if such fragmentation might at times appear to be liberating, nineteenth-century satires habitually represented female communities as sites of gross disorder that posed a threat to centralized authority. Female critics, then, found themselves in a double bind. To be taken seriously as thinkers, they needed to engage in appropriate forms of sociable behavior. If male sociability relied in large part on participating in public conversations and debates, women’s endeavors to join the very same conversations often constituted a kind of social suicide. Given nineteenth-century prohibitions against female assemblies, then, such ventures into the social life of criticism were both necessary and risky. All too often, criticism has been regarded as the work of individuals. In its everyday application, the term “criticism” might describe an act of censure, negation, or law-giving. It was this sense of the term that led John Dryden to observe: “They who write ill, and they who ne’er durst write, / Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite.”9 Among today’s academic circles, however, the term “criticism” more often than not describes an act of analysis, reflection, creative expression, and social engagement. Buttressed by Matthew Arnold’s representation of the critic as “a sort of companion” to the reader who “communicates fresh knowledge” and transmits important cultural traditions, the critic has long been regarded as playing a direct role in the organization of social life, particularly for those whose theoretical approaches reflect specific political agendas, as in the case of feminist, Marxist, or postcolonial theory.10 All critical work is, at its heart, a social endeavor. Literary scholars have increasingly embraced this claim, especially in the recent turn to “networking” as a way of tracking forms of literary exchange and influence.11 Such work ranges in focus, taking as a central point of analysis subjects as diverse asВ the individual writer (as in Judith Thompson’s John Thelwall in the Wordsworth Circle), kinship (Scott Krawczyk’s Romantic Literary Families), patronage (Margaret Ezell’s Social Authorship and the Advent of Print),В literary collaborations (Tim Fulford’s Romantic Poetry and Literary Coteries), reading communities (Stephen Colclough’s Consuming Texts: Readers and Reading Communities, 1695–1870), and commercial networks (David Dowling’s The Business of Literary Circles in Nineteenth-Century America). A number of innovative scholars have even embarked on the laudable task of mapping out literary topographies, Page 6 →drawing upon digital networking tools to render such links more legible and concrete.12 What these works share in common is an insistence on the value of connection, collaboration, and affiliation to the production and circulation of ideas. Often placing literary work within its broader historical context, they attend to distinctive and direct influences upon writers, texts, and reception history, thus reminding us that all literature is the product of real social behaviors and institutions. Much of this work has attempted to mine literary networks for unexpected connections, thereby helping us to understand how apparently marginalized writers—and especially women writers—were able to find a place within the literary field. After all, if criticism was complicit in expunging female critics from the record, it has also been responsible for recovering them. Over the last two decades, an accruing interest in the subject has generated multiple anthologies of nonfiction writing by nineteenth-century women, as well as several volumes seeking to explore the relationship between gender and the genre most frequently aligned with nineteenth-century criticism, the periodical.13 The efforts of Margaret Beetham, Barbara Onslow, and other scholars of the periodical press have been instrumental in calling attention to the many ways in which women participated in nineteenth-century publishing networks.14 Beetham in particular has demonstrated how the “communal space” of the nineteenth-century women’s magazine “extended the reader’s community beyond the domestic circle to which she was increasingly confined—not least, ironically, by the discourses of the magazine itself.”15 Alongside Kathryn Shevelow’s important volume Women and Print Culture (1990), Beetham’s work has helped to demonstrate that the periodical served simultaneously as a source of intellectual deliverance for women and as a contestatory ground where different versions of femininity might be promoted, debated, challenged, and

rewritten.16 Implicit in these studies is the claim that becoming a professional woman writer, especially for those publishing in traditionally male genres, demanded more than “a room of one’s own”—in practice, it was about becoming part of an expansive network of professional connections, partnerships, and communities.17 Understanding precisely what it meant for women writers to “belong” to a class of professional writers has motivated, for instance, Linda Peterson’s claim that the work of Victorian women of letters often features the “extension of вЂdomestic life’ into the вЂsocial community.’”18 For Peterson, the seemingly opposed social functions of women writers—the prescribed role of domestic manager on the one hand and the power to influence public discourse on Page 7 →the other—were by no means mutually exclusive and often worked in concert. Such a claim helps to frame the efforts of professional women writers as more than the mere accommodation or refusal of existing literary networks. In truth, as Peterson points out, these “professional” networks were only just emerging in the nineteenth century, so that women writers could balance shifting notions of gender against an equally unstable understanding of what it meant to be a professional writer of either sex. We can no longer say that the narrative of the nineteenth-century woman writer is one of exclusion or inclusion. Indeed, focusing on forms of exchange in nineteenth-century fiction, Jill Rappaport has demonstrated that these associations at times reflect surprisingly hierarchical approaches of social life, noting “the ways that the networks some women create rely on and also reproduce inequalities.”19 Seen this way, “alliance formation” was not simply about making connections: it was about negotiating a complex system of social protocols that cannot easily be classified as prohibitive or empowering.20 As these studies reveal, our grasp of how sociable networks functioned and helped to shape nineteenth-century literary culture requires that we see them as more intricate, flexible, and conceptual than previously has been the case. Barry Wellman has noted that the contemporary focus on networks and networking “forms part of a worldwide scientific shift away from the tradition of analyzing things in terms of the intrinsic characteristics of their individual parts, and toward structural analytic interpretation of phenomena in the light of their linkages with other members of systems.”21 In other words, network theory demands that we attend more closely to structures of exchange, connection, and cultural transmission, thereby facilitating a more empirical and comprehensive understanding of social life. Yet these linkages, significant as they are in their own right, do not always account for ideological developments, which are so often less tangible. If we understand criticism as the product of social networks, we must also acknowledge that such affiliations and communities are by no means static or predictable. Social forms are always subject to negotiation, and these negotiations often transpire through innovative rhetoric and imaginative fictions. In this spirit, I propose that professional networks not only made literary exchange possible: they were, especially for women writers, integral to how critics imagined their cultural function. If, as Jeremy Boissevain observes, network analysis “asks questions about who is linked to whom, the nature of that linkage, and how the nature of that linkage affects behavior,” it seems vital that we consider empirical associations alongside the perceptions, representations, Page 8 →and reflections of those who were so deeply invested in them.22 By focusing on how professional networks and communities were envisioned by female critics, we can bring to our knowledge of real literary connections a deeper appreciation of their imaginative and rhetorical effects. Such an understanding of the literary networks—not merely as a reality but as an idea—is essential to attaining deeper insight into how intellectual culture comes about in the first place. To date, the relevance of these figurative or imagined communities has remained largely unexplored, though it is omnipresent in literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.23 The “associational world” of this period was populated by clubs, coffeehouses, professional organizations, and business firms that helped to shape the form, function, and ideological investments of critical writing.24 These social bodies constituted a powerful rhetorical presence in the history of criticism, persisting in its characters, dialogues, and associational rhetoric. Hence, we open the first volume of the Spectator (1711–12) to encounter a frontispiece featuring a circle of jovial clubmen (figure 2), take up a volume of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine to find its pages overrun with references to the “tavern sages” (figure 1), or scrutinize Daniel Maclise’s famous rendering of the “Fraserians,” that esteemed literary republic that graced the pages of Fraser’s Magazine (figure 7). Indeed, almost all of the major critical outlets overflow with allusions to the invisible and yet commanding

“We” that assumed responsibility for dispensing literary and cultural judgment. Although some of the most visible instances of this appear within the pages of the major periodical outlets, the trope emerges throughout critical writing of the period in critical dialogues—for instance, Lady Blessington’s Conversations with Byron (1834) and Walter Savage Landor’s Imaginary Conversations (1824–29)—as well as in literary essays. William Hazlitt’s Round Table, a series of essays published between 1814 and 1817 in Leigh Hunt’s Examiner (1808–86), provides a suggestive example. As Augustine Birrell notes, it was originally intended to be “a series of papers in the manner of the Spectator and the Tatler by divers hands.”25 Likening the magazine’s contributors to an Arthurian band of knights, the series was meant to provide a forum for men of letters who felt the need to defend literature at a time when it was seemingly threatened by literary hacks and unqualified judges. In the end, Hazlitt authored nearly all of the contributions, with the remainder being produced by Hunt himself. Still, Hazlitt’s intention to present his own series as a collective endeavor—one partaking in a kind of cultural Page 9 →crusade—helps to illustrate just how far-reaching the collective model of critical writing had become.26 Figure 1: Walter Sickert, Noctes Ambrosianae (1906). Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and Art Resource. В© 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. By and large, these and similar tropes have been interpreted as attempts to “entertain as well as instruct” by calling upon scenes that would be familiar to the intended and often implicitly male reader of criticism.27 Laurel Brake touches on this idea in her discussion of journalistic networks, noting that “the вЂspace’ and dialogue of an issue—with its cross-referencing to fellow writers, issues past and to come, to correspondents, to rivals, and its personifications, pseudonyms, and insistent anonymity or signature, which all tacitly invoked networks—was often mirrored in an actual physical, named, social/intellectual network.”28 While Brake and others have done essential work in establishing the real connections and relationships among contributors, editors, and readers, Page 10 →I propose that attending more rigorously to these fictional communities might supplement our growing knowledge of what such networks looked like, highlighting how theories of sociability, collectivity, and connection informed the gender politics of nineteenth-century criticism. One example should suffice to illustrate the collective motif in nineteenth-century criticism and its potential impact on the female critic’s sense of professional belonging. I provide it as a preview of what is to come in the following chapters and as a touchstone helping to illustrate some of the central questions this volume pursues. Between 1822 and 1835, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (affectionately referred to as “Maga” by its contributors) published seventy-one fictional conversations among a group of critics who purportedly gathered every night at Ambrose’s Tavern to discuss the latest news, cultural events, and literary productions (figure 1). The practice of publishing “the imaginary talk of a number of half fictitious persons” reportedly originated in a picnic undertaken by some “members of the brotherhood” who, according to Blackwood’s contributor Margaret Oliphant, “discussed over their toddy every subject in earth and heaven.”29 Notorious for their caustic wit and eccentricity, the so-called tavern sages constituted a direct expression of the dialogic and to some extent adversarial ideal touted by the major critical organs of the period: “[В .В .В .В ] as the lively manuscript passed from hand to hand,” Oliphant continues, “or two of the laughing critics laid their heads together over it, each man’s sayings were probably more like him and true to his nature than if the mirth of Ambrose’s had been as noisy as they pretended it to be.”30 Mark Parker has suggested that this kind of “adversarial tendency” makes possible “much more tentative modes of critical assertion,” thus affording the periodical a stereoscopic and potentially more expansive critical vision.31 In other words, the sociable form of the “Noctes Ambrosianae” framed the work of criticism less in terms of monolithic standards than in terms of intellectual debate. Springing from real life and conceived “in the freedom of literary irresponsibility yet authority,” the “criticism of life” envisioned by this notorious periodical club was presented as the outgrowth of the frank, spontaneous, and sometimes confrontational ethos that characterized much of nineteenth-century criticism.32 It was also a determinedly public and masculine mode of discourse. In “The Old Saloon,” a series Oliphant created and produced several decades after the reign of the tavern sages, she reflects more openly upon her status as a female critic within a predominantly male community of thinkers, effectively seizing control over the

secluded library Page 11 →that had so long been the province of the tavern sages. Certainly, the series title calls to mind Ambrose’s Tavern and the boisterous gatherings of her forebears at Blackwood’s. Like the “Noctes Ambrosianae,” Oliphant’s series covered a wide range of new books, weaving them into a larger discussion or “criticism of life.” As she noted in a letter to William Blackwood III, it was intended to be “a standing article upon literature, a review of all the books of the month worth reviewing with admittance of speculation and general comment, as would be natural.В .В .В . There is nothing of this kind anywhere.”33 In its original conception, the column attempted to honor the tradition of the “Noctes,” not simply by telling readers which books to purchase but by providing them with a sense of how those books contributed to a larger cultural conversation. In a word, “The Old Saloon” would help readers to navigate the vast world of print now available to them, revealing how these literary products fit into a broader social economy. Yet Oliphant’s restoration of the tavern tradition is no mere homage or sign of accommodation. By calling her series “The Old Saloon,” Oliphant simultaneously invokes the critical tradition at Blackwood’s—a tradition that had been lively and communal—and reminds the reader that it is an aged, possibly even outdated, establishment. As Joanne Shattock notes, the George Street offices were not purchased until 1830, so that Oliphant’s decision to locate the earlier generation of tavern sages within the library is purely fanciful.34 Taking such poetic license, Oliphant presents her own Old Saloon as a merging of past and present—as a place where figuratively, if not literally, the legacy of the tavern sages is linked to the now distinguished reputation of the Blackwood’s firm and Oliphant herself. Oliphant’s precursors are revered but also treated as relics of another time, lovingly shelved along the walls of the library and only occasionally illuminated by the firelight. In a manner of speaking, Oliphant’s “Old Saloon” was a grand reopening of Ambrose’s Tavern under new management: it was, indeed, to be a more sober and inclusive version of the revelries for which the tavern sages had become famous. The fact that Oliphant has placed herself in the company of the tavern sages should not, however, lead us to conclude that her critical persona is also male.35 Indeed, Oliphant is quick to acknowledge her awkward position as a female critic seated alone within the space once occupied by “the demigods of our early annals.”36 Her description of the library in the first essay of the series reads as an extended panegyric that calls attention to the robust masculinity of her forebears: Page 12 →His image stands there upon the wall, in the half shadow, half glow of the dancing firelight, with his head like Jove—one of the most splendid types of man that ever illustrated humanity, Christopher North, John Wilson, the first standard-bearer in old Maga’s band; and look! Behind him, fine and keen, with sarcasm trembling on his thin-cut lips, the beautiful head of [John] Lockhart; and further on, with a twinkle of kindly simplicity, with his plaid round him and his dog at his knees, that badly used but finely transformed Shepherd [James Hogg].В .В .В . How does one dare to lift the small pipe of a lesser voice in presence of these shades?37 The tavern sages constitute a daunting, combative, and explicitly masculine critical network, which is accentuated by the comparison of Lockhart’s intellect to the lightning shafts of Jove. These imperious literary ancestors wield a power that is godly, phallic, and militant, causing the reviewer to pause, “with a certain shamefacedness and recollection of all we are not in the presence of our fathers. We are not formed like Jove or Christopher. Our dart is not one made out of the lightning-shaft, as was Lockhart’s in his youth.”38 In the opening paragraphs of “The Old Saloon,” Oliphant thus establishes as one of her chief concerns the difference between the daring exploits of “Maga’s band” in its youth and her own critical disposition, which at first glance seems to be riddled with an acute anxiety of influence. While Blackwood’s has always embraced contributions “from many a manly penВ .В .В . with a sound and wholesome partiality for her soldiers and sailors,” female contributors have been correspondingly overlooked: Maga “has her ladies too, but, shall we own it? perhaps loves them less.”39 Oliphant’s words not only reflect how powerful the critical collective could be. They also reflect her astute double vision as a woman writer who felt herself to be both inside and outside of Ambrose’s Tavern and, consequently, both indebted to and critical of it. This discursive tension was an almost ubiquitous experience of aspiring female critics. In the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries, female aspirants were never categorically barred from critical writing or from the social networks that gave it life. Following Bourdieu, however, we might accurately locate female critics along the boundaries of this critical arena. In that spirit, I treat critical writing as a site of discursive struggle, an approach that helps not only to reveal how nineteenth-century thinkers attempted to define the scope of literary authority, generic boundaries, and aesthetic principles but also to expose a foundational link between criticism and a social world in which gender politics figuredPage 13 → prominently. While women did produce criticism and participate in this social world, their membership was a matter of constant negotiation, and these negotiations often took place within the real or imagined space of a critical collective. This book thus takes into consideration the actual social conditions that gave shape to critical writing—historical alliances, organizations, and networks—as well as how authors reimagined the female critic’s place within such communities in their private and public writings. Jon Klancher laid the foundation for such an approach in his influential volume The Making of English Reading Audiences (1987), in which he demonstrates how the periodical creates within its pages discrete communities of readers, serving as “a space for imagining social formations still inchoate, and a means to give them shape.”40 By this logic, critical writing is a kind of “social text” that creates as much as it reflects the real world of commercial, intellectual, and ethical investments. In the nineteenth century, criticism constituted a unique discursive field in which an audience could learn how to “вЂread’ a social world, a symbolic universe, a textual field, and to discover its own purpose within them.”41 Critical writing—especially, though not exclusively, in the case of periodical essays and reviews—can in this way be treated as a social text that discloses provocative connections between literary judgment and a social world populated by real readers, writers, and relationships. Like Klancher, I am centrally concerned with criticism’s potential as a site of cultural imagination and semiotic uncertainty, where readers and writers mediated between the ideal of “communal, democratic exchange” and the realities of a literary market that was commercial, political, and often divisive.42 If criticism made possible a more immediate and public exchange of ideas, that idealism was also circumscribed by the hierarchical and frequently gendered relations of the extratextual world. As I demonstrate in chapter 2, from the Spectator club on, the business and discursive practice of literary criticism was infused with a rhetoric of male collectivity that was prominently featured in the institutional mythologies, generic tropes, and visual representations of the period’s leading critical outlets. In the very process of establishing a cohesive social institution, critics found themselves divided between the social responsibilities of their calling—its charge to create a more open and inclusive forum for intellectual exchange—and an institutional rhetoric that was by nature exclusive. Nineteenth-century critical writing thus absorbed and, as we shall see, helped to reshape the ideological investments of existing professional networks. In this way, the social life of Page 14 →criticism reflects a constant and dynamic intercourse between the world of real social relationships and the critical text that shapes and is in turn shaped by that “hierarchically ranked” world.43 At the heart of this study, then, is not only a desire to understand how female critics participated in the major critical networks of their day but an interest in rethinking the gender politics of intellectual culture itself. In her intriguing study Gender and Language in British Literary Criticism, 1660–1790 (1997), Laura Runge argues that gender is encoded in the language of eighteenth-century criticism, focusing on the writings of such noteworthies as John Dryden, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, and others. For Runge, the intersections of gender and genre illustrate how “discourse regularly restricts certain privileges, like judgment and intellect, as masculine, effectively protecting them from female encroachment.”44 To this extent, Runge regards eighteenth-century criticism as buttressing “the unifying discourses of patriarchal hegemony.”45 I share Runge’s interest in tracking the discursive relationship between gender and critical writing, and the following pages extend her work by treating such linguistic artifacts less as signs of an overarching, hegemonic code than as symptoms of a cultural anxiety about the implementation of such a code. Whereas Runge focuses on how the language of gender was used to consolidate patriarchal discourse, The Social Life of Criticism examines how female critics defined their own social function in the light of such struggles, exposing ruptures in the discursive field and thus revealing the complex gender politics involved in negotiating the boundaries of the critical

profession. As shall become readily apparent, these fictions frequently revert to the fantasy of a unified and inclusive critical community. This is a pattern that begins with the Tatler club and stretches well into the nineteenth century, with the “tavern sages” of Blackwood’s Magazine or the famed “Fraserians” presenting especially notable cases in point. The focus on community is significant, for it reflects some of the major questions this volume seeks to address. How did female critics attempt to fit into a larger critical community at this important transitional moment? How might attempts to accommodate or marginalize the female critic within such communities shape our understanding of criticism and its relation to social and political life? For some critics (like Anna Jameson or George Eliot), the challenge was to imagine new ways of belonging to a community that was highly selective in its membership; for others (like Vernon Lee or Eliza Lynn Linton) it was far more important to expose the limitations of collective identity. What all of these writers share in common, Page 15 →however, is a keen attention to the discursive tensions they encountered in attempting to negotiate the imagined networks that defined critical authority at the time. For such writers, it was not simply a matter of being admitted into the fold. Because gender politics so vitally shaped the discursive field, the struggle to operate within these networks and communities is often every bit as revealing as the struggle to gain entrance in the first place. As an illustration of this point, we might return to the example of Margaret Oliphant, who was an important member of the Blackwood’s inner circle and yet keenly aware of how gender politics had determined the course of her career. In her early years with the magazine, Oliphant was known behind closed doors as “Katie, ” after the main character of her first story for Blackwood’s, Katie Stewart (1852). Oliphant, who did not learn of the epithet until 1896, seems to have taken the joke in good humor but also interpreted it as a sign that the firm had singled her out as “so young and simpleВ .В .В . that the girl’s name was appropriate.”46 Oliphant was anything but timid in her dealings with Blackwood’s and was determined to rank alongside her male colleagues, yet she also recognized the difficulty of acquiring such status without the literary patronage her male colleagues accessed through clubs, professional organizations, and institutions of higher learning. She routinely alluded to her “struggle againstВ .В .В . the fictitious reputations got up by men who happen to be вЂremembered at the Universities,’ and who have many connections among literary men.”47 In the absence of such connections, Oliphant suggests, she lacked the authority to comment on a litany of subjects typically reserved for masculine voices. Proposing an article on Pepys and Evelyn, a subject she thought John Blackwood would be reluctant to approve for a woman writer, Oliphant remarked: “I am afraid a feminine critic must find but a limited orbit possible to her—but I should greatly like this piece of work if it would answer you.”48 The challenges of reconciling appropriate forms of female sociability and critical authority comes across most powerfully in Oliphant’s attempts to supplant the model of the “tavern sages” with the “Old Saloon” discussed above. Toward the end of the century Oliphant’s manner of conducting business at her “Old Saloon” became a source of tension between herself and the magazine’s new editor, William Blackwood III. In the first year of the series, Blackwood accused Oliphant of writing favorable reviews for her friends and of publicizing her role as author of the series.49 If Oliphant were known to be the chief contributor to the column, the “Old Saloon” could no longer be considered a legitimatePage 16 → successor to Ambrose’s Tavern: it would not be collective, militant, and masculine, but rather secluded, forbearing, and feminine. The “Old Saloon” threatened to become the old salon, an intellectual circle headed by a progressive bluestocking. Certainly the pun is borne out by the fact that Oliphant’s establishment is not truly a tavern, but rather a private library, a domestic space where Oliphant herself presides over a gathering of great men. In 1892, Oliphant wrote a letter to Blackwood, protesting his intention to cede the editorship of the “Old Saloon” to Alexander Allardyce. While she would have “with great pleasure given up the Old Saloon at any time,” Oliphant defended herself against Blackwood’s accusations and emphatically rejected the notion that he had any proprietary right to the series.50 It has never, Oliphant observes, been one of the rights of an Editor to berate a contributor as he might do a shopman. The Saloon in George Street is unquestionably yours, but the Old Saloon as a seat of criticism was not invested or thought of by you, but by me. You did not make and cannot own it, nor is it any necessary part of

Maga, any more than Ambrose’s Tavern was.51

By distinguishing between the “Saloon in George St.”—the editorial office of Maga, which was Blackwood’s legal property—and the fictional saloon she had created, Oliphant charges Blackwood with impinging on her critical vision and her role as proprietor of the new periodical club. While Blackwood is “unquestionably” Maga’s financial executor, Oliphant figures herself as a shopkeeper who carries out the real business of the tavern. Occupying the intellectual center of the Blackwood’s network, Oliphant serves as a mediating presence who both sustains and critiques the vitality of the “tavern sages.” Although Blackwood may have controlled the resources of the periodical itself, Oliphant was hardly willing to cede control over the invented space of the library, which she had carefully crafted as the abode of the female critic. The “Old Saloon” thus becomes not only the symbolic site of critical discourse but also a crucial point of rhetorical leverage for the female critic—a testing ground where conflicting visions of authority and social engagement might be reviewed, revised, and reimagined. Before proceeding, I must say a word about that somewhat elusive term “criticism.” For the most part, The Social Life of Criticism investigates how women engaged with early literary and aesthetic discourse. To this extent, the periodical review, aesthetic dialogue, and literary essay all assume a central role in the source base for this study. In the nineteenthPage 17 → century, however, criticism was still an evolving and somewhat capacious discursive category, so that literary reviews often overlap with what we might delineate as social and political commentary. Indeed, Philip Smallwood has suggested that criticism by its very nature resists definition because it describes a mode of thinking rather than a generic category, so that even today the term “criticism” might refer to a letter, poem, footnote, review, preface, or informal essay.52 The slipperiness of criticism as a literary and professional category is an undeniable—and unavoidable—challenge to the contemporary scholar but it is also a revealing one. After all, by probing the history of criticism at a time when the boundaries of the field were especially subject to negotiation, we can better perceive the vital role gender played in actually shaping the contours of that field. To this extent, discursive uncertainty constitutes both an epistemological hurdle and a discursive aperture, revealing that a material approach to the networks that purportedly gave structure to the field can only take us so far. In the interest of clarity, however, I offer a provisional definition of criticism—one that will provide a stable foundation for the discussion to follow without abandoning the fluidity of the concept. For the purposes of this study, criticism will be defined as a piece of writing (whether appearing in a periodical, published volume, or preface) that reflects an investment in analyzing and passing judgment on a literary, aesthetic, or philosophical work. Judgment sometimes assumes the form of appraisal or censure, but it just as frequently takes the form of an analysis in which the text or texts in question become a springboard for social, political, or cultural commentary. Frequently, the criticism discussed here reflects upon the nature of judgment itself, commenting less on specific texts than on the methodologies and professional practices adopted by the critic. It is worth noting additionally that the source base for this study includes a range of documents that are not intended to exemplify the qualities of critical writing but which serve instead to provide insight into the cultural status and experiences of female critics—representations of the female critics in fiction, caricature, life-writing, social commentary, and even drama. By bringing together this mixed corpus of literary texts, I hope to clarify the relationship between gender and literary judgment at a time when the boundaries of professional and discursive legitimacy were under constant revision. Although my focus is on the nineteenth-century female critic, the study opens with a discussion of critical practice in the eighteenth century,Page 18 → when literary criticism was beginning to assume the institutional and generic forms we associate with it today. At this time, publications like the Tatler (1709–11) and the Spectator, many of them actually conceived within clubs and coffeehouses, explicitly adopted the club as a model for critical practice. Although these publications ostensibly heralded a new spirit of public and egalitarian discourse, they also echoed the homosocial ethos of club life by propagating negative stereotypes of female sociability and critical judgment. Chapter 2 demonstrates that the enduring trope of critical collectivity grew out of an eighteenth-century culture of male sociability, a fact reflected in the periodical’s discursive practices: its use of club dialogues as

a structure for critical verdicts, rhetorical appeal to the virtual coffeehouse constructed through its readership, and direct attacks on women who attempted to become part of the institution. In the work of female critics like Eliza Haywood and Delarivier Manley, we can discern strategic attempts to overcome the prohibitions, professional rituals, and practices that the “social text” of criticism had naturalized. Importantly, the account presented in this chapter does not treat female critics as categorically excluded from the world of eighteenth-century criticism. Indeed, the emerging critical establishment seems to have simultaneously invited and refused the participation of women, and this discursive tension would yield innovative rhetorical approaches, on the part of both male and female critics, to the task of authorizing critical judgment. Chapter 3 builds upon this concept of discursive tension by considering the gender politics of the nineteenthcentury critical dialogue. In the early part of the century, the social life of criticism was distinguished at once by the consolidation of new literary communities and a constant threat that those communities might be wrought asunder by intense intellectual and political rivalries. This understanding of nineteenth-century criticism has surfaced intermittently in critical writing from William Hazlitt to the present day, for instance in the work of Mark Shoenfield, who suggests that the periodical industry “by virtue of its internal competition and goal to inscribe the whole of society, institutionalized the principle of colliding social languages within its writing and production methods.”53 These “social languages” not only collided when different periodical cohorts engaged in rhetorical sparring matches; they often collided within the same publication and even within the same column of text. This discursive tension would manifest with special force in the periodical’s engagement with aspiring female critics, who would be torn between engaging in intellectual warfare—thus claiming and Page 19 →undermining their critical authority in a single gesture—or occupying the place of “proper” ladies, a move equally calculated to subdue their influence. Adopting the work of Anna Jameson as a touchstone, chapter 3 demonstrates how nineteenth-century female critics innovated on the dialogic structure of criticism, exposing these gendered scripts as what Georg Simmel would call “pure escape” from real social life and thus, at their core, fruitless critical efforts.54 In place of these social scripts, Jameson recommends a critical approach that takes dialogue as an opportunity to engage in sociological “play forms,” rendering the work of criticism synonymous with free, heterosocial, and recursive social engagement. Chapter 4 turns from the critical dialogue to a more popular form of intellectual sociability: the literary gathering or salon. Considering the work of a writer who has often been singled out for her interest in community, I explore how George Eliot both built upon and complicated the dialogic tradition articulated by Jameson by imagining a more heterogeneous field of ideas in which conflict and antagonism was not merely tolerated but actually welcomed. For Eliot, the sociological work of Jeremy Bentham, J. S. Mill, and Herbert Spencer was of vital importance, helping her to develop a socioscientific idiom for assessing the critical networks and coteries of her own time. Inspired especially by Spencer’s understanding of heterogeneity and differentiation as articulated in Social Statics (1851), Eliot identifies the woman writer not only as vital to the “law of progress” and cultivation of social bonds but as the originator of a more progressive sociology of criticism. Of course, Eliot’s understanding of critical “classification” also presented certain problems for the female critic. As women were increasingly invited to join literary clubs and organizations designed to advance their professional standing, these efforts raised questions about how women should conduct themselves in a professional setting. The literature discussing female critics and journalists at this time tends to demonstrate an interest in classifying these new members of the profession, often labeling them as mannish, unsexed, or antisocial. In chapter 5, I consider how Eliza Lynn Linton and Vernon Lee, often regarded as antisocial and even antifeminist writers, attempted to resist and reform the problematic classification of the female critic in the final decades of the century. Elaine Showalter has famously suggested that the fin de siГЁcle was characterized by a “battle within the sexes”—a tension between a model of clear, constant, and biologically determined sexual difference and the prospect of a more expansive, indeterminate spectrum of identity categories.55 To some extent, the work of Linton and Lee would seem Page 20 →to reinforce such a claim. Yet if Showalter’s understanding of “sexual anarchy” reflects a Victorian wariness of this departure from normative identity categories, these critics interpret discursive tension as a generative force, embracing uncertainty and bordercrossing as a source of critical insight and social progress. Anticipating the work of contemporary theorists of

gender, Linton and Lee sought to transcend the categories of sex and gender, promoting a model of intellectual sociability that depended upon fragmentation, flexibility, and intersectionality. Founding any kind of community on the basis of opposition, dissent, or difference necessarily entails certain risks. As I suggest in the epilogue, the historical case studies explored here provide crucial insight into how we might begin to understand the discursive tensions of our own historical moment—a time when the community of feminist critics is often regarded as under threat of dissolution. Indeed, one of the greatest challenges of writing this book has been balancing a desire to acknowledge tensions, uncertainties, and fluidities while depending upon a critical idiom that resists such fluidity. Speaking of “women’s writing” today inevitably raises eyebrows. Now represented abundantly in syllabi, academic departments, and popular literature, women’s writing is regarded by some as so ubiquitous that it has become passГ©. Familiarity has, in some cases, bred complacency and indifference. Conversely, scholars in a variety of fields maintain that accepting the monolithic category of “woman writer” threatens to diminish important differences among women or to reinforce gender as the most significant component of one’s subjectivity—more important than racial, sexual, socioeconomic, or regional contingencies. Seen this way, the appellation “woman writer” risks ghettoizing works by female authors or rendering any connection to a larger community of thinkers practically illegible. This position reaches as far back as the eighteenth century. As Hannah More noted in 1799, when female authors are regarded strictly in light of sex and gender, “their highest exertions will probably be received with the qualified approbation, that it is really extraordinary for a woman.”56 Whether one believes that women’s writing has run its course as a field of study or that feminist values can be said to have triumphed only when women’s writing ceases to be labeled as such, both approaches reflect an anxiety about how to speak of gender in a world that is sometimes presumed to be “post-identity politics.” In my approach to this problem, I draw upon the work of Amanda Anderson. In The Way We Argue Now (2005), Anderson suggests that a growing wariness of the subject in literary theory has restricted the ability of thinkers to engage in the Page 21 →very important work of self-reflection, a move that has in turn arrested the development of theoretical inquiry. Accordingly, as Anderson puts it, “highly constrained sociological forms have governed the analysis of subjectivity and personal experience in literary and cultural studies after poststructuralism.”57 In response, Anderson recommends a model of discursive exchange that depends upon intersubjectivity. Whereas JГјrgen Habermas posited reason as the driving force of communicative ethics, Anderson insists: “The regulative ideal of mutual understanding must be enlarged and recast so as to embrace both the concreteness of otherness and the indeterminacy of social identities and relations.”58 Productive intellectual engagements depend, that is to say, upon the uncertainty of social relations, which must be constantly negotiated through a politics of dialogue and empathy. Seen this way, the history of the female critic is not teleological, moving consistently and inexorably toward victory; it is the story of an always evolving network of social relationships, frictions, investments, and interests. The terms of the discussion—“woman,” “gender,” “criticism”—were not fixed in the nineteenth century any more than they are today. Just as criticism was negotiating its own discursive boundaries, so too were female critics engaged in an ongoing negotiation of their cultural and professional status. Then, as now, these terms were an unremitting source of discussion, deliberation, and controversy. This does not mean merely comparing and contrasting a select circle of female critics, only to shrug our shoulders in perplexity. The critics discussed in this volume make very pointed arguments about the relationship between gender and intellectual sociability, but they also assume a range of positions. They scrutinize and debate the viability of “woman writer” as a cultural category, the ideology of separate spheres, the promise of intersectionality and its limits, the costs and benefits of institutional support, and much more. The critics of the past faced many of the same questions that scholars of gender face today, and they are by no means questions with simple answers. Is the term “woman writer” a boon or a hindrance to the feminist project? How does gender intersect with other contingencies—like national, sexual, or political affiliation—in the work of literary criticism? Is it better to preserve a discrete tradition of women’s writing with its own lineage, rhetorical strategies, and interests? Or should women seek to join a tradition forged in large part by male writers? The “way we argue now,” it would seem, is not so different from the way we argued then.

The following account tracks the social fictions that were associated with female critics, focusing especially on how women writers imaginedPage 22 → themselves (in literary essays, periodical reviews, visual media, and even works of fiction) as participants in complex networks of literary exchange. For many aspiring female critics, negotiating this world meant discussing, critiquing, and even reinventing the most prominent intellectual assemblies of the day. In other words, female aspirants vied not only against the logistical challenges of acquiring professional recognition: their experiences were shaped by the rhetorical and ideological tensions of social life itself. By confronting these tensions, we might begin to reassess where the feminist critic stands in relation to the intellectual communities of our own moment—a moment so often torn between the desire simultaneously to embrace and to transcend difference. Although establishing a sustained dialogue between the past and present is beyond the scope of this study, I hope at least to provide us with the material for imagining such a dialogue. While charting the historical experiences and insights of the female critic, the following chapters are buttressed by an interest in seeing literary scholars today engage in a serious examination of their own origins and practices. In the spirit of the account that follows, I would like to think of our task in light of George Eliot’s advice to women writers in an 1857 review: that we engage in a rigorous and continual process of “self-criticism.”59 It is the aim of this book to explore how the female critic negotiated her place within the communities of the past and, in so doing, to illuminate questions we continue to reflect on to this day.

Page 23 →

Chapter 2 The Critic as Clubman Origins of the Social Life of Criticism In Fanny Burney’s The Witlings (1779), Lady Smatter’s nephew Beaufort offers the following dubious assessment of his aunt’s literary salon: My good aunt has established a kind of club at her house, professedly for the discussion of literary subjects; & the set who compose it are about as well qualified for the purpose, as so many dirty cabin boys would be to find out the longitude. To a very little reading, they join less understanding & no judgement, yet they decide upon books & authors with the most confirmed confidence in their abilities for the task.1 The charge is a familiar one: like so many eighteenth-century satires of female assemblies, Burney’s play represents the clubwomen as laying claim to a form of intellectual sociability they ultimately fail to realize. The members of the Esprit Club are, true to its name, more remarkable for their vivacity than for the substance of their utterances. Hence, Censor remarks that while Lady Smatter, “from the shallowness of her knowledge, upon all subjects forms a wrong judgement, Mrs. Sapient, from extreme weakness of parts, is incapable of forming any.”2 Intellectual colloquy serves as an excuse for coming together into a community of thinkers, but the women are so preoccupied with performing wit Page 24 →that any real critical exchange becomes impossible. When Lady Smatter counts herself as “among the critics” and claims to “love criticism passionately, ” her account is accordingly undermined by the fact that she finds the task of forming judgments taxing and is “ready to fling all [her] books behind the fire.”3 The merits and frailties of the “fair sex” was a recurring subject in drama, fiction, poetry, and other forms of public discourse throughout the century. All too often, the woman writer entered the eighteenth-century imagination much as Phoebe Clinket enters the stage in Three Hours After Marriage (1717): “writing, her head-dress stain’d with ink, and pens stuck in her hair,” her maid trailing behind “bearing a writingdesk on her back.”4 While the “proper lady” was regarded as a moral exemplar, women writers were frequently maligned for their “gullibility, their pride in nonexistent learning, and their belief that women are mentally capable of studying philosophy or writing plays.”5 Popularly deemed a kind of deformity, sin, or mental defect, learning in women was often regarded as a threat to the eighteenth-century feminine ideal, leading Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to advise that her granddaughter conceal the “learning she attains, with as much solicitude as she would hide crookedness or lameness.”6 Burney’s depiction of the Esprit Party would seem, by this logic, to be very much in keeping with prevailing stereotypes of intellectual women. Here, as elsewhere in eighteenth-century literature, the breakdown of female community is suggestively conflated with the deficiency of female judgment. Although circles of learned women were sometimes celebrated in the eighteenth century, they were often ridiculed for attempting to practice a form of intellectual sociability deemed beyond their purview.7 Setting up as critics with literary networks of their own, these women seemed to perform a mere travesty of more recognized and public forums of intellectual collectivity. If we are to understand how gender politics informed the social life of criticism in the nineteenth century, we must first consider the relationship between the eighteenth-century social landscape and the critical ethos that took shape within its precincts. Tracing the origins of the “periodical club,” its complicated gender politics, and responses to it on the part of female critics, this chapter suggests that critiques of female sociability became, from the eighteenth century on, part of larger attack on female judgment and critical acumen. Critical discourse at this time absorbed the language, rituals, and rhetorical structures associated with a social world that was predominantly and self-consciously masculine in orientation: the world of voluntary associations,Page 25 → clubs, and coffeehouses. Despite the reality that women inhabited and actively participated in public discourse, the

business and discursive practice of literary criticism came to be aligned with a rhetoric of male sociability that was announced in both the form and substance of critical writing. As they asserted the authority to judge, the critical collectivities imagined within the pages of the eighteenth-century periodical both appealed to and undermined the sociable practices of the female critic. From this point forward, the female critic would vie not only against practical impediments (for instance, the challenge of acquiring an education or maintaining financial independence); as she navigated the politics of belonging to such a profession, she would also vie against a social world that yoked critical judgment to deeply conflicted views of female sociability.

Virtual Networking: Periodical Clubs and the Public Sphere Before turning to eighteenth-century portrayals of the female critic, it is important to establish two important facts about critical writing: that it bears and has always borne a direct correlation to the social world from which it emerged, and that this connection was visibly reflected in the eighteenth-century periodical club. As we shall see, the prominence of male collectivity as a critical trope stemmed in large part from an effort to supplement and even supplant the purportedly democratic model of intellectual sociability embodied by the eighteenth-century club or coffeehouse. These fictional communities sought to advance a new form of critical discourse—one that aspired to the creation of an inclusive and far-reaching network of participants and yet was bound by the social investments of the extratextual world. By the dawn of the eighteenth century, the system of court patronage that had supported literary men of the past began to give way to a more diffuse associational network converging in the coffeehouse or club. For aspiring and seasoned writers alike, these spaces became sites of literary networking and collaboration where established authors could engage in “a free interchange of ideas” and neophytes could secure patrons.8 The club was, in effect, a “precursor of the modern office,” the backbone of what Peter Clark has called a distinctly British “associational world.”9 This development would carry special weight for writers in the nineteenth century, who characterized the budding network of clubs and coffeehouses as a watershed in the history of English letters. As Tom Page 26 →Taylor remarked in an 1857 article on the early history of English clubs, “Every profession, trade, class, party had its favourite Coffee-house.В .В .В . To these Coffee-houses men of all classes, who had either leisure or money, resorted to spend both; and in them, politics, play, scandal, criticism, and business, went on hand-in-hand.”10 Attracting men from diverse backgrounds—“a strange variety of social combinations,” as Edward Forbes Robinson would put it in 1893—these assemblies became important sites of conversation and intellectual networking.11 In his 1866 volume Club Life of London, John Timbs went so far as to describe the emergence of London’s clubland as a resurrection of the civic ideals embodied in the Greek symposia: the club was often imagined to be the very crux of Augustan culture.12 This associational network embodied the values of a new Britain that was, at least in principle, less invested in vertical power structures than committed to a culture of public knowledge and debate. It is for this reason that so many scholars in recent years have associated the coffeehouse with the rise of the bourgeois public sphere. As Habermas famously observes in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1964), Britain, France, and Germany witnessed a burgeoning of new social formations between 1680 and 1730: the coffeehouse, the salon, and the Tischgesellschaften. The coffeehouse in particular was imagined to be a space accessible to men of different backgrounds where the focus on rational discussion and disregard for social status cultivated “a certain parity of the educated.”13 Through a process of collaboration and exchange, patrons of these institutions could collectively determine matters of “public interest,” a task traditionally assigned to the clergy, aristocracy, or the state. In theory, the public sphere, like the coffeehouse, was an all-inclusive and essentially classless social formation. In reality, such establishments hardly lived up to this model. If sometimes characterized as centers of learning and cultivation, coffeehouses and clubs were also deprecated as sites of debauchery and disorder.14 Ned Ward’s The London Spy (1700) is unsparing in its critique of coffeehouse patrons: There was a rabble going hither and thither, reminding me of a swarm of rats in a ruinous cheesestore. Some came, others went; some were scribbling, others were talking; some were drinking

(coffee), some smoking, and some arguing; the whole place stank of tobacco like the cabin of a barge.15

Page 27 →For Ward, as for so many Britons at the time, the coffeehouse was a site of unnatural, frenetic stimulation, hardly a space where culture and civility were likely to flourish. The multiplicity of voices and discourses that some regarded as the chief virtue of the coffeehouse promoted its reputation as “an ultimately disorganizing site” that threatened to abolish any possibility of “a unified ethical perspective.”16 The ideal of an all-inclusive public sphere was thus always overshadowed by a fear that inclusiveness and diversity of opinion might breed social chaos. The risks of such open forums to some extent served as a discursive rationale for the early periodicals. Coffeehouses typically maintained subscriptions to several papers as a way of inducing patrons to linger and spend money. Indeed, Habermas himself points to organs of criticism like the Tatler as natural extensions of this impulse, mirroring the dialogic function of the public sphere while also helping to document, extend, and provoke free and unfettered discourse among equals.17 The coffeehouse was virtually synonymous with print culture from its very inception, as the title of one 1672 satire, The Coffee-House, or News-monger’s Hall, suggests. To be sure, the epithet “News-monger’s Hall” also reflects the unmistakable tensions that characterized the relationship between the critics and sites of public colloquy. While they frequently worked hand in hand to shape public opinion, the coffeehouse and the periodical represented competing models of intellectual exchange. In 1728, for instance, an anonymous group of coffeehouse proprietors issued a pamphlet, The Case of the CoffeeMen of London and Westminster, in which they complained about the high cost of maintaining multiple newspaper subscriptions for their patrons. What is most noteworthy about this publication is the rhetorical angle adopted by its authors. Despite the financial interests that would seem to underlie the position of the coffee-men, they insisted that the presence of interloping newsmongers threatened the integrity of the coffeehouse community. According to the coffee-men, news writers were not legitimate members of their circle: they were gate-crashers who would eavesdrop on private conversations, print information not intended for public consumption, and spread unconfirmed gossip. In addition to overcharging the coffeehouse proprietors, then, the early critics also violated its ethos of polite, candid, social discourse. In order to restore civility to the coffeehouses, the coffee-men proposed generating their own publications to be authored collectively by their clientele: “The Coffee-Houses being the Grand Magazines of Intelligence, the Coffee-Men, by the due Execution of this Design, will be Page 28 →better able to furnish the Town with NewsPapers, than any other Persons whatever.”18 The newspapers promptly responded with their own pamphlet, claiming that the coffeehouses actually depended upon them to attract patrons: “[T]he Papers mutually beget Company, and Company Papers; and the Masters of these Houses wisely consider one as the Occasion of the other.”19 Although the coffee-men were not successful in producing their own papers, it is telling that what was essentially a business dispute finally took the form of a discussion about which institution was more central to the civic and social life of consumers.20 In effect, the early periodical situated itself as the inclusive and ideal “public sphere” that clubs and coffeehouses were increasingly unable to realize. It would do so by conspicuously drawing upon forms of male sociability and, perhaps most explicitly, by presenting critical judgment as the product of a collective body or “periodical club.”21 Over time, the coffeehouse became not only a space where periodicals were consumed and discussed but also a discursive model for sociable criticism repeatedly invoked in the periodical’s form and content. The Mercurius Eruditorum (1691) claimed to present “News from the Learned World” through dialogues among “a society of gentlemen,” as did the Delphick Oracle (1719–20).22 The Grub Street Journal (1730–37) was managed by a “SocietyВ .В .В . composed of such learned and worthy Members, as have produced the best of Books themselves, and done what in them lay to suppress the bad.”23 Presenting themselves as a society of humane critics, the writers denounced those writing purely out of “Malice,” regarding them as individuals who have “neither the reasoning of Men of Sense, nor the Style of polite Men, nor the sincerity of honest Men, nor the humanity of Gentlemen, or Men of Letters.”24 The Grub Street Society presented its organization as an antidote to the mendacious, unrefined, and often irrational judgments of the sham

critic; in a word, the periodical grounded its authority in clubbable virtues, while challenging the real coffeehouses and clubs for their inability to sustain those values.25 In this case, the standards for admission to the periodical club and the authority to judge became one and the same, establishing a direct link between gendered forms of public sociability and the emerging practice of critical writing. Many early papers reinforced that link by presenting arguments not as disquisitions but rather as conversations among a fictional cast of characters, often explicitly identified in a dramatis personae. The practice of including a dramatis personae protected the identity of authors, ensuring their freedom to express views that might otherwise be deemed seditiousPage 29 → or controversial. But perhaps more importantly, it endowed the reviewer with an authoritative and uncanny appeal, what Josiah Conder called in 1811 “the mysterious sanction of anonymous power.”26 Despite the fact that individual essays were published anonymously, a practice that remained true for many of the major journals and reviews until the second half of the nineteenth century, the periodical was able to cultivate a “vigorous cult of assumed personality” and to recall the collective spirit of the coffeehouse under the aegis of the editorial “We.”27 A number of early periodicals, including the Observator (1704–9), the Athenian Gazette (also known as Athenian Mercury, 1691–97), and the aptly titled Humours of a Coffee-House (1707), followed suit, presenting a wide array of subject matter in the form of fictional conversations among cultivated clubmen.28 Some, like the Athenian Mercury, innovated on the dialogic form by soliciting contributions from readers, who could directly participate in these debates by submitting letters to the editor. Following this innovation, the periodical became a kind of virtual coffeehouse where readers, contributors, editors, and correspondents could, at least in theory, mingle freely. Later in the century, Edinburgh’s Mirror Club adopted a similar practice in two successive publications, the Mirror (1779–80) and the Lounger (1785–87). The Mirror, a collaborative effort headed by Henry Mackenzie, opened its first number by comparing periodical publishing to a social debut where “a stranger is introduced into a numerous company.”29 The Lounger, also edited by Mackenzie, repeatedly hearkens back to this model of sociable criticism, going so far as to publish a fictional letter in which a member of the Mirror Club takes issue with the new journal for abandoning the club motif: [T]here is one particular in which I am apt to believe, that we the members of the Mirror Club possessed an advantage over the author of the Lounger. You, Sir, if I mistake not, conduct your work single and alone, unconnected with any person whatever. We, Sir, were a Society, consisting of a few friends, closely united by long habits of intimacy.30 For the writer of this letter, the process of composition is both more enjoyable and more successful when conducted through a meticulous course of revision and peer review. Indeed, by this account the Mirror Club was so successful as a collaborative “Society” that readers were sometimes given to believe that it was “the joint production of all the men of letters in Scotland.”31 Accordingly, the Mirror Club never limitedPage 30 → its membership to the official roster; at least from the perspective of this correspondent, it was the nucleus of a much wider community of educated Scots. At a time when Scottish writers were frequently the subjects of nationalist satires, the Mirror Club and its periodical productions advertised Scotland as a vibrant center of literary culture, helping to cultivate a national community that would more closely approximate Habermas’s model of the public sphere. In principle, then, the periodical “miscellany” was a manifestation of the collective spirit embodied by the coffeehouse. Even publications that did not explicitly align themselves with the coffeehouse tradition entered into this spirit of collectivity by responding to and incorporating material from other magazines and journals. The Gentleman’s Magazine (1731–1907), for instance, abandoned the use of fictional eidolons but preserved the essential format of the miscellany by reporting on the leading periodicals of the day. Bringing together a range of publications—including the Craftsman (1726–47), the London Journal (1719–44), the Universal Spectator (1728–46), Applebee’s Journal (1720–26), the Free Briton (1730–33), Read’s Journal (1718–31), the Hyp-Doctor (1730–41), and the Grubstreet Journal (1730–37)—into a common intellectual forum, the Gentleman’s Magazine presented to its readers a virtual coffeehouse where they could

encounter a wide selection of texts and discourses. The club was so important, in fact, that some periodicals placed it literally before anything else—that is, on their frontispieces. The frontispiece to the 1788 edition of the Spectator, for example, features a cohort of jovial clubmen gathered around a table, smoking, drinking, and conversing (figure 2). As these examples plainly illustrate, Britain’s earliest critical organs were overwhelmingly invested in the culture of club sociability that had helped to popularize them. Nor was the link between these publications and club life merely superficial. The periodicals capitalized on the club ethos as a way of entertaining, cultivating a broad base of readers, and establishing print media as a vehicle for social reform. The dialogic format of the early periodical—the inclusion of dialogues among fictional contributors, as well as between editors and subscribers—mimicked a form of social intercourse that would have been familiar to most readers and established the periodical’s reputation as a more fluid, dynamic, and egalitarian forum. In one of the most salient instances of art holding a mirror up to nature, the eighteenth-century periodical would gradually come not only to adopt as its own the club’s ethos of intellectual sociability but actually to supplant the club as a fulcrum of moral and intellectual authority. Figure 2: Francis Hayman, frontispiece, The Spectator (London: Payne, Rivington, et al., 1788) Page 31 →

Gendering Discourse: Collectivity and Female Judgment In her 1858 essay “On the Adoption of Professional Life by Women,” Bessie Rayner Parkes writes: “Whoso remembers the allusions to women in the вЂTatler,’ the вЂSpectator,’ and even in the вЂRambler,’ will acknowledge the truth of the assertion.В .В .В . It was time that women should take up the pen, if only to purify the young periodical press which delighted in such a topic of abuse.”32 As a critic and cofounder of theВ English Woman’s JournalВ (1858–64), Parkes was alarmed at how quickly the “young periodical press” had turned to satires of the female sex as its stock-in-trade. To be sure, if the “periodical club” sought to address the disorderly conduct of the coffeehouse by promoting a more free and equitable form of intellectual congress, its treatment of women who wished Page 32 →to participate in those conversations often seemed to call that agenda into question. As we shall see, the relationship between criticism and femininity was a complicated one in the eighteenth century. In an effort to defend the “virtual coffeehouse” represented by these publications, critics frequently called upon forms of female collectivity, sometimes citing women as the arbiters of taste while at other times labeling irrational discourse as feminine. Female sociability thus served as a rhetorical tool that could be strategically invoked to circumscribe the authority of the critics, while at the same time frustrating the efforts of female aspirants. Even as print media sought to rival or replace the discursive structures of the real world, it also mirrored—and even amplified—the problems endemic to that world by absorbing unstable and sometimes contradictory approaches to gender. By calling upon gendered models of sociability, the new social life of criticism reproduced precisely those hierarchical arrangements it claimed to resist. Certainly, it would be misleading to label the eighteenth-century public sphere as entirely “masculinist” in orientation.33 The once static division between a masculine public sphere and a feminine private or “domestic” sphere is now widely recognized to be untenable. As Amanda Vickery has pointed out, it is vital that we “extend this definition of the public sphere of politics further still to include the supposedly вЂprivate’ world of family connections and friendship networks—within which political ideas were debated and new social practices played out.”34 The mere presence of periodical literature at the tea table testifies to a permeable barrier between the two spaces.35 Perhaps more importantly, the model of intellectual congress instantiated by the periodical club was largely grounded in feminine and ostensibly private values. As Moyra Haslett observes, “The most significant response to Habermas’s apparent exclusion of women from the public sphereВ .В .В . is the reminder that the вЂmasculine’ public sphere was always feminised and indeed came to be constituted through female participation.”36 The ethos of the club or coffeehouse was, at least in principle, predicated upon a standard of conduct that “would not give offence to the most polite and refined women.”37 If women were discouraged from participating in certain forms of public discourse, they were also curiously implicated in the new culture of sociability.38

Habermas’s feminist critics are therefore right to point out that the public sphere was not wholly masculine in practice; yet the fact that eighteenth-century sources so frequently represent the public sphere as such bespeaks a telling discord between historical fact and representation.Page 33 → The hypermasculinized rendering of the critical collective in eighteenth-century literature reflects a heightened anxiety—what Dror Wahrman would characterize as “gender panic”—about the various ways in which femininity threatened to define critical practice.39 The world of public discourse represented by the coffeehouse and eventually by the periodical was not, that is to say, exclusively masculine or universally hostile to female participants. Nevertheless, it is important that we recognize the public sphere as a social imaginary frequently invoked in eighteenth-century literature and almost always represented as a space that could or should be masculine.40 Thus, despite recent and productive challenges to the idea that the eighteenth century was governed by a “separate spheres” ideology, the belief in separate spaces for men and women was, at the very least, one that was debated and often asserted in imaginative literature. In the words of Richard Steele, it was “very natural for a man who is not tuned for Mirthful meetings or Assemblies of the fair sex, to delight in that sort of conversation which we find in Coffee Houses.”41 Even the most positive appraisals of women’s critical judgment reflect ambivalence regarding the scope and influence of female sociability. In his 1742 piece “Of Essay-Writing,” David Hume proclaimed women to be “Sovereigns of the Empire of Conversation,” a sentiment that many of his contemporaries echoed.42 Women’s combined talent for hospitality, sensibility, and conversation, Hume proposes, qualifies them to be the most effective judges, producers, and arbiters of cultural knowledge. In yoking this new form of intellectual sociability to female judgment, he makes an argument that at first appears to be progressive: To be serious, and to quit the Allusion before it be worn thread-bare, I am of Opinion, that Women, that is, Women of Sense and Education (for to such alone I address myself) are much better Judges of all polite Writing than Men of the same Degree of Understanding; and that ’tis a vain Panic, if they be so far terrify’d with the common Ridicule that is levell’d against learned Ladies, as utterly to abandon every Kind of Books and Study to our Sex. Let the Dread of Ridicule have no other Effect, than to make them conceal their knowledge before Fools, who are not worthy of it, nor of them.43 Hume draws here on a popular eighteenth-century argument aligning femininity with feeling and a more refined palate for matters of aesthetic and social value. As Robert W. Jones observes, “The transposition of вЂtaste’ as a discursive subject, from the academy to the coffee-table, was a major Page 34 →event of the eighteenth century. It is evidenced in countless aesthetic dialogues and treatises of the period and almost always takes femininity as the anchor for aesthetic judgment.”44 But if the emotional sensitivity of women situated them as astute judges of aesthetic commodities, it also marked them as ill-equipped for impartial critique. It thus comes as little surprise that Hume’s work—like so many eighteenth-century conduct manuals—could simultaneously celebrate women as the guardians of taste and yet deem them unqualified to evaluate books of devotion and gallantry, both subjects presumably so close to a woman’s heart as to cloud her critical judgment.45 Moreover, even as Hume recognizes the potentially improving influence of female judgment on the social body, his remarks reflect a curious ambivalence: if women might elevate critical standards, the stigma against female judgment is so insuperable that women of sense have little choice but to recoil from social converse. The impulse revealed in Hume’s essay is, in many respects, representative of a larger trend: the culture of eighteenth-century letters did not explicitly deny or welcome female critical consciousness, but instead existed in a state of discursive tension, frequently both sanctioning and refusing women’s authority to judge in the same breath. For instance, despite its staunchly homosocial frontispiece, the Spectator openly proclaimed that “there are none to whom this Paper will be more useful, than the female World.”46 On the one hand, periodicals like the Spectator seemed to invite female participation in such conversations, thereby laying claim to a democratic ethos that the real coffeehouses lacked. The club’s professed status as a site of cultivation and respectability was in large part grounded in principles “associated with and derived from the construction of femininity: politeness, virtue, orderliness, propriety, decorum.”47 On the other hand, the authority of such publications was frequently

based upon a claim that coffeehouses and clubs had become sites of frenetic, effeminate sociability. The coffeehouse’s culture of idle talk gradually came to be aligned with negative stereotypes of women. In News from the Coffee-House (1667), these sites of critical engagement are represented as a serious threat to the masculinity of the clientele: “Here Men do talk of every Thing, / With large and liberal Lungs, / Like Women at a Gossiping, / With double tyre of Tongues.”48 Even as the clubmen are assailed for their cattiness and vulgarity, this critique of the coffeehouse hinges on a more pointed attack on female sociability: by this logic, the men who attend such establishments are so coarse and unruly that they are considered to be little better than women. This striking rhetorical move—the labeling as feminine a form of association that Page 35 →had once been imagined as exclusive and masculine—would become a signature move of the periodical club as it sought to replace the physical coffeehouse as a site of intellectual and social improvement. As coffeehouse culture came under fire over the course of the eighteenth century, this two-pronged approach to female incursions into public discourse became more and more common. Paradoxically, the feminization of critical discourse would become for the eighteenth-century periodical both a source of rhetorical leverage and an object of censure: it was a force to be at once welcomed and rebuffed. Several factors helped to reinforce the homosocial disposition of the social life of criticism.49 Perhaps most importantly, women were not typically deemed “clubbable,” the term coined by Samuel Johnson to describe men whose amenability and wit qualified them to join his infamous Literary Club.50 In part, this was because women—often lampooned in the newspapers as vain, competitive, frivolous, and meddlesome—were presumed to lack the sociable instincts demanded of a true clubman.51 The New Art and Mystery of Gossiping (ca. 1760), which claims to provide “a genuine Account of all the Women’s Clubs in and about the City and Suburbs of London,” depicts female assemblies not as sites of rational discussion so much as occasions for gossip and scandal (figure 3). Populated by women aptly named for their verbal indiscretions (Mrs. Chitchat, Madame Prittle Prattle, Bess Double Tongue, and Jenny All-Talk, to name just a few) the women’s club proves to be nothing more than “a pack of chattering fools together” where food, tea, spirits, and scandal are consumed to excess.52 As in the case of Lady Smatter’s Esprit Club, their ungovernable conversation promises to dissolve the social bond entirely: the women roundly accuse one another of social and sexual indiscretions, thereby rendering any kind of collaboration or exchange impossible. At the bottom of this critique was a presumption that women were too vain to participate in the social life of criticism.53 The only form of criticism women were fit to practice, it would seem, was the art of the catty insult. In The Adventures of David Simple (1744), Sarah Fielding lampoons “a large Company of Ladies,” each “so desirous to prove their own Judgment, that they would not give one another leave to speak.”54 Never one to mince words, Fielding compares this female assembly to “the Cackling of Geese, or the Gobbling of Turkeys,” and observes that the ladies exclaimed “[t]he words Genius,—and no Genius,—Invention, —Poetry,—fine Things,—bad Language,—no Style,—charming Writing,—Imagery,—and Diction, with many more expressions which swim on the Page 36 →Surface of Criticism.”55 One sees a similar critique of female sociability at work years later in Thomas Rowlandson’s retrospective work, Breaking Up of the Bluestocking Club (figure 4). The participants in this assembly take part in a brutish melee, rending one another’s clothes to the point of indecency. Their faces daubed with makeup, a jar of French cream spilling onto the floor, even the celebrated bluestocking club is represented as a failed social experiment that is more effective in cultivating artifice than dispensing literary judgment. So far from exemplifying the ideal of rational entertainment, these women embody the worst vices of female sociability: vanity, jealousy, and unrestrained emotion. In the end, female clubs thus came to symbolize a deep and abiding suspicion of women’s capacity for intellectual sociability and judgment. If the idea of the homosocial coffeehouse authorized critical judgment for male wits and poets, female assemblies were often represented as simply going through the motions, reflecting precisely that disorderly conduct which the periodical club sought to abolish. Figure 3: Cover illustration, The New Art and Mystery of Gossiping (London, ca. 1760), 10 Figure 4: Thomas Rowlandson, Breaking Up of the Bluestocking Club (1815). Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. Page 37 →

Tattling on Tradition: The Cases of Jenny Distaff and Mrs. Crackenthorpe

The periodical wielded the authority of an elite community united by specialized codes and rituals, but it also provided an ostensibly democratic forum for critical exchange. By virtue of the diversity of voices included within its pages, as well as its practice of inviting readers to peer into the business of the most popular metropolitan clubs, the periodical became a new kind of association that claimed to grant all readers honorary membership. The Tatler—set alongside its successor the Female Tatler (1709–10)—offers an especially illuminating example of this rhetorical strategy and the gender politics that shaped its critical ethos. From the irrepressible Jenny Distaff (who stages an unsuccessful takeover of the Tatler) to the learned Sagissa (who takes snuff in a desperate attempt to appear more like the learned members of the Spectator club), female critics became objects of opprobrium in the emerging critical organs, despite declarations that the cultural influence of women might promote a more civil, open, and democratic forum.56 While claimingPage 38 → to grant women honorary admission to the social life of criticism, the Tatler ultimately satirized the female critic as a figure whose “unclubbable” character would render a truly inclusive collectivity impracticable. From the beginning of its run, the Tatler consisted of several short columns reporting on the business of the most popular coffeehouses of the time, including White’s, Will’s, and St. James’s. The coffeehouse was an established site of public debate and conversation, and replicating such a community in print was, in one respect, simply good marketing. Yet by printing news from all corners of this social network the Tatler also claimed to transcend the factionalism of coffeehouse culture, thus drawing together an even broader community of thinkers. Although the paper’s chief authors, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, were “confirmed clubmen, tavern-haunters, and coffee-house gossips,” they were careful to differentiate between the coffeehouse wit and the true critic, who was presumably to be found only within the pages of the Tatler.57 Ill equipped for companionship, they argued, the coffeehouse “Critick is a Sort of Puritan in the polite World,” attempting only to purge discourse and never to enrich it: “never a Companion, but always a Censor.”58 The Tatler took as one of its guiding principles a desire to divest criticism of this atomizing impulse and to reinvent it as a legitimate tool of civic humanism. In order to promote this new critical ethos, the Tatler adopted two strategies that would set it apart from the coffeehouse: the promise of real public dialogue untainted by factional politics and the use of entertaining yet instructive fictions. Like so many of its contemporaries, the Tatler incorporated a large cast of fictional contributors, correspondents, and subsidiary characters, including the periodical’s fictive editor, Isaac Bickerstaff. Writing under the shield of a pseudonym, contributors were able not only to preserve their anonymity but also to assume identities vastly different from their own. In so doing, the writers could stage a coffeehouse drama in which the collision of discourses and character types represented an astonishing variety of perspectives and judgments. It also made possible the instantiation of a complex gender politics, one that boldly illustrates the tensions that existed between the periodical club and the female aspirant. Even as the early periodical claimed to address female readers, it recalled their vexed relationship to social life and the intellectual discourses with which it was associated; the periodical’s very existence was predicated both on the authority of a closed circle of clubmen and on the need to translate the private conversations of club life for women who could not participate directly in it. Despite the periodical’s claim that it was reaching out to “the Fair Sex, in whose Page 39 →Honour” the paper is named, the mere fact that it needed to reach out indicates that its managers wished to have it both ways—to preserve the homosocial sanctum of the club while also inviting women to join the fold.59 Attempts to establish the periodical as a guardian of culture and a site of productive criticism were thus marked by a pronounced discursive tension. Although periodicals like the Tatler and the Spectator may be said to have situated women as important constituents of the reading audience, as Kathryn Shevelow has demonstrated, many of them aggressively propagated the view that women should read in order to enhance their suitability as domestic helpmates. The early periodical capitalized on the growing number of women readers by invoking a series of traditional female types—from virtuous matrons and simpering maids to courtesans and spinsters. Effectively holding a mirror up to the female reader, Shevelow observes, these periodicals “were often explicitly designed to play a reformist role, to influence extra-textual practices.”60 Upon the performative stage afforded by the early periodical, then, women were prompted to act out the roles prescribed by custom, so that criticism became didactic and prescriptive rather than dialogic and analytical. In effect, women were invited to join the club so that their behavior might be more effectively policed. Moreover, as the Tatler attempted to circumscribe its function and authority, it undermined the world of the coffeehouse by aligning it with a kind of frenetic effeminacy, a

gesture that tended to reinforce the belief that women could not sustain serious critical engagements. The story of Jenny Distaff demonstrates pointedly how, in a curious twist of fate, the female critic came to be both a mouthpiece and a casualty of the Tatler’s efforts to replace the coffeehouse or club as a site of critical collectivity. In 1709, the Tatler’s fictional editor, Isaac Bickerstaff, went on professional hiatus, entrusting the firm’s management to his half sister Jenny, a young lady who embodies many of the stigmas associated with intellectual women in the eighteenth century (figure 5). Though Jenny is never self-effacing, she certainly recognizes that readers might question her credentials to write for a periodical with such close ties to the social world of the coffeehouse. “It may be thought very unaccountable,” she confesses, “that I, who can never be supposed to go to White’s, should pretend to talk to you of Matters proper for, or in the Stile of, that Place.”61 It is worth noting that Jenny (like her creator, Steele) draws a careful distinction between “Matters proper for” the club (politics, literature, sport, and so forth) and matters composed “in the Stile of” the club. The Tatler certainly fulfilled both charges, providing Page 40 →appropriate conversation pieces for the clubmen and coffeehouse clientele, while also presenting them in a “Stile” that mimicked the discursive conventions of the coffeehouse. Jenny’s anxiety about assuming the role of critic is thus understandable—not having direct access, it is likely that she would lack not only a knowledge of issues current in the clubs but also a native grasp of the club ethos. In one sense, Jenny Distaff helps to extend the Tatler’s campaign against the clubs and coffeehouses as sites of critical judgment. “But tho’ I never visit these publick Haunts,” she adds, “I converse with those who do; and for all they pretend so much to the contrary, they are as talkative as our Sex, and as much at a Loss to entertain the present Company, without sacrificing the last, as we our selves.”62 Culling information from the garrulous clubmen who are so eager to win her admiration, Jenny exposes the club’s ethos of fraternal civility as a mere fantasy. Matters discussed within the club were not to be mentioned elsewhere, every conversation being marked by a tacit seal of confidentiality. The mere fact that Jenny can gain access to the club suggests a breach on the part of the clubmen and renders their claims to solidarity suspect. What is more, in breaking the rules of club sociability, the men are maligned as unruly and prone to gossip, once again aligning them with women like Jenny All-Talk or Mrs. Chitchat. In Tatler 10, Jenny thus lampoons a dissipated gentleman who spends all of his time either gazing in a mirror or in conversation at St. James’s Coffeehouse, where he remains “passive of all that goes through [his mind], without entering into the Business of Life.”63 Jenny indicts the clubman for maintaining a steady apathy to matters of real importance. His penchant for gossip and fashion render him effete, self-indulgent, and indifferent to the forms of public agency and influence that the coffeehouse claims to embody. By contrast, Jenny suggests that if women “had the Liberty of frequenting publick Houses, and Conversations,” they would doubtless surpass their male counterparts.64 The satire of the St. James clubman reflects an ongoing effort on the part of the Tatler to supplant real spaces of intellectual colloquy by framing them as feminized and disorderly forums. On the face of it, Jenny Distaff would seem to be merely a spokesperson for Steele’s own social vision. Although in some respects a stranger to the work of criticism, she nonetheless conveys a clear critique of the associational culture the Tatler wished to displace. At the same time, Jenny’s criticism of the public sphere is curiously self-defeating. Again and again, the Tatler disparages London’s social networks for failing to embody those masculine values the coffeehouses and clubs claimed to promote, and it does so by aligningPage 41 → the clubman with artifice, pettiness, and intellectual vacuity, precisely the qualities that were thought to plague disreputable female assemblies of the day. In effect, Jenny ridicules the clubmen by feminizing them. The columns that seem to delineate Jenny Distaff as an authoritative critic are thus double-edged. If we are captivated by the wisdom of Jenny’s brazen critique of club life, it is worth remembering that her account, like so many others from the period, represents aberrant sociability as feminine. Figure 5: Francis Hayman, frontispiece, The Tatler (London: F. C. and J. Rivington, et al., 1822). Image originally published in 1789. Rather than aligning her with the authoritative male critics of the Tatler, then, Jenny’s lampoon of the effeminate clubman actually calls attention to her own transgressive acts of gender-bending. According to

Bickerstaff, “Jenny’s only Imperfection is an Admiration of her Parts, which inclines her to be a little, but a very little, sluttish.”65 Although Steele uses the term “sluttish” in its archaic sense, as an indication of Jenny’s unkempt appearance, he certainly regards Jenny’s intellectual “Parts” as a liability on the marriage market: Page 42 →Thus my Sister, instead of consulting her Glass and her Toilet for an Hour and half after her private Devotion, sits with her Nose full of Snuff, and a Man’s Nightcap on her Head, reading Plays and Romances. Her Wit she thinks her Distinction; therefore knows nothing of the Skill of Dress, or making her Person agreeable. It would make you laugh to see me often with my Spectacles on lacing her Stays; for she is so very a Wit, that she understands no ordinary Thing in the World.66 From Bickerstaff’s perspective, Jenny’s inclination to pursue a life of learning is part and parcel with her disheveled appearance, and both contribute to her unsexing. Jenny’s problematic transgression of conventional gender roles is clinched by her habit of wearing a man’s nightcap and taking snuff while she writes. Almost literally, the act of criticism transforms Jenny, in the eyes of her half brother, into an unclassifiable, sexless being. Thus, even as Jenny’s penchant for learning proves her to be a suitable understudy for Bickerstaff, she—like so many fictional female characters in eighteenth-century literature—also embodies a kind of “dysfunctional femininity” that renders her an embarrassment to the profession.67 Jenny’s critical acumen becomes, strangely enough, both an asset and a liability for the Tatler. Her social deviance is only compounded by the fact that she wishes to follow her brother’s example: Jenny wants to be a critic. When left to her own devices, Jenny confesses to being “not a little pleas’d with the Opportunity of running over all the Papers in his Closet,” and her short-lived sinecure as author of the Tatler promises to be positively revolutionary.68 So far from serving as an extension of her brother, Jenny regards it as one of her chief responsibilities “to give a right Idea of Things which, I thought, he put in a very odd Light, and some of them to the Disadvantage of my own Sex.”69 Nowhere is this more evident than when Jenny seizes upon Bickerstaff’s “Day-Book of Wit.” Having expounded at length on the “Command of Females” as depicted in popular drama, Jenny excuses herself for reverting continually to the subject of gender: “It is so natural for Women to talk of themselves,” she quips, “that it is to be hop’d, all my own Sex at least will pardon me, that I could fall into no other Discourse.”70 This turns out to be truer than Jenny herself may have suspected, for when she attempts to round out the discussion by sharing a Latin quotation she believes to be “in Contempt of the Critics,” Jenny’s zeal to engage in critical discourse only proves her to be a bad translator.71 The passage Jenny encounters is a selection from Horace’s Ode 1.26: “Tristitiam et Metus / Tradam protectis in Mare Creticum / Page 43 →Portare Ventus.”72 Translated into English, the passage reads: “May the winds blow fear and sorrow to the Sea of Crete.” In other words, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the critics. Jenny naively takes the Latin “Mare Creticum,” (“The Sea of Crete”) to mean “male critic,” thereby exposing her unnatural fixation on critical writing, as well as her determination to provoke a battle of the sexes. The battle, it would seem, is one Jenny was destined to lose. As Armand de la Chapelle, editor of the first French edition of the Tatler aptly notes: “Creticum and critique are two words similar enough to fool a woman who does not understand Latin.”73 Jenny’s failure to grasp this indictment on her own critical ignorance only confirms Bickerstaff’s reservations about female judgment. Her eventual ejection from the critic’s closet is thus endorsed by Steele and buttressed by her exclusion from the discourses of learning upon which the periodical depends. Literally unable to enter the conversation, Jenny is depicted as a deluded and self-promoting overreacher who struggles to understand what will forever remain veiled to her. Indeed, Jenny’s attempt to learn these discourses by infiltrating the literary clubs is what finally leads to her permanent expulsion from them. After perusing Bickerstaff’s papers, Jenny deduces that he is planning to publish a profile of clubmen, beginning with “that Cluster of Wise Heads, as they are found sitting every Evening from the left Side of the Fire at the Smyrna, to the Door.”74 The club described is the Smyrna Coffeehouse, which was frequented by Steele and other contributors to the Tatler. Jenny’s disclosure of this project appears to have been for Bickerstaff a gesture of unwelcome publicity. In his eyes, Jenny’s intention to peer

into the club life of Pall Mall qualifies her as a kind of editorial monster who must be permanently relegated to her proper sphere—a domestic haven far from the intellectual chatter of critics and clubs. After only a few issues, Jenny disappears from the Tatler. The next time we hear of Jenny is when Bickerstaff announces that he has married her off to a sober man of business, appropriately named Tranquillus. As effective as Jenny’s work in the editorial closet may have been, her removal from it is equally instructive: after all, Bickerstaff himself could never articulate the limitations of the female critic as effectively as Jenny’s own performance does. To this extent, Jenny serves both as the mouthpiece of the Tatler’s assessment of the public discourses it sought to supplant and as the author of her own dismissal. Jenny Distaff’s captivating and transgressive personality, as well as her vocal defense of women’s claim to an equal share in the work of criticism, makes it tempting to regard her as a feminist figure, and it is worth Page 44 →noting that despite the Tatler’s frequent satires on women, Steele was sometimes a staunch champion of female education.75 Yet for Steele, the desired outcome of women’s education was not necessarily equal participation in intellectual culture, and his claims on behalf of female education ultimately reveal his fidelity to a somewhat circumscribed vision of eighteenth-century femininity.76 Like so many of his contemporaries, Steele’s approach to the female critic was ambivalent. He felt that female education could be a positive boon to marriage and a distraction from the dangerous diversions that women’s “more Sedentary Life” might otherwise cultivate: “[A] Female Philosopher is not so absurd a Character and so opposite to the Sex, as a Female Gamester; .В .В .В it is more irrational for a Woman to pass away half a dozen Hours at Cards or Dice, than in getting up Stores of useful Learning.”77 Even when he praises women for their facility with language, though, Steele’s remarks slip into the popular stereotype of the gossiping woman: “If the Female Tongue will be in Motion, why should it not be set to go right?”78 Thus, while study was not anathema to femininity, Steele was reluctant to place women in the same intellectual sphere as men, and this is something that he makes clear in the depiction of Jenny Distaff. Even as Jenny delights in attacking the institutions that exclude her, her attacks also set her own aberrant femininity in relief. In short, the Tatler’s critiques of male collectivity and of female judgment are mutually reinforcing. Although Steele’s piece relates a sincere critique of certain forms of club sociability—a critique motivated by the desire to reframe criticism as the business of the periodical—he simultaneously lampoons Jenny Distaff, whose efforts to demonstrate her critical acumen render her not only unfeminine but actually unfit to assume the role of critic. In the years to come, the periodical club would playfully invoke a spirit of male camaraderie, while aspiring female critics—the Jenny Distaffs of the real world—continued to be barred from the editorial closet by elaborate social and literary fictions broadcasting the limitations of female judgment. To assume the “function of critical judge” that Habermas identifies as vital to the operation of the public sphere, women would need to find a way of penetrating the social life of criticism as something other than the fictional creations of male writers.79 In other words, women would have to rewrite the social fictions that sought to exclude them from it. Consciously or not, Steele seems to have made it possible for women writers to imagine what it would mean to assume the position of critical judge. Appearing only three months after Addison and Steele’s Tatler, the Page 45 →Female Tatler (1709–10) presented a direct response to the Tatler’s indictments against the female critic.80 In the initial issues of the Female Tatler, the fictional editor is identified as Mrs. Phoebe Crackenthorpe, “a lady that knows everything.” Like her male counterpart, Isaac Bickerstaff, Mrs. Crackenthorpe boasts that her publication provides a model of collective improvement not guaranteed by metropolitan clubs, coffeehouses, and benefit societies. “The end of satire,” she explains, “is reformation, and this would be of more force than your societies for that purpose, were it duly observed and hearkened to, without being misconstrued defamation.”81 Mrs. Crackenthorpe’s defensive tone—her chiding insistence that readers carefully distinguish between “defamation” and legitimate criticism—links her project to the reformatory aspirations of Addison and Steele, as does her effort to provide an alternative to the voluntary associations of the extratextual world. As a female critic, however, it was especially important that she deflect any suggestion that she was merely a gossiping, ill-tempered woman. Indeed, Crackenthorpe consistently reminds us that the Female Tatler is a novel enterprise and that, though she claims “impartially to laugh at the foibles of both sexes,” her position as a female

critic is a distinguishing feature of the new periodical.82 In the inaugural issue, Mrs. Crackenthorpe authorizes her account by appealing to the original Tatler: “I hope,” she writes, “Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq. will not think I invade his property, by undertaking a paper of this kind, since tatling was ever adjudg’d peculiar to our sex.”83 Rather than contesting the Tatler’s mocking homage to women, which reduces female knowledge to gossip, Mrs. Crackenthorpe reinterprets it as a warrant for her own critical venture. Though still operating within a tradition that aligns feminine discourse with gossip or idle talk, Crackenthorpe’s periodical would take the relationship between women and criticism as a central concern. When other members of the critical community began to attack this new rival, Mrs. Crackenthorpe openly retaliated. In the eleventh issue, she bitterly announces that “several ill-bred critics have reported about town that a woman is not the author of this paper, which I take to be a splenetic and irrational aspersion upon our whole sex.”84 In this passage, Mrs. Crackenthorpe not only dismisses the suggestion that women are incapable of managing a periodical; she turns the traditional gender hierarchy on its head by attributing to women “a finer thread of understanding” and claiming that men have “by an arbitrary swayВ .В .В . kept us from many advantages to prevent our out-vying them.”85 By contrast, she claims, “those ladies who have imbib’d authors, and div’d into arts Page 46 →and sciences have ever discover’d a quicker genius, and more sublime notions.”86 According to this line of argument, it is not the female critic who is unnatural, but rather systematic attempts to suppress her. But what is perhaps most remarkable about Mrs. Crackenthorpe’s response to her critics is the sentence she ultimately passes upon them: “These detractors must be a roughhewn sort of animals that cou’d never gain admittance to the fair sex, and all such I forbid my drawingroom.”87 Just as preceding generations of women writers had been repulsed from the gentlemen’s clubs and editorial closets, Mrs. Crackenthorpe denies her male detractors and “ill-bred critics” from entering the social arena where she transacts business—the female sanctuary of the drawing room. In Mrs. Crackenthorpe’s figuration, the drawing room thus becomes a counterspace to the male coffeehouse or club. Recognizing that critical authority is closely aligned with sociable rituals and an ethos of collective civility, she attacks her enemies on precisely these grounds. The real aim of Crackenthorpe’s paper, however, is to create a society in which men and women are admitted equally into intellectual discussion, and she says as much in the third number of the periodical, where she describes the “society I aim at” as one in which gentlemen are not guided by wit but rather by “learning, judgment and force of reason.”88 “I would have the ladies,” she continues, to relish somewhat above mere tittle-tattle, and tho’ they want the benefit of profound learning, yet conversing with ingenious persons would so far improve their natural parts, as to give ’em a more noble idea of things, and create in ’em at least a value for matters serious and instructive, which would stifle a world of scandal and detraction.89 Ideally for Crackenthorpe, this learned society would be equally open to men and women, and would help to contest popular stereotypes of women as frivolous, sentimental, hysterical, or ignorant. In other words, Crackenthorpe presents a heterosocial community as the only one capable of refuting such charges. As a model, she turns to France, where people “have so complaisant a regard for the fair sex, that they always mix with ’em in conversation, entertain ’em with discourses on every topic, which gives them a short knowledge of the world.”90 By contrast, English ladies retire from dinner apart from the men, passing “half their lives’ time in talking of fans and tea-cups, sugar-tongs, salt shovels and gloves made up in walnutshells.”91 The distinctively genderedPage 47 → space of the tea table becomes, for Crackenthorpe, both a literal and a symbolic measure of the manufactured distance between male and female discourse. Crackenthorpe’s advice apparently went unheeded. She continued to be attacked by critics of both sexes who felt that her sardonic wit perhaps too closely resembled that of her male colleagues; her attempts at bridging the gap between the tea table and the coffeehouse had availed little. In number 51, Crackenthorpe thus announces that she, resenting the affront, offered to her by some rude citizens, altogether unacquainted with her person,

gives notice that she has resigned her pretentions of writing The Female Tatler to a society of modest ladies, who in their turns will oblige the public with what ever they shall meet with that will be diverting, innocent, or instructive.92

Unable to overcome claims that the female critic was (to borrow the words of a Custom House official quoted in number 35) “a flirting queen” or a “scribbling Jade,” the author of the Female Tatler cedes control to a “society” of women who presumably will undertake their task with a deeper fidelity to the gender norms of their time.93 It is telling that the acerbic Mrs. Crackenthorpe is succeeded by a female collectivity that, while presenting a more staid and sober public image to their readers, also constituted a direct response to the predominantly masculine periodical club. Later issues of the Female Tatler are certainly less caustic and more instructive in tone, but one continues to detect vestiges of Crackenthorpe’s progressive impulse. For example, the fictional contributor Emilia writes in number 101: Why should a book or a pen be more appropriate to a man than a woman, if we know how to use them? I can see no reason why they should be denied us in any degree. Twas the tyranny of mankind that condemned us to the glass and needle, or we had sat in parliament long before this time, and perhaps without the assistance of a pack of cards to shorten the time.94 Recognizing the limitations placed upon them as female critics, Emilia carries on Crackenthorpe’s project of interrogating the prevailing arguments against female participation in forms of public colloquy. Ultimately, she would seem to suggest, it is the Female Tatler and the society of Page 48 →ladies at its center that becomes a true model for the inclusive community touted, but only partially fulfilled, by the original Tatler.

A Network of Spies: The Female Spectator The “profile of clubmen” that Jenny Distaff threatened to preview for the public ultimately did find its way into print in the Spectator, which both celebrates and critiques the club as a form of intellectual sociability. Taciturn by nature, the fictive editor Mr. Spectator describes himself as more of a “Looker-on” or “Spectator of Mankind, than as one of the Species.”95 Initially, his aversion to “being talked to, and being stared at” threatens to render him a kind of misanthrope.96 But Mr. Spectator’s introversion also confers on him a power of invisibility, enabling him to penetrate the clubs and coffeehouses of London with ease. We might even think of Mr. Spectator as occupying a position of “cultivated distance,” his lack of affiliation with the majority of clubs giving him unique insight into their social organization.97 As he himself puts it: There is no place of general Resort, wherein I do not often make my appearance; sometimes I am seen thrusting my Head into a Round of Politicians at Will’s, and listening with great Attention to the Narratives that are made in those little Circular Audiences. Sometimes I smoak a Pipe at Child’s; and whilst I seem attentive to nothing but the Post-Man, over-hear the Conversation of every Table in the Room. I appear on Sunday nights at St. James’s Coffee-House, and sometimes join the little Committee of Politicks in the Inner Room, as one who comes there to hear and improve. My face is likewise very well known at the Grecian, the Cocoa-Tree, and in the Theatres both of Drury-Lane and the Hay-MarketВ .В .В .В . In short, where-ever I see a Cluster of People I always mix with them, though I never open my Lips but in my own Club.98 From the very outset, the Spectator was advertised as delivering a comprehensive account of news from across London’s associational network. Yet the Spectator’s relationship to club culture was in many respects a fraught one. On the one hand, the Spectator depended on the club model as a way of authorizing its own verdicts. The paper constituted a new kind of club, one capable of admitting readers into Page 49 →its roster by means of written correspondence. On the other hand, the Spectator continually lampoons and at times subverts coffeehouse culture and its problematic association with “party factionalism,” which would seem to contradict the paper’s commitment to “motives that are rational, virtuous, and aimed at the public good.”99 For the

most part, Addison and Steele take issue with the club for very specific reasons—for its elitism, unnatural uniformity, and lack of moral structure. The Spectator thus aligns itself with one set of club values (fellowship, cultivation, and mutual improvement) while distancing itself from others (indulgence, solipsism, and exclusion). As Paul Trolander and Zeynep Tenger explain, the Spectator club “is not a club of particular kinds, but a masculine version of this generalized civil space that the periodical purports to represent and to construct.”100 In other words, it was a model of intellectual discourse that moved away from the club as a closed literary clique and yet drew on the club for its ethos of civic fellowship. In reality, this “masculine version” of fellowship was every bit as embattled as the social world from which it emerged, often celebrating an inclusive, democratic ethos even as it remained wary of female interlopers. Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator (1744–46) presented an explicit challenge to the discursive tension at the heart of the Spectator club. It is worth noting that Haywood was intimately familiar with Steele and his work and even dedicated her 1724 novel The Surprise to him. Haywood is presumed to have been part of Steele’s cohort during the composition of the Tatler and in later years belonged to a circle of intellectuals gathered around dramatist Aaron Hill, which included James Thomson, John Dyer, Susanna Centlivre, Martha Fowke, and others.101 She was, in other words, intimately involved in and concerned with the most influential literary networks of the time. Accordingly, Haywood’s critical persona realizes early in her periodical endeavors the “absolute necessity” of creating a literary coterie, not unlike the early periodical club.102 She appoints three companions as her coauthors: an elegant wife and female wit, “a widow of quality,” and an educated young lady.103 While careful to acknowledge the individual merits of this select trio, who represent three distinct forms of virtuous femininity, the Female Spectator ultimately proclaims that “whatever productions I shall be favoured with from these ladies, or any others I may hereafter correspond with, will be exhibited under the general title of The Female Spectator.”104 Consequently, all contributions are to be “considered only as several members Page 50 →of one body, of which I am the mouth.”105 The Female Spectator begins, as had its male precursors, with the formation of a “little Club” that spoke as a single voice (figure 6).106 Nonetheless, Haywood’s publication departs significantly from the original Spectator in its manner of acquiring and managing knowledge. Although Juliette Merritt claims that Haywood’s text betrays “an unquestioned confidence in the legitimate and unquestioned authority of vision,” it is clear that the Female Spectator is equally concerned with what women are not permitted to see, as well as with the blatant differences between male and female acts of spectatorship.107 In the Spectator, the editorial persona is a silent onlooker who gathers intelligence by eavesdropping at London’s most popular gathering places. While he remains quietly observant in these public spaces, the original Spectator exercises his own desire for sociability within the pages of the magazine. Strategically restraining his own conversation in unfamiliar venues, he is nevertheless able to infiltrate the clubs owing to his gender and intimate knowledge of the club ethos.108 As he gathers intelligence from all corners of the club world, the male spy uses his information as the basis for his own Spectator club, an organization drawn together by a common desire for privileged knowledge.109 The Female Spectator finds it difficult even to gain entrance to these sites of public discourse, and the knowledge she possesses is presumably acquired at the expense of her feminine virtue, “by a Hurry of promiscuous Diversions.”110 To compensate for her exclusion from the clubs and coffeehouses, the Female Spectator claims to have established a global network of spies whom she regards as “a more effectual way of penetrating into the Mysteries of the Alcove, the Cabinet, or Field, than if I had the Power of Invisibility.”111 Of course, the spies of which she speaks are only spies in name. In truth, this clandestine network is a global community of women who observe the world covertly and from a distance, much as the original Spectator had done. The difference is that for these women, “the Power of Invisibility” is conferred upon them by virtue of their position within the home. As she elevates her own critical project to a global scale, the Female Spectator vindicates female judgment, whether exercised within the home or within the pages of a periodical, by transforming “invisibility” into power. In a word, Haywood presents her own critical project as one that authorizes the female critic, while calling attention to the intersections of traditionally male and female spheres of influence. Haywood reinforces this disparity by confronting a skeptical male Page 51 →reader who remains oblivious to her

critical agenda. In a letter to the editor, dated from White’s Coffee-House, the gentleman expresses his disappointment that her spies have not fulfilled the magazine’s promise to report on international affairs. Whereas Isaac Bickerstaff was appalled by Jenny Distaff’s attempts to peer into the critic’s closet, this reader complains that the Female Spectator lacks the connections she needs in order to successfully infiltrate more serious intellectual circles.Page 52 → “Tho’ I never had any very great Opinion of your Sex as Authors, ” he proclaims, “yet I thought whenever you set up for such, you had Cunning enough to confine yourselves within your own Sphere.”112 The Female Spectator’s “mountainous Promises” thus demonstrate “a Want of Judgment” not only with respect to the demands of an editorial post but to the limitations of her sex.113 If Jenny Distaff had once been cast as a misreader of the masculine discourses she encountered at the Tatler, it is now the male reader who fails to understand Haywood. Rather than recognizing that the magazine’s interest in gender is a matter of global scope and importance, the writer of the letter describes the Female Spectator as “an idle, prating, gossiping old Woman, fit only to tell long Stories by the Fire-side,” demoting her criticism to prurient, idle talk only meant “to be read in Boarding-Schools, and recommended as maxims for the well regulating private Life; butВ .В .В . no way fit for the polite CoffeeHouses.”114 By attributing authoritative knowledge to the public coffeehouse and gossip to the private feminine space of the boarding school, Haywood’s male reader invokes a hierarchy of knowledge based on gendered spaces and institutions. In his view, the Female Spectator has either deliberately misled her readers or revealed herself to be a “Vain Pretender to Things above [her] Reach” by undertaking a project far beyond her purview as a woman writer.115 Figure 6: Remigius Parr, frontispiece, Female Spectator 1, 3rd ed. (Dublin: George and Alexander Ewing, 1747) This reader’s very literal interpretation of the Female Spectator, however, only undermines his indictment on her critical acumen. Unable to penetrate the periodical’s metaphoric tone and texture, he articulates precisely the kind of bias Haywood satirizes.116 Ultimately, Haywood is less interested in chastising the male critic than she is in founding a more genuinely inclusive culture of critique. The final issue of the Female Spectator suggests that future organs of criticism might be more truly heterosocial than either the original Spectator or her own exclusively female assembly. She writes: Close as we endeavour to keep the Mystery of our little Cabal, some Gentlemen have at last found means to make a full Discovery of it. They will needs have us take up the Pen again, and promise to furnish us with a Variety of Topics yet untouched upon, with this condition, that we admit them as Members, and not pretend to the world, that what shall hereafter be produced, is wholly of the Feminine Gender.117 Page 53 →Having been approached by a group of men seeking to play a role in the management of the periodical, the Female Spectator club must come to an end. The dissolution of the female club might well seem to constitute a throwback to the Female Tatler’s society of ladies and assemblies like it, which could exist only under the proviso of male oversight. Still, the men who gain admission to Haywood’s club do not seek to silence female voices but rather to furnish them with a “Variety of Topics yet untouched upon.” In other words, the men do not exactly oversee the work of these female critics so much as collaborate with them. In this way, Haywood realizes even more fully than Mrs. Crackenthorpe the possibility of a heterosocial community of critics. To be sure, this new club continues to be informed by discursive tension. Although she and her companions “have not yet quite agreed on the Preliminaries of this League,” they are “very apt to believe we shall not differ with them on Trifles, especially as one of them is the Husband of Mira.”118 By invoking Isaac Bickerstaff’s advice to Jenny upon her marriage—his hope that “if a TrifleВ .В .В . you were to be above little Provocations”—the Female Spectator underscores Haywood’s acute consciousness of the conventions of female sociability so frequently reinforced in periodical literature at the time.119 Like Jenny Distaff, the Female Spectator had earned a reputation for transgressive behavior and been figuratively “married off” to a group of sober gentlemen. It is a provocative example of what Tedra Osell describes as the “family metaphor”—the practice of establishing familial relationships among the fictional personae of the Tatler and its contemporaries. By deliberately linking these fictional personae through a common genealogy,

Osell suggests, female contributors to these periodicals cultivated a kind of “rhetorical femininity” that can be regarded as both normative and empowering.120 In this case, however, the family model also proves to be a limiting one for women. If Jenny Distaff, the creature of Richard Steele’s imagination, served as a cautionary tale to young ladies aspiring to enter the masculine world of criticism, the Female Spectator recalls the countless other cases in which female aspirants were subjected to the governance of male editors in order to forestall their own critical efforts. As an incipient institution—one that was embedded both materially and rhetorically in the social world—eighteenth-century criticism was constantly negotiating both its own limits and its relationship to the manifold Page 54 →political and cultural discourses that graced its pages. Springing from a vibrant and expanding network of clubs, coffeehouses, and coteries, the periodical afforded a new discursive forum that promised to promote and enrich literary culture for an ever-widening public audience. Like the social life from which it emerged, however, criticism was consistently colored by a factional and exclusionary ethos. In 1791, Eliza Thompson published a poem in the Analytical Review (1788–98) entitled Retaliation; or, The Reviewers Review’d. The focus of Thompson’s satire is a “knot of half learned Scotchmen” who have “set up for critics, and arrogate to themselves the right of dictating to the public what literary productions are worthy their notice, and what are not,” a power more often guided by favoritism, petty rivalry, and bribery than by a genuine concern for the march of intellect.121 Though acknowledging that “satire is by no means the province of a woman,” Thompson’s verse unabashedly repudiates the monopoly these reviewers claimed over the dispensation of literary judgment.122 The insularity of the periodical club—“cramp’d by musty rules” and “Intrench’d in darkness”—constitutes one of its greatest offenses.123 For Thompson, as for so many women writers by the end of the eighteenth century, this company of “snarling Critics” symbolized a larger truth: criticism had become the work of select and learned assemblies, governed by the rules of the sociable world, and marked everywhere by the politics of gender.124 The connection between criticism and social life had a profound impact on the female critic and her sense of professional belonging. In the end, eighteenth-century criticism was characterized neither by a categorical erasure nor by resounding triumph of the woman writer, but rather by a constant tension between the evolving concept of criticism and of the woman writer. As Michel Foucault notes, discourse is not static and prescriptive. Rather than merely encoding power, discourse is also “the power to be seized” and consequently a site of struggle.125 If we understand discourse as a dynamic process—a communicative activity that is always reinventing its subject, direction, and manner of engagement—then it is not enough to say that critical writing does or does not reproduce an already established and essentially static approach to the female aspirant. The relationship between criticism and gender was far more frequently characterized in the eighteenth century by struggle, ambivalence, and discursive strain. We need not choose between a version of literary history that treats women writers as subordinates and one that regards them as equal partners. Instead, we might adopt a historical Page 55 →perspective that recognizes transformations in the intellectual world as a constant negotiation that cannot be classified in terms of victory or defeat, occupation or expurgation. Doing so requires training our attention on the social world that gave rise to eighteenth-century critical discourse and that, as we shall see, precipitated in very material ways its investment in gender politics well into the nineteenth century.

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Chapter 3 The Critic as Interlocutor Anna Jameson and the Politics of Dialogue In his famous 1825 article for the New Monthly Magazine (1814–84), William Hazlitt described the founding of the Edinburgh Review (1802–1929) as a veritable watershed in the history of ideas: The persons who wrote in this Review seemed “to have their hands full of truth,” and now and then, in a fit of spleen or gaiety, let some of them fly.В .В .В . Some of the arrows glanced: others might stick, and in the end prove fatal. It was not the principles of the Edinburgh Review, but the spirit, that was looked at with jealousy and alarm. The principles were by no means decidedly hostile to existing institutions: but the spirit was that of fair and free discussion.1 In the decades preceding Victoria’s accession to the throne, many shared Hazlitt’s vision, treating criticism as a cultural frontline where debate was welcomed as a potential source of reform and innovation. Political agitation in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, the inexorable rise of the periodical press, and the accompanying expansion of the reading and writing public had fostered a new “spirit of the age” that rejoiced in intellectual provocation.2 Amplifying Hazlitt’s remarks just a year later, William Maginn described the founding of the major nineteenth-century critical outlets as a “revolution,” so that “here, too, in Criticism as in Politics,Page 57 → they began to feel, think, and speak like free men.”3 By all accounts, the social life of criticism was marked by ardent and even discordant dialogue—a spirit of intellectual “play” that made it possible to scrutinize and refine real social interactions. But if this spirit of intellectual play made possible a new order of “free men,” it is by no means clear that it afforded the same prospects for the free woman. The “fit of spleen or gaiety” that colored the reviews, not to mention a martial exuberance that exulted in the flinging of rhetorical “arrows,” would naturally have been difficult for women writers to adopt, since anything approaching stridency or rhetorical violence could easily be dismissed as a departure from the model of the “proper lady”—the effusions of an uncontained, irrational, and therefore defective judgment.4 As women entered into spirited and sometimes antagonistic dialogues, many feared that emotional sensitivity, the mainstay of their value as wives and mothers, could easily take a wrong turn and manifest as lewd or unseemly behavior. An 1833 article inВ Fraser’s Magazine, for instance,В praised Letitia Landon for her ability to convey powerful sentiment in verse, while differentiating her from female critics who wrote about more worldly and presumably masculine affairs: “Is she to write of politics, or political economy, or pugilism, or punch? Certainly not. We feel a determined dislike of women who wander into these unfeminine paths; they should immediately hoist a moustache—and, to do them justice, they in general do exhibit no inconsiderable specimen of the hair-lip.”5 Even as women wrote and published criticism, then, they were routinely stymied by claims that nature and experience rendered them unfit for the fraternal spirit celebrated by Hazlitt.6 When women attempted to join the conversation, they were often met with hostility—assailed for venturing into “unfeminine paths”—or ritually set upon a pedestal in a gesture at once reverential and dismissive.7 Although women were not barred from critical dialogue, the impassioned ethos that characterized the social life of criticism was curiously offset by a gender politics that preferred scripted conduct to “fair and free discussion.” In response, female aspirants treated critical dialogues—texts that scripted conversations among both real and fictional critics—as productive spaces where the difference between “masculine” and “feminine” discourse could be reflected, disrupted, and sometimes dismantled.8 These critics were important participants in what Jon Mee terms a “conversable world,” a sphere that prioritized social interaction as an outlet for larger cultural developments, with all of the ideological loose ends that might imply.9 Taking the work of Anna Jameson as a touchstone, this chapter Page 58 →traces the tension between the

discursive “spirit of the age”—especially as reflected in the robust masculinity of the famed Fraserians and the “tavern sages” of Blackwood’s Magazine—and the tradition of the sentimental and solitary woman writer. If her work retains the earmarks of a more conservative approach to gender, Jameson’s writings in the 1820s and 1830s nonetheless situate her as a transitional figure who anticipated the work of her high Victorian successors by endorsing the value of critical dissent and, somewhat unexpectedly, aligning it with the figure of the female critic. Leveraging the power of conversation to reflect and interrogate the nature of real social relations, Jameson did not merely seek to accommodate an existing model of discourse. Rather, she sought to rewrite the social scripts that female aspirants were expected to embrace, resisting both the chivalry and the antagonism that threatened to write women out of the role of critic. In the end, this sustained engagement with the gender politics of conversation made it possible for Jameson to effect a vital shift from the model of the sequestered authoress to a more inclusive model of critical dialogue—one more adamantly committed to the dialogic spirit of the age.

The Round Table: Male Collectivity and the Nineteenth-Century Critic Although scholars for many years aligned Romantic writers with a spirit of impassioned individualism, the early nineteenth century was also home to the Examiner’s “Round Table,” the rowdy circle of critics at Fraser’s Magazine, and the boisterous “tavern sages,” whose fictional conversations animated the pages of Blackwood’s Magazine.10 In recent years, scholarship of the early nineteenth century has shifted from a focus on the “solitary converse” of reflective poets to a growing interest in conversations that transpired via written correspondence, intertextual references, an expanding culture of reviewing, and the less tangible “intersections” of cultural ideas.11 This attention to intellectual sociability has made it possible to conceive of the period’s literary landscape as more inclusive and far-reaching—not the work of six great poets but rather the collaborative product of writers practicing in a variety of genres and social contexts. The “spirit of the age” can now be understood as a discursive behavior that thrived on social interaction and, as Stephen Behrendt puts it, the belief that individuals from a variety of ideological and subject positions Page 59 →could be “participants in an active—even an interactive—community of writers and readers.”12 Like their predecessors, early nineteenth-century writers frequently regarded criticism as coextensive with conversation.13 John Lockhart, a regular contributor to Blackwood’s and the Quarterly Review (1809–1967), observed that “[t]he best table-talk of Edinburgh was, and probably still is, in a very great measure made up of brilliant disquisition—such as might be transferred without alteration to a professor’s notebook, or the pages of a critical Review.”14 The truth of this statement is borne out by the proliferation of journals and reviews in Edinburgh and London, most of which articulated their aims and methodologies in terms of social affiliation. Nearly all of the major nineteenth-century reviews (including Blackwood’s, the Quarterly Review, Fraser’s Magazine, the Edinburgh Review, the London Magazine, and the New Monthly Magazine) adopted a rhetorical posture grounded in collectivity. The Edinburgh Review, usually thought to have served as a kind of template for early nineteenth-century critical organs, presents an especially compelling case in point. Francis Jeffrey, the founder and original editor of the Edinburgh, regarded the liberal spirit of his contributors as a direct reflection of the historical moment: “Perhaps it would have been better to have kept more to general views. But in such times as we have lived in, it was impossible not to mix them, as in fact they mix themselves, with questions which might be considered as of a narrower and more factious description.”15 Advocating “considerable latitude” in both subject matter and critical method, Jeffrey became the figurehead for a new, impassioned, and potentially more “factious” critical ethos. This is not to say that nineteenth-century critics were irrationally prone to intellectual sparring. Writers for the major critical organs were, however, invested in propagating the appearance of vibrant conflict and revolutionary zeal, what Mee has described as “a combative tradition that has always found pleasure and utility in a more contentious idea of conversation.”16 Following in the tradition of their eighteenth-century forebears, the most popular critical organs of the nineteenth century were deeply invested in the politics of representation, presenting themselves before the public as spirited and combative enclaves. The Edinburgh critics exercised their newfound power “like the dash of one of the famous regiments of the great, just concluded war.”17 Lord Byron famously referred to the Edinburgh’s contributors as an “oat-fed phalanx”—that is, as a brutal

Scottish cohort bent on vanquishing the newly emergent Page 60 →class of “English bards.”18 Having emerged from “the merry meeting round Jeffrey’s dinner-table,” the Edinburgh’s founding in 1802 was, in the words of Margaret Oliphant, one of the most romantic episodes of literary history, the reckless, youthful, light-hearted enterprise got up among a few clever young men, much desiring both money and fame, but a little fun and excitement above all, and delighted by the idea of setting up an irresponsible tribunal and judging those who by nature had the gift of judging and condemning them.19 Like Hazlitt, Oliphant imagines the founding of the Edinburgh to be characterized by youthful exuberance and a desire to provoke responses from critics and readers alike. In an 1808 letter to John Scott, John Murray, founder of the rival Quarterly Review, expressed some anxiety about “entering the fieldВ .В .В . as we shall do, against an army commanded by the most skillful generals.20 “We must enter,” Murray continued, “with our most able commanders at once, and we shall then acquire confidence, if not reputation, and increase in numbers as we proceed.”21 One of the most compelling successors to the eighteenth-century periodical club appears in the pages of Fraser’s Magazine. Founded in 1830 by Hugh Fraser and William Maginn, Fraser’s was seen by many as the very epitome of the periodical club. In 1837, newspaper editor James Grant described the circle of contributors as a harmonious community of collaborators and equals: They are a little literary republic of themselves. I am satisfied there is no other periodical whose contributors are better acquainted with each other, or are more united in principle and purpose.В .В .В . They all play into each other’s hands, and all feel a personal interest in the fortunes of the magazine. They are a happy brotherhood, living in a world of their own.22 The concept of a “literary republic” calls to mind an assembly in which a plurality of voices, each representing a different subsection of the world of letters, finally merge into one. It was a vision shared by the New Monthly Magazine, which announced in 1832 that periodical literature might serve “as aВ house of call toВ the whole fraternity—a mart of sociableness—an exchange of good offices and new experience.”23 Contrasting England to those nations where freedom of association and expression were Page 61 →suppressed, the writer celebrates such publications and their tendency to exemplify the “power which comes from union.”24 Yet it would be a mistake to regard Fraser’s as the harbinger of a new critical mind-set that would genially welcome all perspectives into the fold. Like its eighteenth-century precursors, the “literary republic” of Fraser’s carefully monitored admission to its ranks, as a three-part satire published early in the magazine’s run, “The Election of Editor for Fraser’s Magazine,” demonstrates. The piece purports to be an eyewitness account of a public meeting regarding the election of the magazine’s editor. So far from celebrating the democratic process, however, the fictional election asserts the fantasy of a more inclusive critical community to be both impracticable and undesirable. As men from all corners of the literary world nominate themselves for the editorship, they only expose their unfitness to assume the post. James Hogg and John Lockhart, both regular contributors to Blackwood’s, step forward only to reveal a willingness to betray their literary compatriots for the sake of professional prestige. The bond of these notorious “tavern sages” ultimately proves to be based not upon a passion for intellectual colloquy but rather on their love of “eoenic revelry and tipsified jollification.”25 Lockhart in particular is depicted as esteeming the gaiety of Ambrose’s Tavern (with its plentiful supply of food and drink) over cultivating a genial and productive relationship with his readers. In the end, the democratic experiment serves primarily to lampoon rival periodical clubs, presenting them as erratic, unreliable, and eager to forsake members of their own cohort in the interest of personal advancement. In other words, “The Election” does not so much indulge the fantasy of a critical community in which all are free to participate as reinforce the vital importance of differentiating between those who could “frolic or fight” among the Fraserians and those who must remain “[b]anish’d from our jovial board.”26

As might be expected, women writers are counted among the latter, a fact that highlights the continuing role gender politics would play in shoring up the authority of nineteenth-century critical alliances. The election was, the narrator observes, originally “to take place in the Freemason’s Tavern,” but circumstances change with the unexpected appearance of several female aspirants: [b]y some strange oversight, preparations had been neglected to be made for the reception of the ladies, the number of whom, with short petticoats and blue stockings, who assembled at an early hour in front of the tavern, is incredible. Lady Morgan lost a spangled shoe in the Page 62 →crowd, the Princess Olivia of Cumberland had her pockets picked, and Lady Holland was obliged to be carried by Sir James and Sam into the Horse and Groom gin-shop, where the accomplished wit declared the scene was quite dramatic.27 Certainly, the incursion of these women into the space of critical debate suggests that gender was an issue for at least some of the major nineteenth-century critics. The ladies mentioned are linked by virtue of their status as interlopers—Lady Holland for her domineering style of managing the “Holland House” salon, and aspiring writer Olivia Serres (nГ©e Wilmot) for her spurious claims that she was the illegitimate daughter of Prince Henry, Duke of Cumberland. Donning “short petticoats and blue stockings,” these enterprising transgressors are parodies of the advanced woman, asserting an interest in a literary enterprise they are ultimately too vulnerable to withstand. The women cannot safely occupy the crowded assembly, where they are subject to all manner of inconveniences and hazards. The business of the club is finally suspended by the appearance of the women, who must be ministered to and removed from the habitual site of conversation, the tavern. This dynamic had been in place well before the founding of the major nineteenth-century reviews. In her Letters for Literary Ladies (1795), an epistolary exchange between two fictional gentlemen on the subject of female education, Maria Edgeworth testifies to the vital connection between the sociable world and the acquisition of literary expertise. According to one of these gentlemen, the double standard is unmistakable: men “converse freely with all classes of people, with men of wit, of science, of learning,” even as women continue to be denied formal admission to “academies, colleges, public libraries, private associations of literary men.”28 The homosocial ethos of such venues, he insists, is not a meaningless custom that can easily be contravened; it is, on the contrary, essential to the tone and efficacy of critical dialogue: Whenever women appear, even when we seem to admit them as our equals in understanding, every thing assumes a different form; our politeness, delicacy, habits towards the sex forbid us to argue or to converse with them as we do with one another:—we see things as they are; but women must always see things through a veil, or cease to be women.29 Page 63 →The admission of women fundamentally alters the “form” critical dialogue must assume. Belonging to another, almost ethereal world, women may not dispense critical judgment but must instead be safeguarded from criticism through the dispensations of male politeness and delicacy. Although Edgeworth’s object in Letters for Literary Ladies was to invalidate such claims, her words reflect a pervasive conviction that women were by nature and education ill-suited for critical discourse. The gentleman who voices his concerns about “female studies” in Edgeworth’s volume finds a real-life analogue, for instance, in Hannah More, who (though a member of the Samuel Johnson’s circle, a frequent participant in the bluestocking assemblies, and an astute critic in her own right) insisted that women were “more affectionate than fastidious” and that, as more sympathetic beings, they were “likely both to read and to hear with a less critical spirit than men.”30 Such presumptions about the influence of women on critical dialogue persisted well into the nineteenth century. In “The Election,” Fraser’s acknowledges that the critical “spirit of the age” depends upon a selective and, for the most part, homosocial public image. While women are not explicitly barred, their unexpected appearance on the scene interrupts the consolidation of the critical collective and necessitates a discursive shift, from the jovial and yet intimate site of the tavern to Lincoln’s Inn Square, an event that makes it impossible for Fraser’s to clearly circumscribe its aim or scope. If ladies are granted admission among the critical elite, then, the presumption is that anyone—even the magazine’s chief rivals—might do

the same. The attempt at a more inclusive community ultimately fails. Overwhelmed by the swelling numbers of aspiring female critics and by an ever-expanding pool of literary rivals, the Fraserians retrench to the safety of the Freemason’s Tavern by the conclusion of “The Election.” In the end, Fraser’s thus represents its contributors as members of a literary “republic” in the true sense of the word—an elite governing body concerned with the guidance of the public yet wielding an authority over and apart from that public. Daniel Maclise memorialized this commitment to the periodical club in an 1835 etching of the circle, which features the magazine’s contributors convening—and drinking—around William Maginn’s editorial table (figure 7). Fraser’s, like so many other vehicles for Romantic criticism, presented itself as sociable, public, assertive, and highly theatrical. Above all, as the arrangement of Maginn’s etching suggests, it was a corporate body of men poised shoulder to shoulder in their effort to bring order Page 64 →to the expanding world of nineteenth-century letters. The social life of criticism was alive and well in the early nineteenth century, but its chief practitioners now presented the periodical club as a concerted, organized, and sometimes militant band of brothers who were determined to defeat their rivals. Thus, while Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite are right to suggest that the reorganization of cultural and political authority at the turn of the century “expanded and in some cases threatened the literary public sphere by incorporating others,” critical practice was also characterized by a reinscription of an older eighteenth-century rhetoric.31 The spirit of the age continued to be marked by a discursive tension between the ideal of a more inclusive network of literary practitioners and the seductive fiction of an exclusive and predominantly male critical elite. Figure 7: Daniel Maclise, The Fraserians, Fraser’s Magazine 11 (January 1835), 14–15

Scripting Gender: Critical Discourse and the Politics of Gallantry Like their eighteenth-century predecessors, this critical elite did not categorically bar women from their ranks, but it did limit the ability of women to participate as intellectual equals, often maligning female aspirants or indiscriminately praising them—a gesture equally calculated to Page 65 →set them beyond the pale. Relegated to existing social scripts, female critics were effectively deterred from taking part in the kind of free exchange acclaimed by Hazlitt. To offer one striking example, Maclise produced a second group portrait following the publication of The Fraserians, which featured important women writers of the day, many of them key players in the emerging periodical networks (figure 8). The portrait includes Maria Hall (who would become editor of St. James’s Magazine [1861–82]), Elizabeth Letitia Landon (who published reviews in the Literary Gazette [1817–63]), Mary Russell Mitford (whose work appeared in the Lady’s Magazine [1770–1847]), Lady Sydney Morgan (who wrote for the New Monthly Magazine), Harriet Martineau (a regular contributor to the Quarterly Review), Jane Porter (who contributed to the Gentleman’s Magazine, among other periodicals), Caroline Norton (editor of La Belle AssemblГ©e [1806–37]) and Countess Marguerite Blessington (later the editor of The Keepsake [1828–57] and Heath’s Book of Beauty [1832–47]). Appearing in January 1836, Regina’s Maids of Honour presented a stark and overtly gendered contrast to The Fraserians. As the accompanying text indicates, the portrait depicts “a company, every one a lovely she, very busy taking tea, or coffee, as the case may be.”32 In contrast to the boisterous meetings at Ambrose’s Tavern or Francis Jeffrey’s dinner parties, the ladies enjoy “not cups of wine” but rather refreshments “which cheer and not inebriate.”33 On the surface, Maclise’s etching would seem to pay homage to the literary ladies, presenting them as more staid and steady than the earlier Fraserians. Yet these encomia also underscore a crucial disparity between the representation of male and female contributors to the major critical organs of the period. Though credited with dignified reserve and a certain sharpness of insight, the female Fraserians are depicted as the very antithesis of their successful male counterparts. Whereas the male critics of Fraser’s, Blackwood’s, the Edinburgh Review, and other periodicals presented themselves as brazen, assertive, and sometimes even inebriated, Regina’s maids are temperate, sober, and safely nestled within their proper domestic setting. In contrast to the band of Fraserians who gaze boldly at the viewer in a show of corporate unity, the maids turn toward one another as they engage in whispered tГЄte-Г -tГЄtes. It is, in short, less a site of intellectual cohesion than a space of civil, yet sequestered and disconnected interaction.

Even as Regina’s Maids of Honour commends Fraser’s female constituency, it celebrates them as women rather than as true counterparts to the male Fraserians. In her discussion of Maclise’s etchings in Becoming a Page 66 →Woman of Letters (2009), Linda Peterson shrewdly points to these images as an indication that professional identity was itself an indeterminate category in the nineteenth century, treating the sketches as evidence of an attempt on the part of Fraser’s to define professionalism in terms of class and gender.34 Peterson is right to call attention to the flexibility of the term “professional” at this time—a fact that may well have afforded opportunities for women writers to align themselves with influential literary circles. The construction of professional identity in the Fraserians and Regina’s Maids, however, also depended upon carefully differentiating between appropriate forms of male and female sociability. Indeed, undergirding Regina’s Maids is a rhetorical gesture common to critical practice at the time: the chivalric celebration of women writers for their beauty, diffidence, and virtue. Letitia Landon is described as a modest lady who averts her gaze to avoid embarrassing the male viewer, and a lengthy encomium is devoted to the brilliance of Maria Hall’s eyes. Lady Sidney Morgan (also one of the enterprising gatecrashers featured in “The Election”) is addressed not as a woman of intellect but rather as a virtuous lady who must be shielded from the wild antics of the Fraserians: “Who is next? Miladi dear. Glad are we to see you here. Naughty fellows, we must plead, that with voice of angry organ once or twice we did, indeed, speak not civilly of Morgan; but we must retract, repent, promise Page 67 →better to behave.”35 The suggestion that male critics must “repent” their severe treatment of Morgan’s prose, while not exactly insincere, is certainly pronounced with tongue in cheek.36 The critic’s reformation is brought about not by any new insight into Morgan’s work but rather by the spectacle of her femininity, which spurns him on to a performance of chivalric virtue and draws out the contrast between the boyish exuberance of the male critic and the quiet civility of “Miladi.” As he playfully slaps his own wrist for being so “naughty,” there is little doubt that the critic would adopt quite a different tone toward his fellow Fraserians. Figure 8: Daniel Maclise, Regina’s Maids of Honour, Fraser’s Magazine 13 (January 1836), 80–81 It is worth noting that this sardonic defense of Lady Morgan was first inspired by John Wilson Croker’s scathing treatment of her work in the Quarterly Review, an incident that further illustrates the difficulty with which women writers navigated the critical spirit of the age. In an 1817 review of her volume France (1817), Croker charged Morgan with a propensity for “vagueness, bombast, and affectation,” as well as “bad taste,” “impiety,” and political radicalism.37 As he attempts to establish his own objectivity, Croker calls upon copious excerpts from Morgan’s work, proclaiming that “we shall take the precaution of judging her, absolutely and literally, out of her own mouth; she shall be her own critic.”38 Morgan responded to Croker’s attacks in her 1818 novel Florence Macarthy, in which the eponymous heroine, herself an aspiring writer, is similarly assailed by the reviewers. Conway Crawley, a barrister and would-be man of letters whose resentment toward Macarthy is fueled by “the position she now held in a circle from which it was his object to have excluded her,” delights in regurgitating the words of a spiteful critic, calling her “a mere bookseller’s drudge,” a “mad woman,” and “audacious worm.”39 When General Fitzwalter faults him for “applying such language to a woman—to any woman,” Crawley withdraws his remarks, noting that he has merely been repeating the “criticism of a celebrated periodical review, which may, perhaps, be deemed severe.”40 Suggestively, Crawley’s words are excerpted directly from Croker’s 1817 review, and his shift from verbal assailant to apologetic gallant signals Morgan’s keen awareness of the gender politics that informed critical dialogue at the time. Initially, it would seem that Morgan endorses a more genteel form of criticism, one that might shield herself and other women writers from the scrutiny of the major critical outlets. Later on, however, Macarthy offers a slightly different perspective on the exchange, at once critiquing the impassioned masculinity that fuels these attacks and recognizing them as a signal of professional triumph: Page 68 →Which of the worthy we’s, the weekly, the monthly, the quarterly drudges, would “let loose their dogs of war” on works safe from the world’s notice and applause?—No, they war not with dullness and the dead; it is living, buoyant, and, above all, prosperous merit, animates their zeal; and their malice is worth courting: for, next to the spontaneous burst of public

applause, an author’s ambition should be the unqualified, unmanly, ungentlemanlike attacks of some party, hired anonymous reviewer.41

Simultaneously dismissing the indecorous “we’s” who relish conflict and welcoming their attention as evidence of her own “prosperous merit,” Macarthy suggests that membership within this literary republic ironically depends upon being subjected to the “unmanly, ungentlemanlike attacks” of the foremost critical collectives. Being praised by the critics on the basis of her sex is, correspondingly, every bit as exclusionary as being assailed by them. As in “The Election,” the presence of a female aspirant compels Crawley (and Croker) to renounce his belligerent spirit in favor of a more assuaging tone. Such rhetorical maneuvers were anything but new. Years earlier, in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Wollstonecraft had argued that male gallantry tends to vitiate women’s capacity for judgment by blinding them to other forms of sociable exchange, especially those that, once freed from well-established scripts, might actually prove instructive: “Where are they suddenly to find judgment enough to weigh patiently the sense of an awkward virtuous man, when his manners, of which they are made critical judges, are rebuffing, and his conversation cold and dull, because it does not consist of pretty repartees, or well turned compliments? ”42 At bottom, such blind deference is dangerous because it constitutes a script that forecloses the possibility of real critical interventions, preventing women from recognizing that “true beauty and grace must arise from the play of the mind.”43 As Laura Runge has demonstrated, although the discourse of gallantry ostensibly stems from a desire to hold in check male power and potential for violence, it always “acts as a constant reminder of the relative power between men and women.”44 Thus, even as gallantry purported to place women in the uniquely powerful position of “civilizing agent,” in practice it obliged them to perform a very specific series of conventions that “tested or judged” their femininity while calling attention to the fact that any authority women might claim existed only because men agreed to play the part of conciliating interlocutors.45 Taking part in any meaningfulPage 69 → critical dialogue would require that women writers penetrate and dismantle the social scripts that threatened to write them out of the discussion, dispensing with such discursive condescension and seeking instead to receive and administer criticism in a spirit of “fair and free discussion.”

Solitary Confinement: Anna Jameson and the Sentimental Woman Writer If Wollstonecraft had alerted readers to the gender politics of conversation, it was her intellectual heir—Anna Jameson—who would bring this discourse to bear on the work of the female critic.46 As Ainslie Robinson has demonstrated, Jameson’s work frequently gained notoriety as the object of criticism in the leading periodicals of the day.47 Nevertheless, her ability to navigate existing critical networks was largely successful, and much of her writing was first published in literary and art reviews like the Penny Magazine (1832–45), the English Woman’s Journal, the New Monthly Magazine, the Athenaeum (1828–1921), and the Art Journal (1839–1912).48 Jameson’s writings thus reflect, in both content and material history, the important connection between professional networking and critical writing at the time. As she aggressively pursued membership within these networks Jameson remained wary of their limitations. Like Bessie Parkes, Jameson was concerned that the virulent tone of the reviews had been especially hard on women writers, a practice she considered to be unsporting. Toward the end of her career, in her “Letter to the Right Honourable Lord John Russell” (1859), Jameson would explain: Reviews and journals are now a part of the reading of all well-educated people; they lie on every drawing-room table. A woman takes up one of these able periodicals, expecting to find instruction, more sustenance, religious guidance. Possibly she lights upon some article, written, not in Latin, but in choice and vigorous English, by one of those many clever young writers who, it is said, have come to a determination “to put down women.” Here she finds her honest endeavours to raise her position in life or to reclaim her fallen sisters, traduced and ridiculed. She perceives that these gentlemanly adversaries do not argue the question of right or wrong, they simply use a power for purpose.49

Page 70 →Rather than engaging seriously with the literary and social endeavors of women, Jameson notes, these “gentlemanly adversaries” of the press use their position to deny women a fair hearing. “It is not the facts or the truths which offend,” she continues, “it is the vulgar flippant tone, the slighting allusion, the heartless вЂjocosity’—to borrow one of their own words—with which men, gentlemanly, accomplished, otherwise generous and honourable men, can sport with what is most sacred in a woman’s life.”50 The ribald spirit that had come to be aligned with critical practice seemed, in Jameson’s view, a coarse and derivative mode of discourse that claimed to partake in a lively discussion of public interest even as it foreclosed the expression of alternative viewpoints. In short, the problem with nineteenth-century criticism was its failure to fulfill the spirit of dynamic, dialogic exchange it claimed to uphold. Rhetorically speaking, the female critic was in a treacherous position. To actively pursue and articulate literary, aesthetic, or social judgments might invite ridicule on the grounds that she was being presumptuous or indecent; even genuine attempts at intellectual colloquy could easily be mistaken, as Jameson herself notes, for acts of “discontent—repining—caprice.”51 By the same token, to embrace the persona of the solitary and selfdeprecating author was effectively to withdraw from any kind of authentic critical exchange. Jameson’s critical dialogues seek to escape this rhetorical enclosure by directly confronting and interrogating the impassioned performances of the male connoisseur while recasting the female critic as a sociable, rational, and engaged participant in critical dialogue.52 In order to combat the “sneering tone which has prevailed of late in one or two of our popular reviews,” Jameson would assail the model of the sequestered female critic, presenting her as a viable candidate for the kind of sprightly, sociable exchange touted by the most powerful critical cohorts.53 Jameson was attuned to the relationship between gender, sociability, and critical discourse from the very beginning of her career.54 Between the appearance of her first publication in 1821 and her death in 1860, Jameson moved from a position of relative anonymity to public recognition as an esteemed scholar of art, literature, and culture. She is perhaps best remembered for her Shakespeare criticism and collective biographies of women, such as Memoirs of the Loves of the Poets (1829) or Memoirs of Celebrated Female Sovereigns (1831). In these works, Jameson draws together women who wielded immense power in their own time but did not have access to a viable support network. By imagining virtual communities of women that were not fully realized in their own historical Page 71 →moment, Jameson manages, as Alison Booth has established, to develop an “aggregate resistance to historical canons,” underscoring how the sublimation or isolation of powerful women has been naturalized within a “masculinist historiography.”55 Toward the end of her life, Jameson’s interest in these virtual communities translated into the establishment of a real network of professional female critics, as her home became the meeting place for a circle of women interested in the literary and social advancement of women. The Ladies Circle or Langham Place Group, as it was later called, included such notable figures as Barbara Bodichon, Bessie Rayner Parkes, and Emily Faithfull. In March 1858, on the advice of Jameson herself, Bodichon and Parkes cofounded the English Woman’s Journal, which would become a popular venue for aspiring female critics and a vital tool for the emerging women’s movement. To this extent, we might regard Jameson as a successor to the Female Spectator, whose interest in both real and fictional communities of female critics reflects a determination to redraw the boundaries of existing critical networks.56 Certainly, Jameson was well aware of the collective spirit that characterized early nineteenth-century criticism. In 1821, she took the first of several voyages to the Continent as governess for an aristocratic family. The same year, the London Magazine began publishing Jameson’s Italian journal anonymously as “Sketches on the Road.” More travelogue than criticism, the series was presented as the collaborative effort of several young men intending “to pursue no regular plan, but to go from place to place, as they are urged by curiosity or invited by pleasure.”57 In the spirit of periodicals like Blackwood’s and Fraser’s, Jameson conveyed her personal reflections on foreign art, literature, and culture through a band of young male writers whose “letters written from one to another” reflect a fraternal bond.58 In effect, she delivered her cultural observations as those of an itinerant male club. Serialized, collaborative, and public, “Sketches” poses a sharp contrast to later incarnations of the same material, which demonstrate a growing interest in the nature of female critical judgment.59 Jameson recast the young men’s letters in 1825 as the private reflections of a fictional female diarist and published it as A Lady’s Diary, abandoning the collective model of criticism in

favor of one that aligns virtuous femininity with seclusion from public life. In order to present herself as a respectable public writer, that is to say, Jameson replaced the collective model of authorship advanced in “Sketches” with a model of female authorship that would have been considered more appropriate to her sex.60 The transformation of “Sketches” into A Lady’s Diary underscores an implicit assumption that the male critical Page 72 →voice—collective, spontaneous, and playful—was fundamentally different from the female voice, which was presumed to be solitary, demure, and introspective. While the volume contains a number of passages from the original “Sketches,” they now appeared alongside moments of idle speculation and self-reflection. A Lady’s Diary was so successful that Jameson’s publisher, Henry Colburn, released a new edition the following year under the revised title, Diary of an EnnuyГ©e. For the first time, the author was identified as Anna Jameson. Typically classified as a work of fiction, Jameson’s Diary combines conventions of the private journal with fragments of criticism on art, culture, and literature. Linda Anderson has persuasively argued that as a genre the diary constituted a problematic yet empowering space for women writers: “While these autobiographical writings constructed the subject through strict narrative and linguistic conventions in order to create a conforming, if transcendent, version of selfhood, for women they could also offer an alternative space, a place from which to contest their socially sanctioned position of silence and submission.”61 To some extent, Jameson leveraged the rhetorical power of the diary in order to authorize her own foray into the world of critical writing. The diary form allowed Jameson to pursue serious aesthetic and cultural commentary while writing in a genre tied to private experience and therefore deemed an acceptable outlet for women writers. As we see in Regina’s Maids, even the most admiring portraits of women writers might also divert them from the “unfeminine paths” of writing about “politics, or political economy, or pugilism, or punch.”62 The Diary, as such, promises instead to be a subjective account of a young woman’s experiences, replete with “threadbare raptures” and “poetical effusions.”63 Even the frontispiece to the first edition of the Diary, as Margaret Oliphant recalls, featured “a female figure seated dejectedly beneath a tall lily-bush,” implicitly aligning the author of the volume with solitude, diffidence, and restraint.64 On the surface, then, Jameson’s account appears to validate the tradition of the secluded lady authoress, whose emotional and unmediated responses seem more appropriate to the pages of a private diary than to critical dialogue. The diarist’s awareness of the distance between these two rhetorical registers is rendered especially apparent when she speculates on how the reviewers might respond to her writing: “Now if my poor little Diary should ever be seen! I tremble but to think of it! —what egotism and vanity, what discontent—repining—caprice—should I be accused of?”65 Stepping outside her role as secluded authoress to occupy the role of critic, the diarist sees herself as arrogant, fanciful, and emotionallyPage 73 → fickle: she becomes an egotistical young lady whose critical aspirations are spurious, amateur, and presumptuous. But if the frontispiece advertises the volume as one that reinforces the cultural idea of the “proper lady” and has perhaps even been authored by one, the pages that follow so conspicuously undermine this ideal that its addition must have been either a horrible blunder or a brilliant act of rhetorical misdirection on Colburn’s part. In reality, the Diary served as Jameson’s inaugural effort to redefine the public image of the female critic, in part by distinguishing herself from those sequestered lady writers who were so often accused of lacking the capacity for serious critical engagement. While the narrator of this account reveals that her own journey has been motivated by disappointment in love, she is not so much a sentimental tourist as a wanderer and expatriate whose observations are colored by deep cynicism. Far from being overwhelmed by “all the never-sufficientlyto-be-exhausted topics of sentiment and enthusiasm,” she is ennuyГ©e—bored of it all.66 By putting dispassion on display, the diarist disowns the ostensibly sentimental character of women’s writing while also differentiating herself from the pleasure-seeking men of Jameson’s earlier “Sketches.”67 Jameson’s gradual effort to situate herself as an authoritative critic depended, that is to say, on appropriating and transfiguring the rhetorical scripts of the Romantic critics in order to situate female aspirants as legitimate, practiced, and attentive participants in the social life of criticism. For her own part, the diarist remains keenly aware of the disparity between her amateur impressions and those of the professional critic, yet it is by no means clear that she regards the practiced eye of the latter as more reliable.

Indeed, these remarks serve less as a gesture of self-deprecation than as a strategy for exposing the unique rhetorical predicament of a would-be female critic who has been cut off from the world of real critical exchange. Reflecting on her own aesthetic experiences, she confesses a secret desire to apprehend the language of skilled critics and connoisseurs, while also gratefully acknowledging the advantages of assessing art through the eyes of a novice: I am no connaisseur; and I should have lamented, as a misfortune, the want of some fixed principles of taste and criticism to guide my judgment; some nomenclature by which to express certain effects, peculiarities, and excellencies which I felt, rather than understood; if my own ignorance had not afforded considerable amusement to myself, and perhaps to others. I have derived some gratification from Page 74 →observing the gradual improvement of my own taste: and from comparing the decisions of my own unassisted judgment and natural feelings, with the fiat of profound critics and connaisseurs: the result has been sometimes mortifying, sometimes pleasing.68 Though the diarist recognizes the limited scope of her knowledge, Jameson presents this as a failure of education rather than a failure of capacity. Even without the sophisticated language deployed by her male counterparts, the diarist finds that she is able to make steady progress in developing a critical acumen all her own. At times, her “unassisted judgment” even compares favorably with that of more experienced critics. Years later, Jameson would make a similar remark in her Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies (1855). Recalling Goethe’s remark that a female acquaintance lacked any “sympathetic veneration for the creation of the human intellect,” she mused that “female critics look for something in a production of art beyond the mere handiwork,” and that the “moral associations” women sometimes bring to the work of judgment should elevate rather than degrade the “value of our criticism.”69 In this spirit, Jameson rejects those rhetorical scripts that align women with ingenuous sentiment and men with professional judgment. Indeed, the Diary proposes that it is mainstream critical discourse that reflects the more limited and subjective worldview. In a suggestive inversion, the diarist applies the sentimental stereotype typically aligned with the secluded authoress to the male critic, figuring his judgment as an unreliable performance of critical bravado.70 As the diarist describes the elaborate pantomime of a male connoisseur studying a painting in an Italian museum, it becomes clear that his fidelity to academic standards has actually curtailed the scope of his judgment: [S]ee him with one hand passed across his brow, to shade the light, while the other extended forwards, describes certain indescribable circumvolutions in the air, and now he retires, now advances, now recedes again, till he has hit the exact distance from which every point of beauty is displayed to the best possible advantage, and there he stands—gazing, as never gazed the moon upon the waters, or love-sick maiden upon the moon! We take him perhaps for another Pygmalion? We imagine that it is those parted and half-breathing lips, those eyes that seem to float in light; the pictured majesty of suffering virtue, or the tears of repenting loveliness; the divinity of beauty, or “the beauty of holiness,” which have thus transfixed him? No such thing: Page 75 →it is the fleshiness of the tints, the vaghezza of the coloring, the brilliance of the carnations, the fold of a robe, or the foreshortening of a little finger.71 Here the critic is a ravished viewer who is struck not by the painting’s “divinity of beauty” but rather by its technical merits. Paying homage to academic standards of color, shadow, and perspective, he becomes completely absorbed in his performance of knowledge and fails to appreciate the emotional and aesthetic effect of the painting or its depiction of “suffering virtue” and “repenting loveliness.” Alternately resembling the moon and a “love-sick maiden,” the critic is rendered effeminate by the very performance of expertise that should confirm his authority to judge. Even his appreciation for the “vaghezza of the coloring,” a phrase that at first seems to verify his expertise, betrays his assessment to be no more than a feeble parroting of critical acumen and aligns him with the sentimental, unrefined, and implicitly uncritical female viewer. The term “vaghezza,” which describes the sensory charm or appeal of a painting, comes from the Italian root vagare, to wander. Precisely that terminology which was to empower his judgment thus exposes its artifice and links the

connoisseur to the itinerant EnnuyГ©e, a self-proclaimed amateur who ostensibly has no grounds for judgment whatsoever. Unable to deviate from the academic scripts he has so carefully rehearsed, he both exposes the limitations of professional belonging and undermines the presumption that such sentimental exuberance is the exclusive province of the female critic. Several years later, Lady Elizabeth Eastlake (nГ©e Rigby) set forth a similar argument in her 1856 review of the first three volumes of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1843–60). In Eastlake’s view, the reviewers had been hesitant to dispute Ruskin, fearing that such a task would demand a level of acerbity to which they were unaccustomed—in other words, that “something of the Ruskin is needed, at all events in process, to catch a Ruskin.”72 In Eastlake’s estimation, however, the esoteric knowledge of the critical elite constitutes both their claim to authority and their chief weakness. Eastlake illustrates the point by invoking Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes”: Like the cunning weavers, [Ruskin] persuades his readers that it is the test of their religion and morality to see as he sees, and the delusion is kept up till some one not more clever, but more simple, ventures to speak the plain truth. The real way, therefore, to face Mr. Ruskin, Page 76 →is not with those weapons he has selected from the mental armoury, but with those he has left, and thus accoutred the humblest adversary has nothing to fear.73 While Ruskin’s admirers might regard his academic costume—and his status as a “Graduate of Oxford”—as sufficient proof of his wisdom, Eastlake claims to see through these vestments to the “body of Mr. Ruskin’s criticism.”74 Figuring themselves as part of an exclusive and impenetrable clique, such critics speak a specialized language that is unintelligible to the public and therefore goes unchecked. Taking the part of the child in Andersen’s tale, Eastlake announces what the average reader is either unwilling or unable to perceive: that the specialized, critical idiom embraced by professional critics proclaims their membership within an exclusive clique, while eschewing the very difficult work of dispensing original judgments. Well before Eastlake’s intervention, Jameson’s diarist both exposed the limitations of such academic performances and situated the female critic as a positive boon to the social life of criticism. While acknowledging the practical advantages of studying “fixed principles of taste and criticism,” she identifies herself as “no connoisseur” and cites her amateur status as proof that her critical vision is both clear and independent.75 By the same token, the male critic’s appeal to scholarly knowledge bars him from a true aesthetic experience and thus constitutes his principal weakness: “the more extensive our acquaintance with the works of art,” the diarist reflects, “the more limited is our sphere of admiration.”76 On the most basic level, Jameson’s argument lays the groundwork for authorizing female critical judgment, regardless of whether or not it might be grounded in specialized knowledge. An intimate understanding of aesthetic concepts becomes far less important, under this model, than the ability to depart from academic scripts. Though the diarist admits that her writing can at times become “very sentimental, and picturesque, and poetical,” she is also free to appreciate art unfettered by an academic knowledge of technique; her own moments of deep feeling, she suggests, are earnest, unrehearsed, and thus more likely to produce sound aesthetic insights. Jameson’s depiction of the diarist as the more socially responsible critic assumes an even greater significance alongside the diarist’s commentaries on critical dialogue itself, a subject to which she recurs at several points over the course of her account. Echoing Wollstonecraft’s critique of polite discourse, Jameson notes that the presence of women all Page 77 →too often calls forth that spirit of gallantry that so often forecloses true intellectual exchange: The conversation of men of the world and men of gallantry gives insensibly a taint to the mind; the unceasing language of adulation and admiration intoxicates the head and perverts the heart; the habit of tГЄte-Г -tГЄtes, the habit of being always either the sole or principal object of attention, of mingling in no conversation which is not personal, narrows the disposition, weakens the mind, and renders it incapable of rising to general views or principles; while it so excites the senses and the imagination, that every thing else becomes in comparison stale, flat, and unprofitable.77

By contrast, the diarist celebrates the Parisian salons, where “the social arts are carried to perfection—especially conversation.”78 In Paris, she observes, “[E]very one talks much and talks well. In this multiplicity of words it must happen of course that a certain quantum of ideas is intermixed: and somehow or other, by dint of listening, talking, and looking about them, people do learn, and information to a certain point is general.”79 Despite her apparent preference for solitude, then, it is readily apparent that the diarist has a deep appreciation for productive and engaging forms of social intercourse. In the absence of such forums, she regards the diary less as an ideal outlet than as a compromise, permitting her to express those ideas that must be excised from the conversation: What would have become of me if I had not thought of keeping a Diary? O should have died of a sort of mental repletion! What a consolation and employment has it been to me to let my overflowing heart and soul exhale themselves on paper! When I have neither power nor spirits to join in commonplace conversation, I open my dear little Diary, and feel, while my pen thus swiftly glides along, much less as if I were writing than as if I were speaking—yes!80 In the end, the convention of the lady’s diary—private, desultory, and sentimental—does not reflect women’s natural propensity for solitude and intellectual tranquility; on the contrary, the diary becomes a genre of last resort and a signal of the limitations placed on female participation in critical exchange. Confronted by rhetorical conventions that render Page 78 →all discourse “flat, unprofitable, and stale,” the diarist has no choice but to recoil into the community of her own thoughts. Rather than serving as an exemplar of the “proper lady” writer, the female critic we encounter in the Diary becomes a mouthpiece for those female aspirants whose participation in a more inclusive and productive model of criticism was hampered by such social scripts. The diarist’s unspoken agenda is, by this account, to expose the discursive tension that relegated female aspirants to an enforced seclusion, while leaving criticism itself that much worse for their absence. It is perhaps unsurprising that Jameson’s fictional critic alienated many of her early reviewers. A writer for the Monthly Review (1749–1845) deplored Jameson’s unbecoming “freedom of expression.”81 “With a love of the fine arts,” he writes, “our fair country-women learn to acquire on the Continent a license of observation and criticism which we would not willingly see substituted for the retiring sensitiveness of their insular manners.”82 While the Diary sold very well from the time of its initial publication, readers were shocked to discover in 1826 that it was largely a fabrication, that the author had since decided to pursue a career in letters and, in Jameson’s own words, “cheated some gentle readers out of much superfluous sympathy.”83 If readers and reviewers were charmed by the diarist’s naive enthusiasm, they abhorred the affectations of a calculating female critic. These charges are especially striking since one of the most noteworthy characteristics of the Diary had been its aversion to critical affectation. Still expected to conform to the tradition of the sentimental lady writer, Jameson could not adopt the rhetorical tactics of her male colleagues without appearing duplicitous and unfeminine. Henry Crabbe Robinson dismissed the Diary of an EnnuyГ©e as the “amusing gossip” and “affected sentimentality of a pretended invalid.”84 Thomas Carlyle counted Jameson among the despicable “swarm that came out with the annuals,” and Ruskin claimed that Jameson “was absolutely without knowledge or instinct of painting (and had no sharpness of insight even for anything else).”85 Perhaps most notably, an 1842 review for the Gentleman’s Magazine carefully qualified its praise of Jameson’s Guidebook to the National Gallery, declaring: “[W]e hope before long to see one executed by some person professionally acquainted with the subject, under the sanction of the trustees, and at the national expense.”86 Despite popular approval of Jameson’s work, it was by no means clear that the productions of a female critic could surmount the public bias against those who could not claim membership in the more esteemed intellectual circles of the day. Page 79 →Understandably, many contemporary scholars have followed suit, conceding that Jameson presented herself as an amateur in the field who abstained from any serious consideration of critical method. Clara Thomas argues that Jameson’s sentimental depictions of women reflect a genuinely conservative approach to gender. If Jameson’s early critics “treated her always as a lady-writer first and as a writer second,” Thomas avers, it seems to have been an approach Jameson herself endorsed.87 Because Jameson describes her book Shakespeare’s Heroines (1832) as the “private musings of an introspective woman,” Christy Desmet

distinguishes it from the work of the public and professional writer.88 In a similar vein, Laurie Kane Lew proposes that Jameson’s attempt to make high art intelligible to a popular audience is predicated on the “inarguably feminized language of gossip” rather than any formal theory of criticism.89 Even Jameson herself admits in Memoirs of the Loves of the Poets (1829) that she is “neither critic nor scholar.”90 Yet Jameson’s writings, from the publication of the Diary to the end of her career, suggest a deep investment in exploring the scope and power of female critical consciousness. While she could not lay claim to the professional credentials boasted by her male counterparts, it is by no means clear that she refused the office of literary and cultural critic, and in the years to come she would begin to address quite explicitly her unique position as a female participant in the world of critical discourse. Jameson was extremely wary of the martial spirit that informed the work of the most influential critical circles, regarding the truculent attitude of the Edinburgh and Quarterly reviews not as harmless recreation but rather as monstrous: Methinks these two Reviews stalk through the literary world, like the two giants in Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore: the one pounding, slaying, mangling, despoiling with blind fury, like the heavy orthodox club-armed Morgante; the other, like the sneering, witty, half-pagan, half-baptized Margutte, slashing and cutting, and piercing through thick and thin: Г tort et Г travers. Truly the simile is more Г propos than I thought when it first occurred to me.91 Although this lumbering, brutish model of criticism generated fantastic spectacles for the reading public, it also tended to arrest rather than to promote public debate. Just as Orlando converted the giant Morgante to a pious life of service, so too did Jameson hope to convert the world of criticism to a mode of intellectual inquiry motivated less by a desire for Page 80 →power than by a sense of social responsibility. For Jameson, this project depended implicitly upon reassessing the gender politics of critical dialogue itself. Using her own dialogues to interrogate the social scripts that so often defined intellectual exchange, Jameson would advance a vision of critical community that would more truly realize the dialogic model claimed by the most celebrated critical cohorts of the day.

Opening a Dialogue: Female Critics in Conversation As Alexander Dick and Angela Esterhammer have demonstrated, “The now-familiar premise that language is a form of action, that people do things when they speak, was already well known and, indeed, of paramount concern during the Romantic period.”92 It is a fact that was made explicit in the appearance of so many Romantic texts that take the dialogue as a rhetorical framework, from Lady Blessington’s Conversations with Byron and Walter Savage Landor’s Imaginary Conversations to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “conversation poems.” In critical writing, the dialogue became a rhetorical tool, allowing the Fraserians and “tavern sages” alike to carefully delineate the ethos and constituency of the critical elite. For female critics, however, the dialogic form and its approximation of real social interactions would make it an ideal forum for reevaluating the politics of belonging. After all, the true etymological origin of dialogue is not di, which would simply connote an exchange between two or more persons, but rather dia, which suggests “transition, movement, with no limitation upon the number of voices sharing in the logos.”93 Rather than bringing about a perfect synthesis of ideas, the dialogue reflects all of the discursive gaps, tensions, entanglements, and silences of real social relations. As we shall see, the critical dialogues of women writers thus served a double function, issuing literary and cultural judgments even as they revised the cultural scripts traditionally allotted to women writers. A helpful illustration of this principle—as well as a salient precursor and point of comparison to the work of Jameson—emerges in the work of Clara Reeve just a few decades earlier. A successful novelist and critic, Reeve understood the kind of authority and rhetorical leverage the dialogue form would impart to her ideas, as her work The Progress of RomanceВ (1785) demonstrates. Although it is certainly true, as Laura Runge puts it, that Reeve presents in this volume a female critic whose “reputation as a literary artist depends upon her standing as a proper lady,” the Page 81 →dialogic strategies she employs signals that her rhetorical approach is not merely conciliatory.94 In her preface to the volume Reeve explains that, like the coterie productions of the bluestockings,

this work originated in “conversations with some ingenious friends upon the various subjects, which it offered to be investigated and explained.”95 By presenting a history of the romance tradition in dialogue, Reeve could present a range of viewpoints on the literature and thus offer a more comprehensive treatment of the subject than her precursors: [O]pposite sentiments would admit of a more full and accurate examination, arguments and objections might be more clearly stated and discussed, than in a regular series of Essays, or even letters, not to mention, that the variety and contrast which naturally arise out of the Dialogue, might enliven a work of rather dry deduction, and render it more entertaining to the reader, and not the less useful or instructive.96 The book is accordingly divided not into chapters but rather into “evenings” that are attended by the female critic Euphrasia, her friend Sophronia, and her skeptical male interlocutor Hortensius. Although Euphrasia retains control over the conversation throughout, she regards her company as an essential part of the composition process. “I shall depend upon your assistance,” she informs her companions, “and since you have opened my mouth upon the subject, you are bound in honour to correct my redundancies and to supply my deficiencies.”97 Euphrasia’s suggestion that they “correct” any errors she may make, while humble in its own way, also situates her as a critic who welcomes debate. Despite the submissive gesture, she is anything but enthusiastic about rehearsing a predetermined script and seems to earnestly invite a dialogue that would open her remarks to commentary and even resistance. For instance, the authorization of Euphrasia’s critical voice requires that she overcome the excessively deferential ethos of the male interlocutor. When Euphrasia calls attention to romances that are frequently overlooked in the scholarship, Hortensius replies: “Certainly.—I shall pay them due respect for your sake.”98 Euphrasia promptly corrects him: “Not so,В Hortensius,В I will not accept such respect for them.—You shall pay it for the sake of those illustrious men, who imbibed their enthusiasm, and carried it into practice.”99 Hailing the virtues of these “books that caused such a spirit of Chivalry in the youth of much later times,” Euphrasia rejects as misplacedPage 82 → the extreme reverence of her male companion, whose desire to address her in the language of romance renders him little better than a modern Don Quixote.100 If Hortensius is lost amid tomes of chivalric romance, Euphrasia places herself squarely within the province of eighteenth-century criticism. Euphrasia’s familiarity with literary and critical history is, indeed, one of her greatest rhetorical advantages. For instance, on the sixth evening of their discussion Sophronia recalls a conversation she has had with a gentleman acquaintance who boasts of his own expertise in the romance tradition. The exchange is worth quoting at length: Soph. I have been desired to mention a certain book to you, and to ask if you have read it, and whether it would not be of service in your present enquiry?—It is called, “TraitГ© de l’Origine de Romans, par Mons. Huet.” Euph. I have it in my own library. Soph. And what is your opinion of it? Euph. I will give it you in the words ofВ Shakespeare.— “His remarks are two grains of wheat in two bushels of chaff, you shall search for them a whole day, and when you have found them they are not worth your labour.” Soph. Shall I tell the gentleman who desired me to offer it to you, of this sentence of yours, or Shakespeare’s? Euph. Not so, I will put my answer into the mouth of a great Critic, whose sentence will be as respectable, as it is decisive.101

Once Euphrasia has pronounced her sentence upon the volume, Hortensius marvels at her familiarity with these more established critics: “She comes upon us with her extracts again, and she uses them so as to make them irresistible.”102 Euphrasia’s acquaintance with the literature is positively staggering and, as Hortensius’s final remark suggests, it is not the first time she has called upon existing scholarship to buttress her own critical verdicts. Although her aggressive appeal to secondary sources risks being taken as a mere parroting of male authority, it also testifies to her participation in a long-standing conversation about the origins and development of the literary tradition. Her breadth of knowledge is “irresistible” because it proves that she, and not Sophronia’s patronizing gentleman, belongs to a community of critics who can boast more than a casual acquaintance with the scholarship. While adopting deference as Page 83 →a rhetorical shield, Euphrasia’s self-fashioning is far more robust than it might seem at first glance, deftly ventriloquizing male critics in order to authorize her own judgments. In some ways, though, Reeve found herself still bound by the restrictions that had led to the suppression of Jenny Distaff, Mrs. Crackenthorpe, and other eighteenth-century female critics—the supposition that criticism might somehow render a woman immodest, unruly, and unfeminine. If Reeve shrewdly circulates the critical verdicts of professional male critics, she is far less disposed to aggressively advance her own critical vision. By the 1830s, Anna Jameson was less willing to assume the pretense of the modest lady writer, and she would strategically deploy the dialogue form to expose its limitations. In the introduction to her most important work of literary criticism, Characteristics of Women, Moral, Political, and Historical (1832), Jameson attempted to rewrite the role of the female critic by staging a similarly embattled dialogue between the sexes. On the surface, the introduction to Characteristics serves to outline the central topic of the book, an examination of Shakespeare’s heroines, and to justify a project that many might regard as the impudent attempt of a female author to announce the superiority of her sex. Within the first few pages of the volume, however, it becomes clear that the true objective of the female critic, Alda, is to claim a space for herself within the social life of criticism—to revise the terms and rituals of the discussion so that she can be granted the fair hearing she has previously been denied. The difficulty of sustaining such a conversation is underscored from the very first page of the volume. Much like Hortensius and the authorial voice of “Regina’s Maids of Honour,” the male interlocutor Medon reverts instinctively to gallantry, treating Alda as a lady rather than as a partner in dialogue. His elaborate tributes to Alda consistently drown out her endeavors to move the conversation forward, as the opening encounter between them illustrates: Alda: You will not listen to me? Medon: I do, with all the deference which befits a gentleman when a lady holds forth on the virtues of her own sex. He is a parricide of his mother’s name, And with an impious hand murders her fame, That wrongs the praise of women; that dares write Libels on saints, or with foul ink requite The milk they lent us. Page 84 →Yours was the nobler birth, For you from man were made—man but of earth— The son of dust! Alda: What’s this?

Medon: Only a rhyme I learned from one I talked withal; ’tis a quotation from some old poet that has fixed itself in my memory—from Randolph, I think. Alda: ’Tis very justly thought, and very politely quoted, and my best courtesy is due to him and to you:—but now will you listen to me? Medon: With most profound humility. Alda: Nay then! I have done, unless you will lay aside these mock airs of gallantry, and listen to me for a moment! 103

Medon’s desire to place Alda upon a pedestal effectively sets her apart from the world of serious critical debate and forecloses the possibility of a real intellectual exchange. Strikingly, however, Medon’s homage to women lays bare an underlying misogyny, while also (as with the affected connoisseur of Jameson’s Diary) exposing his own limitations as a critic. The selection from Thomas Randolph’s “In praise of Woemen in Generall,” though seemingly laudatory, assumes quite a different connotation in its proper context. Randolph’s poem goes on to use these apparent accolades as the springboard for a wry critique of female rhetoric: Boast we of knowledge? You have more than we You were the first ventur’d to pluck the tree. And that more Rhetoric in your tongues doth ly Let him dispute against that dares deny Your least commands; and not perswaded be With Sampsons strength, and Davids pietie, To be your willing Captives;104 So far from presenting the female intellect to advantage, Randolph’s verse invokes long-standing stereotypes against learned women: Eve, Delilah, and Bathsheba become analogues for the woman who has rhetorical skills great enough to render even the most commanding of men powerless. If Medon appeals to Randolph as an authority on female virtue, the reference ultimately reveals him to be either a poor critic who fails to understand the meaning of these lines, or a smug detractor Page 85 →whose praise of Alda is manifestly disingenuous. As Medon conforms to the scripted behavior of the false gallant, quite literally borrowing his words from another writer, he repeatedly stalls the conversation. Whereas Reeve’s female critic had strategically ventriloquized the critical verdicts of more authoritative writers, Medon’s attempts to do the same are pointedly called into question. By recoding Medon’s gallantry as affectation, Alda compels him to shed the persona of uncritical admirer and to confront her claims through serious and rational discussion, so that by the end of the dialogue he is “prepared to listen in earnest.”105 Of course, the tension between Alda and Medon also denotes the antagonism between Jameson and the critical establishment writ large. By presenting her ideas in the form of a dialogue, Jameson inserts herself into a discourse that she felt had long held female voices in check. This strategy is reinforced as Alda places her own claims in conversation with male critics like Friedrich Schlegel, William Richardson, Samuel Johnson, and the wider “brotherhood of commentators.”106 When Medon recalls how “some of the commentators of Shakspeare have thought it incumbent on their gallantry to express their utter contempt for the scene between Richard and Lady Anne, as a monstrous and incredible libel” on women, Alda replies somewhat unexpectedly: “They might have spared themselves the trouble.”107 Just as denouncing Medon’s “false airs of gallantry” allows Alda to engage him in a real conversation, so too does she gain admission into a broader

community of critics by proclaiming that the idealization of women—women who might in fact, as in Jameson’s appraisal of Lady Anne, be motivated by vanity or ambition—proves a hindrance to critical interpretation. By rejecting the gallantry of the critics and confronting the weaknesses of her own sex, Alda establishes herself as a disinterested critic whose judgments are not determined by gender alone. Having successfully jettisoned the chivalric ethos that characterized responses to women’s writing in the major nineteenth-century periodicals, Alda turns her attention to potential critics of her own work. Medon, reflecting on Shakespeare’s depiction of vice in The Merchant of Venice, warns Alda: “[T]here are people in the world, whose opinions and feelings are tainted by an habitual acquaintance with the evil side of society, though in action and intention they remain right; and who, without the real depravity of heart and malignity of intention of Iago, judge as he does of the character and productions of others.”108 Alda’s reply is suggestive: “Heaven bless me from such critics! Yet if genius, Page 86 →youth, and innocence could not escape unslurred, can I hope to do so?”109 On the surface, Medon’s remark illustrates how useful literature might be in helping readers to vie with the wide range of moral behaviors they encounter in public life. Alda, however, places a slightly different construction on this statement. Always keenly attuned to the question of critical judgment, she reflects anxiously that some reviewers do indiscriminately judge “the character and productions of others” with the apathy and even malice of Iago. If Alda is figured as a literary Desdemona, whose good intentions are construed as overstepping her bounds, she finally escapes Desdemona’s fate by refusing to perform the role of the isolated and passive damsel. Instead, she tirelessly asserts her own claim to the seat of literary judgment and, by exposing the critical treatment of women writers as conspicuously uncritical, resists being either idealized or victimized by the literary establishment on the basis of her sex. Thus, when Medon expresses a distaste for the preposterous “reasoning in these female coteries,” Alda is quick to retort: “It is easy to sneer at political and mathematical ladies, and quote Lord Byron—but O leave those angry commonplaces to others!—they do not come well from you.”110 Medon’s assessment of intellectual women is not merely misguided: it is a lazy and mechanical repetition of old “commonplaces” that, as Jameson suggests throughout the dialogue, signals an acute anxiety about treating women as equal partners in critical discourse. To be sure, while Jameson’s writings express a desire to introduce female voices into critical dialogue, she often seems to reinstate traditional gender roles. Even in her most overtly feminist writings she warns against “anything which takes a woman out of her proper sphere, out of a happy and congenial home.”111 For Jameson, participation in critical discourse had less to do with women’s rights and more to do with the advancement of British culture as a whole. Hence, when Medon charges Alda with an interest in advocating the superior virtues of her own sex, she replies quite explicitly: “[A]s to maintaining the superiority or speculating on the rights of women—nonsense! why should you suspect me of such folly?—it is quite out of date. Why should there be competition or comparison?”112 Just as Medon’s “affectations of gallantry” threaten to impede the progress of his conversation with Alda, so too does the dissociation and division of the sexes threaten on a much broader scale to arrest social progress. By Jameson’s account, the very structure of social life, including institutions of literary and intellectual production, reinforces such divisions: Page 87 →Why do clubs, academies, charitable boards, literary and scientific societies so tenaciously exclude women, except when tolerated as an occasional and merely ornamental element? .В .В .В If, where no law of expediency or necessity require it, men studiously separate themselves from us and then reproach us that we form, in more self-defence, some resources for ourselves, what can ensue but the moral deterioration of both?113 What was needed was “a more complete social communion of men and women.”114 Jameson was aware that her argument was a controversial one and likely to spawn allegations that she was once again overstepping her bounds as a woman writer. “Our pretensions to such avocations as I have mentioned,” she writes, “may possibly be met by just the same arguments which fifty years ago were launched against вЂliterary ladies;’ and if sneers at вЂblue stockings’ and female pedants could have turned women from the cultivation of their minds, and crushed every manifestation of genius, no doubt it would have been done.”115 Jameson deems such aspersions to be outdated and impotent, noting that the desperate repetition of the “same

arguments” in opposition to women writers, much like the “angry commonplaces” Medon instinctively parrots in his conversation with Alda, reveals such attitudes to be anything but innate or unassailable. At the same time, Jameson places herself within a longer history of women who, like the bluestockings, recognized heterosocial dialogue as a positive boon to the evolving practice of criticism. Jameson withstood her professional challenges with resilience and, like Alda, eventually won over some of her erstwhile antagonists. In November 1831, Blackwood’s notorious tavern sages discussed Jameson’s Beauties of the Court of Charles the Second (1834) within the sanctuary of Ambrose’s tavern, gaping excitedly at the Beauties, praising them in bawdy detail, boldly resisting the practice of “gallant” criticism. While Timothy Tickler (John Lockhart) describes Lady Castlemaine as a “voluptuous vixen” and Lady Cleveland as an “insatiate harpy,” the Ettrick Shepherd (James Hogg) languishes over the portrait of Nell Gwynn, impulsively commanding her: “Gie me a kiss, ma lassie!”116 On the one hand, the tavern sages demonstrate a compulsive fascination with the sexuality of the Beauties, and their lewd remarks persist in treating these women as alluring sexual objects. Yet even here, we can detect a slight shift in the reception of female critics like Jameson. Toward the end of their jovial pronouncements, “Christopher North” (John Wilson) intercedes with a more sober reflection: Page 88 →I do not deny that many worthy people may have serious objections to the whole work. But not I. ’Tis a splendid publication, and will, ere long, be gracing the tables of a thousand drawing-rooms. The most eminent engravers have been employed, and they have done their best; nor do I know another lady who could have executed her task, it must be allowed a ticklish one, with greater delicacy than Mrs. Jameson.В .В .В . her own clear spirit kindles over the record of their lives, who in the polluted air of that court, spite of all trials and temptations, preserved without flaw or stain the jewel of their souls, their virtue.117 Wilson not only articulates Jameson’s argument with approbation; he also distinguishes Jameson from the tavern sages surrounding him and from the community of courtesans she discusses. Though clearly retaining some reservations about the reputations of these women (despite the engravers’ having “done their best”), he sanctions Jameson’s ability to offer a frank assessment of them without ever becoming guilty by association. F. D. Maurice was more unequivocally appreciative of Jameson’s intervention: “When we can find a person who shows us some road out of dilettantism, into that of which it is the counterfeit; out of criticism that crushes all creative power, into the criticism which reverences and fosters it; out of the independence of the sexes which destroy the work of both, into that fellowship and co-operation which is implied in their existence,—that person ought to be welcomed as one who is fit to teach us and help us.”118 Maurice’s words reflect a deep awareness of and appreciation for the argument Jameson had been constructing since the very beginning of her career: that a divisive gender politics had promoted the rise of sham critics, motivated more by social performance than a concern for dialogic exchange. Not yet admitted to Ambrose’s Tavern—and certainly not “welcomed” as a wholesale reformer of the critical establishment—Jameson had at least obtained an audience with some of the most important critical circles of the period.119 In 1864, Bessie Parkes published “A Review of the Last Six Years,” an account of the progress women had made as critics and reviewers. While women had taken important strides by midcentury, she proposes, the social mission of the English Woman’s Journal ironically prevented it from competing seriously with the major gentleman’s reviews, “for a subject cannot be at once popular and unpopular, rich and poor, clothed in purple and fine linen, and undergoing incessant fear of a social martyrdom.”120 The question is one that contemporary theorists continue to Page 89 →struggle with: how is one to speak out on behalf of women without reinscribing the sexual division of labor that threatens to exclude them from equal participation in public discourse? Much had been accomplished toward opening the critical profession to women, but at midcentury many of the same questions still remained. Furnished with a growing support network that could usher women into presswork, the new generation of female critics was still poised precariously between a mounting interest in women’s capacity for intellectual work and the recurring harangue against literary ladies and bluestockings. Jameson became increasingly irate about the attacks on women writers in the press toward the middle of the century. The relatively demure and restrained voice of the EnnuyГ©e had become far more outspoken and

intrepid. “Suppose,” Jameson writes, a woman were to take up the pen and write a review, headed in capital letters, “MEN in the 19th Century!” and pointing to absurd mistakes in legislation; to the want of public spirit in public men; to fraudulent bankruptcies; to mad or credulous speculations with borrowed gold—to social evils of the masculine gender corrupting the homes of others, and polluting their own, and wind up the philippic with—“Of such are our pastors and our masters?” Or respond to an article on “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” by an article headed “Silly Novels by Gentlemen Novelists?” True! This might be done—but God forbid that it ever should be done!—God forbid that women should ever enter an arena of contest in which victory, were it possible, would be destruction!121 In an otherwise effusive article on Jameson for Macmillan’s Magazine (1859–1907), F. D. Maurice deplored the belligerent tone of this passage, observing: “There cannot be the least occasion to show that gentlemen write silly novels. Everybody is aware of that.”122 Clearly, the facetious tenor of Jameson’s remark was lost on Maurice. Jameson’s object in this passage is not to recommend that such an article actually be written but rather to express her alarm at the fact that the press continued to target women writers as a subject for abuse. The implication is that writing an essay about “MEN in the 19th Century” would be absurd because men are not generally treated as a monolithic category whose actions and utterances are determined chiefly by gender. Women writers, however, continued to be treated as a uniform body, nearly all of them suffering from the common frailties and limitations of “the sex.” For Jameson, Page 90 →it was a sign that the dialogue she had attempted to establish between female critics like herself and the predominantly male critical establishment had not been an unmitigated success. The essay Jameson alludes to, of course, is George Eliot’s now famous article for the Westminster Review (1824–1914), “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.” Jameson regarded the piece as objectionable because it, like so many other reviews, singled out women writers for criticism, rather than acknowledging the common weaknesses of male and female writers. For his own part, Maurice admits to being perplexed by the allusion to Eliot’s review, which he apparently had not yet encountered. He writes: “Where the article on вЂSilly Novels by Lady Novelists’ appeared, I know not; but it must have been intended in a different spirit from that which Mrs. Jameson supposed.”123 Though Maurice failed to penetrate the satirical overtones of Jameson’s writing, he was certainly right to suspect that “a different spirit” undergirded Eliot’s piece. If Eliot was particularly attentive to the weaknesses of women writers, it was, as we shall see, because she felt that they had a special role to play in the future of critical practice.

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Chapter 4 The Critic as Sociologist Sociable Dissent in the Work of George Eliot According to a myth familiar to scholars of nineteenth-century literature, George Eliot’s literary and domestic partner G. H. Lewes shielded her from reviews of her own work, fearing that the criticism would be too much for her to bear. After her death, an unsigned article in the Saturday Review (1855–1938) described Eliot’s supposed “criticophobia” as a symptom of “the fatal and feminine idea of a mission which pursued her, and which made her look at adverse critics not as at possibly mistaken tasters of a work of art, but as good men who sympathized or did not sympathize with her gospel.”1 By this logic, Eliot’s fear of the critics was part of a more far-reaching, misguided, and distinctly feminine “mission” or “gospel,” a lust for intellectual fellowship that was fundamentally at odds with the work of nineteenth-century criticism.2 There is certainly a great deal of evidence to confirm Eliot’s aversion to critical writing.3 Her private correspondence, first published in John Cross’s Life of George Eliot (1885), suggests a striking correlation between Eliot’s rising fame as a novelist and her growing distrust of critical judgment. In an 1852 letter to John Chapman, Eliot remarked that the “publishing world seems utterly stagnant—nothing coming out which would do as a peg for an article,” and her skepticism of periodical criticism seemed only to swell after she became a writer of fiction.4 Just after the publication of Scenes of Clerical Life (1858), Eliot insisted to Charles Bray: “no reviews are of any importance now.”5 Page 92 →Despite Eliot’s at times rancorous responses to her critics and to the reviewing community more generally, she did not indiscriminately shun reviews of her work, nor did she declaim the value of true criticism. Having begun her career as a critic and editorial assistant for the Westminster Review, Eliot understood the cultural value of criticism, as well as its habitual defects. While she reviled much of the criticism produced during her time—a sentiment confirmed by her move away from reviewing in the late 1850s—her position was fueled by far more than feminine delicacy. Indeed, Eliot’s letters reflect an extensive knowledge of both popular and professional responses to her writing, suggesting that she did not maintain as great a distance from the critics as her apocryphal “criticophobia” would suggest. Long after she ceased contributing to the Westminster, Eliot continued to reflect on the nature and proper exercise of critical consciousness in her personal correspondence, professional engagements, and novels. We see this as much in her proposal that the second edition of Adam Bede (1859) include a prefatory discussion of literary criticism (a proposal that her publisher ultimately rejected), as in the publication of her final full-length fiction, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1878), a work that in both form and content recalls Eliot’s familiarity with and deep investment in criticism. Although Eliot was unquestionably wary of literary reviews, her suspicions were grounded more in her aversion to Victorian critical practice than in a rejection of criticism as such. To some extent, Eliot vied with the very stereotype Anna Jameson sought to undermine—the stereotype of the untried, secluded woman writer who was presumably too delicate to withstand the social life of criticism. Yet whereas Jameson trained her attention on critical dialogues that were intimate and informal, Eliot’s work was directed toward a much larger sphere of professional engagement—the networks and coteries that helped to generate and circulate critical judgment. Drawing upon historical accounts of the female-guided salon—as well as the sociological work of Herbert Spencer, J. S. Mill, and others—Eliot developed a methodology that, so far from reflecting a fear of criticism, demonstrates a keen interest in productive discord and disagreement. Paradoxically, Eliot regarded professional belonging as dependent upon difference. In the end, placing Eliot’s work within this broader social context not only revises our understanding of Eliot’s position on the role of sympathy in professional life, but also helps to complicate entrenched attitudes toward female critical consciousness, framing the Page 93 →female intellect less as a vessel for compassion than as the mouthpiece for sociable dissent.6

Laws of Progress: The Sociological Foundations of the Westminster Review George Eliot’s interest in community and her characterization of it in the novel have been well documented.7 But Eliot’s engagement with social theory was at least equally important to her evolving understanding of critical practice. In The Dynamics of Genre (2009), Dallas Liddle rightly underscores Eliot’s resistance to the review’s hierarchical posture, noting that Eliot categorically opposed the dogmatic tenor of the nineteenthcentury review and openly critiqued the genre in her own productions.8 Yet to regard her engagement with nineteenth-century journalism as one of grudging participation and ultimate renunciation risks underrating Eliot’s enduring belief in the positive value of critical discourse. By viewing Eliot’s early career through a sociological lens, we can better explain both her relationship to the reviewing community and her innovative responses to the problems it sometimes presented. Eliot was initiated into the publishing world through her work as coeditor of the Westminster Review, and both the institutional precepts of the Westminster and Eliot’s unique experiences in the editorial closet shaped her belief that intellectual progress depended on the comparison, collision, and combination of vastly different points of view. For Eliot, the successful critical exchange must, of necessity, cultivate bonds within a heterogeneous social body defined equally by conflict and mutual understanding. Originally founded in 1823 as the brainchild of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, the Westminster was intended to be a vehicle for radical philosophical thought, distinct from publications like the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, both of which represented entrenched party interests. From its inception, the Westminster distinguished itself, pledging to “take part with no faction, to support no body of men.”9 Of course, despite the Westminster’s determination to serve as a haven for radical thinkers, it was not without an agenda of its own. The prospectus identified the editors as “organs of an able and active society of individuals, who have seen with regret and somewhat of indignation that the name of criticism has been usurped with sinister views.”10 Initially at least, the Westminster claimed to be the public face of a close-knit circle of thinkers who posed Page 94 →an alternative to those partisan outlets that threatened to marginalize new and unorthodox points of view. United by a common allegiance to the utilitarian doctrines of Bentham, the Westminster circle was built upon the promise of a society in which incisive critique constituted the very bedrock of communal livelihood. According to J. S. Mill, who once called Bentham that “great questioner of all things established,” the chief aim of Benthamite philosophy was to wage an honorable “war of criticism and refutation” that held even the most entrenched truths to a higher standard of proof. He writes: Bentham’s method may be shortly described as the method of detail of treating wholes by separating them into their parts, abstractions by resolving them into Things, classes and generalities by distinguishing them into the individuals of which they are made up; and breaking every question into pieces before attempting to solve it.11 Insisting that “the human mind is not capable of embracing a complex whole, until it has surveyed and catalogued the parts of which that whole is made up,” Bentham inspired his followers at the Westminster to adopt a more systematic and meticulous approach to critical interpretation.12 Even as they rejected the insularity of mainstream political and social platforms, the Westminster’s staff and loyal followers recognized a deep, if paradoxical, need to develop a community of their own—one devoted to interrogating accepted philosophical precepts. As the Westminster afforded a hub for thinkers outside the political mainstream, it also served as a forum for testing innovative theories of intellectual community. Most noteworthy among these, at least in the context of Eliot’s career, were the sociological models of J. S. Mill and Herbert Spencer. In the 1820s Mill headed the Utilitarian Society, a group of aspiring young scholars who regularly assembled to exchange and discuss drafts of essays intended for submission to the Westminster. As George Nesbitt notes, the articles penned by members of this circle were distinguished by a uniquely authoritative tone, evidence of “the assurance naturally supplied by this concerted thinking—the feeling that the writer represented not an individual but a school.”13 In some ways, this undertaking served as a kind of prelude to Mill’s appointment as the Westminster’s editor the following decade. But during his famous mental “crisis” of 1826—an event documented at length in his Autobiography (1873)—Mill began to doubt that any fixed philosophical system held all of the answers. Despite

its foundational role in Mill’s political theory,Page 95 → Benthamism had not yielded the pleasure and fulfillment that Mill, trained only to a theoretical understanding of the “greatest happiness principle,” had expected. Increasingly, he found himself at odds with a “sectarian Benthamism,” which threatened the principles of classic liberalism he would later defend in On Liberty (1859).14 At the heart of Mill’s crisis was a growing awareness that the work of criticism must be in some degree social. Bentham’s chief error, according to Mill, was his “contemptВ .В .В . of all other schools of thinkers.”15 “Bentham failed,” Mill continues, “in deriving light from other minds. His writings contain few traces of the accurate knowledge of any schools of thinking but his own; and many proofs of this entire conviction that they could teach him nothing worth knowing.”16 Committed to the project of disputing tradition and yet convinced that his own claims were beyond reproach, Bentham lacked the kind of intellectual sympathy Mill felt sound criticism demanded. By contrast, Mill insists that intellectual advancement depends upon the public’s readiness to support differences of opinion and “the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error.”17 Such volatile collisions, he argues, help to bring about the formation of more exact knowledge by “dislocating the compact mass of one-sided opinion and forcing its elements to recombine in a better form and with additional ingredients.”18 When Mill agreed to serve as editor of the Westminster in 1834, he accordingly proclaimed his intention “to give a wider basis and a more free and genial character to Radical speculations” by inviting articles from across the political spectrum and disavowing any affiliation with specific philosophical creeds.19 From this time on, the community of the Westminster would become inexorably larger and more heterogeneous.20 The second major influence on Eliot’s critical outlook, Herbert Spencer, first encountered both Mill and Eliot at the home of John Chapman, the man who published Spencer’s 1851 volume Social Statics and would serve as Eliot’s coeditor at the Westminster. Spencer’s “law of progress” echoed Mill’s skepticism of fixed intellectual creeds and, by drawing an analogy between biological and intellectual development, inaugurated a socioscientific idiom that Eliot would repeatedly invoke in later years. In Social Statics, a work that poses a direct challenge to Bentham’s principle of utility, Spencer claimed that simple organisms—“creatures consisting of nothing but amorphous semi-fluid jelly”—are less advanced than those consisting of differentiated organs, each of which is highly specialized and essential to the functioning of the whole.21 By contrast, more advanced organisms are heterogeneous in makeup, consisting of distinct Page 96 →organs that serve specialized functions and work in combination to make the body more adaptable and efficient. In short, the most evolved and well-adapted organisms are those that are complex, diversified, and heterogeneous in parts. Acknowledging the popular tendency to describe society as a “body politic,” Spencer extends the analogy to all social bodies, which must likewise combine the “highest individuation” with “the greatest mutual dependence.”22 By this logic, a society that welcomes intellectual diversity would tend to be more highly developed than one in which diversity is not permitted to flourish. Spencer thus regards the sort of intellectual conflict prescribed by Mill as productive precisely because it enables thinkers to arrive at certain shared, primary truths, thereby facilitating the acquisition of new knowledge and forging stronger bonds of sympathy among individuals. If Mill established a precedent for impartial editorship at the Westminster, Spencer provided Eliot with a vocabulary and sociological model for articulating the relationships among her own critical community, its rivals, and the reading public. The very year Social Statics appeared before the public, Eliot and Chapman drafted an updated prospectus for the Westminster, which announced that the “Law of Progress” was to be the guiding principle of the review.23 In this spirit, the prospectus pledged the Westminster’s commitment to “a radical and comprehensive treatment” of the day’s most important questions and “the conciliation of divergent views.”24 Eliot’s belief in intellectual diversity was quickly put to the test as she occupied the center of a vibrant, influential, and transatlantic community of thinkers, which included Robert Mackay, Harriet Martineau, Horace Greeley, and William Cullen Bryant, who tellingly described Eliot as the “blue-stocking lady who writes for the Westminster Review.”25 Although Eliot’s position as Chapman’s editorial assistant was ostensibly anonymous, it was an open secret among the major literary circles of the period, where, as Bryant’s remark suggests, her gender was a matter of note. Women had certainly pursued editorial work prior to Eliot’s arrival

at the Westminster, but Eliot was one of very few women editing at that time in Britain and was among the first to edit a publication of this sort.26 The Westminster claimed to be a serious review and one that would rival the major political journals of the day. Eliot would not merely be correcting proofs; she would be responsible for drawing together an otherwise disjointed community of eminent, in many cases groundbreaking, thinkers within the pages of the review. Eliot undertook the task with zeal and without receiving financial compensation for her labor. Her pet project, the “Independent Contributions”Page 97 → section, provided a forum for writers who “differ widely on special points of great practical concern, both from the Editors and from each other.”27 By creating such a forum, Eliot hoped to broadcast voices excluded from even the most radical publications. She applied the same principles to the “Belles Lettres” section, where she dexterously mediated among contributions to create a seamless dialogue between them. In an 1852 letter to Chapman, Eliot marveled that men as ideologically opposed as James Martineau, F. H. Newman, J. S. Mill, and J. A. Froude could coexist within the pages of the Westminster: These men can write more openly in the Westminster than anywhere else. They are amongst the world’s vanguard, though not all in the foremost line; it is good for the world, therefore, that they should have every facility for speaking out. Ergo, since each can’t have a periodical to himself, it is good that there should be one which is common to them—id est, the Westminster.28 Setting adversaries side by side, this “common” forum facilitated a shared project of intellectual discovery. Disagreement among contributors was not only tolerated; it was regarded as a positive boon to the Westminster’s intellectual mission. In the reviews penned by her own hand, the “law of progress” emerges as both a recurring subject and vital component of Eliot’s critical method. Addressing many different fields of inquiry—including theology, philosophy, history, and literature—Eliot’s reviews time and again tout a narrative of progress able to unfold only within a heterogeneous field of ideas. As early as 1851, Eliot published a review of Mackay’s The Progress of Intellect (1859) in which she describes spiritual knowledge as “perpetually unfolding itself to our widened experience and investigation.”29 Like Spencer and Mill, Eliot treats the production of knowledge as a syncretic and often collaborative process. It should thus come as no surprise that in a discussion of William Glen Moncrieff’s pamphlet Soul (1852) Eliot rejects the claim “that there is a homogeneity of thought in all the different parts of the Bible,” preferring instead to regard the Bible as a text composed over time and by many different hands.30 According to Eliot, the “thoroughly honest critical investigation” needed to penetrate Scripture is valuable precisely because it is a collaborative and intertextual project.31 The value of intellectual collaboration is even more central to Eliot’s 1855 review of Otto Friedrich Gruppe’s Gegenwart und Zukunft der Philosophie in Deutschland (1855), a Page 98 →work that describes critical judgment as “a comparison, or perception of likeness in the midst of difference.”32 Like Eliot, Gruppe insists that astute critics should not capitalize on intellectual differences in order to assert their own agendas; the progressive critic seeks instead to find common ground and to view intellectual disagreement as a foundation for new knowledge. It is fitting that Eliot’s theory of criticism—one that celebrated productive differences of opinion—should emerge within the pages of the Westminster book reviews, a space where the sciences, theology, history, and philosophy were frequently discussed in a single column. Eliot’s theory of intellectual diversity was itself, that is to say, nurtured and refined in an environment that promoted such diversity. As coeditor, though, Eliot found it nearly impossible to bring the disparate views of her contributors into harmony. In an 1852 letter to George Combe, Eliot cites a revealing passage from the correspondence of Frances Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review from 1802 to 1829. In an 1815 letter to one of the review’s cofounders, Frances Horner, Jeffrey recounts his own endeavors to reconcile opposing viewpoints among contributors: [В .В .В .В ] it always appeared to me that a considerable diversity was quite compatible with all the consistency that should be required in a work of this description. [В .В .В .В ] and that doctrines

might very well be maintained in the same number which were quite irreconcilable with each other, except in their common tendency to repress servility and diffuse a general spirit of independence in the body of the people.33

Jeffrey’s remark, though echoing the pluralist spirit of the Prospectus, did little to quell Eliot’s growing anxieties. Dismissing Jeffrey’s claim that “considerable diversity” of thought can be sustained in a single issue, Eliot instead finds solace in his admission that certain ideas are “quite irreconcilable.” “I am glad,” she wryly observes, “of any authority to cite which will tend to prove the impossibility of securing perfect harmony in a work dependent on fluctuating contributors.”34 In what almost appears to be a deliberate misreading of Jeffrey’s statement, Eliot articulates her mounting fear that no publication could realize the kind of productive, syncretic dialogue delineated in the 1851 Prospectus. The shift in Eliot’s outlook can be attributed both to the growing popularity of the Westminster and to the expansion of the periodical market, which had brought about considerable changes in her editorial function. Increasingly, Eliot found her attention preoccupied by the Page 99 →process of selecting articles for publication and refining the prose of her contributors. As Margaret Beetham puts it, “an editor or proprietor will try to enforce a certain consistency of style and position,” so that editors were always in the position of mediating among contributors, readers, and publishers.35 Though Eliot would likely have spurned the idea of distilling the Westminster’s discrete contributions into a single line of argument, the prospectus advertises the review as a space not only willing to accommodate opposing views but actually able to elicit a kind of harmony among them. This goal was repeatedly contested by writers who were either unfamiliar or unconcerned with the Westminster’s “law of progress.” For example, James Martineau, a longtime contributor who made vociferous attempts to seize control of the Westminster in later years, repeatedly demanded that the review express unequivocal support for the Unitarian doctrines that assumed such a central place in his own work.36 In the face of such challenges—not to mention the swelling pile of books and articles that demanded her attention—Eliot’s mediating role increasingly took a backseat to her role as anonymous proofreader, peacekeeper, and intellectual laborer. Thus, when George Combe confronted the Westminster with “the imputation of вЂtrimming’ and cowardice,” Eliot explained that her desire to be inclusive often conflicted with her responsibility “to secure the best thought and the best writing on the most important topics.”37 Eliot’s remark is curiously prescient of Matthew Arnold’s avowal ten years later in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time, ” where he would famously define criticism as “a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world, and thus to establish a current of fresh and true ideas.”38 Like Arnold, Eliot believed that the very fate of intellectual culture depended on a far-reaching model of criticism, one capable of absorbing knowledge from diverse communities and fields of inquiry. But in her final days as editor of the Westminster, Eliot worried that her involvement with a circle of writers who did not share her vision of social progress was diminishing her ability to carry out this mission. In an 1852 letter to Herbert Spencer, Eliot describes her frustration with the editorship in telling words: I fancy I should soon be on an equality, in point of sensibility, with the star-fish and seaegg—perhaps you will wickedly say, I certainly want little of being a Medusa. I have had a loathing for books—for all tagging together of sentences since I came, and have liked everything as indefinite as the sounds of an Aeolian harp. You see I am sinking fast Page 100 →toward “homogeneity,” and my brain will soon be a mere pulp unless you come to arrest the downward process.39 Drawing on the zoological idiom so familiar to Spencer, Eliot figures herself as a simple organism, virtually indistinguishable from other creatures inhabiting the vast sea of periodical literature. Eliot’s description of herself as a medusa, or jellyfish, replicates this taxonomy but also complicates it by invoking the Greek myth of Medusa.40 Given Eliot’s growing frustration with the Westminster, the double entendre reveals much about her professional self-image. Medusa’s gaze turns men to stone; her influence is not synthetic or invigorating

but rather stultifying and destructive. In this passage, Eliot portrays her editorship, like the petrifying gaze of the Medusa, as immensely powerful and yet unproductive. Feeling less and less capable of “tagging together” articles in a constructive manner, Eliot faced a mounting temptation to abandon her progressive vision and relinquish her position at the center of the Westminster circle.

A Common Fund: The Female Salon and Critical Collectivity For the most part, Eliot’s career has been bifurcated into two phases: the period before the publication of her first work of fiction in 1858, which has been described as a kind of juvenile apprenticeship, and the period that saw Eliot’s emergence as the preeminent novelist of her day. While Eliot’s novels have always attracted attention for their rich portrayals of nineteenth-century femininity, her critical work has repeatedly been regarded as distinct from or in tension with her status as a woman writer. In “The Voices of the Essayist” (1980), G. Robert Stange admits that Eliot’s anonymous reviews occasionally divulge sentiments that, “if they were known to come from a woman, might be regarded as special pleading,” but also insists that she “accepted, apparently not unhappily, the convention of the male reviewer.”41 Taking a slightly different tack, Alexis Easley rightly claims that Eliot depended on anonymity as a shield against being assessed solely as a woman writer, thereby demonstrating “through her own example, the ways that вЂtrue’ authorship was beyond sex and gender.”42 Though Eliot was indeed reluctant to be judged solely on the basis of biological sex, the underlying assumption in these approaches is telling: even when harboring feminist sympathies, Eliot does not theorize a distinct position for the female critic. For Eliot, the critic is masculine, androgynous, or desexualized and never explicitlyPage 101 → feminine. Yet if we trace Eliot’s application of Spencer’s sociological model to the world of criticism—in particular, his belief in the value of heterogeneity and differentiation—it becomes apparent that her understanding of the critical collectivity was profoundly shaped by gender. For Eliot, the female salon and the cultured woman at its center exemplified the theory of critical sociability she had cultivated at the Westminster and would continue to pursue to the end of her career—a theory that celebrated “likeness in the midst of difference.” In 1854, Eliot abandoned her post at the Westminster and left for Germany with George Henry Lewes. She had gone to great lengths to guard against public knowledge of her sex while serving as editor of the Westminster, but when she openly acknowledged her relationship with Lewes, she was reminded once again of the limitations sometimes faced by Victorian women in public life. Since Lewes was not actually divorced from his wife, the two could not marry and lived together out of wedlock, a decision that proved troubling even to their closest acquaintances. Thomas Carlyle lamented the “bad rumours circulating about a certain вЂstrong minded woman’ and him,” and even though Eliot and Lewes would entertain leading men of letters in the years to come, women appeared less frequently at their home, wary of associating with a known adulterer and his unrepentant mistress.43 In the 1860s, Eliot’s female visitors could, in the words of Gordon Haight, “be numbered on one hand,” and Kathryn Hughes characterizes the circle congregating at the Lewes’s home as “heavily masculine.”44 In 1869, Charles Eliot Norton noted that Eliot “is not received in general society and the women who visit her are either so emancipГ©e as not to mind what the world says about them, or they have no social position to maintain.”45 The intellectual community Eliot so diligently pursued during her time at the Westminster seems, by these accounts, to have faded away with her very public departure from Victorian sexual norms. Social life on the Continent was different. In Weimar, Eliot and Lewes frequented the home of Princess Caroline Sayn-Wittgenstein, whose evening gatherings featured some of the most promising minds of Europe.46 In her Weimar journal, Eliot describes visiting Franz Liszt at his home, the Altenburg, where she lunched “in a saloon formed by overarching trees” with philologist Hoffmann von Fallersleben, poet Oscar Schade, artist Peter von Cornelius, and musician Joachim Raff.47 Afterward, the group reportedly proceeded to a large musicsalon where they read, rehearsed musical compositions, and conversed at length. Eliot’s account of these gatherings suggests an atmosphere of intellectual vitality and conviviality. Page 102 →“People are wonderfully kind to us here,” Eliot writes in a letter to John Chapman: “Liszt overwhelming in attentions, [Gustav Adolf] SchГ¶ll and all freundlich, and Mr. [Thomas] Wilson who has been here about ten days, extremely polite and agreeable.В .В .В . Affection, respect, and intellectual sympathy deepen.”48

This spirit of “intellectual sympathy” was especially pronounced in the European salons. Disenchanted with the review as an intellectual forum, Eliot turned to the salon and the female hostess at its center as a new model for critical collectivity—one capable of realizing the principle of heterogeneity she had cultivated under the tutelage of Mill and Spencer. Although the rituals of salon culture varied from one country to another, in the most general sense the salon was a mixed-gender gathering that valued conversation as a means of generating criticism, social connections, and occasionally published writing. The discursive ethos of the salon was associative, dialogic, and purportedly democratic; in a way, it was a domestic and heterosocial iteration of the eighteenth-century coffeehouse. Like the coffeehouse, though, the salon could hardly live up to its reputation as a prototype for the ideal public sphere, and countless writers took issue with the salons for their pretentious display of learning or, conversely, for their tendency to lapse into idle chatter. Such critiques recall Anthony Trollope’s lampoon of Mrs. Proudie’s conversazione in Framley Parsonage (1860), which features men and women who, despite their professed zeal for conversation, engage only in the most superficial discussions of fashion, food, gossip, and the improving effects of intellectual discussions they never seem to begin.49 This is not to say that the salons failed as sites of intellectual production. As one might expect, some were simply more successful than others. In the end, however, the importance of such gatherings within Eliot’s critical worldview has far more to do with the idea of the salon than with the reality. For Eliot, the salons represented access to a vast network of European intellectuals, as well as a model of how to referee the kind of intellectual community she had found so exasperating as editor of the Westminster. In 1854, just as Eliot arrived in Weimar, the Westminster commissioned her to write an article that would dovetail with her experiences in the German salons, “Woman in France: Madame de Sablé” (1854). While technically a review of Victor Cousin’s Madame de SablГ© (1854), this essay is also one of Eliot’s most extensive discussions of the relationship between gender and critical sociability. As the title suggests, “Woman in France” does not merely offer an account of a celebrated salonniГЁre but also presents a broader survey of women’s influence in the cultural historyPage 103 → of France. If the seventeenth century saw the emergence of works like FranГ§ois La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes (1665), Blaise Pascal’s PensГ©es (1670), and Jean de La BruyГЁre’s CaractГЁres (1688), Eliot argues that it was a direct result of the heterosocial salon and the dynamic female presence at its center. In short, Eliot figures the salonniГЁre as having originated a collective model of criticism akin to the periodical miscellany. In part, the essay constitutes an attempt to recuperate what Eliot regarded as a female literary tradition that had been erased from the British cultural landscape. To that end, “Woman in France” commences with a comparison between women’s writing in Britain, which is likened to the “swaggering gate of a bad actress in male attire,” and the productions of their French counterparts.50 In Eliot’s view, the disparity between the writings of British women and the more fertile literature of their French cousins stems chiefly from differences in social custom, the most important of which was the ready access French women had to intellectual culture through the salon. The French salon was a refuge—for men, from the competitive workaday world, and for women, from the limitations of domestic life. In the salon, men did not engage in inane conversations with the ladies only to “take each other by the sword-knot to discuss matters of real interest in a corner.”51 These were “rГ©unions of both sexes, where conversation ran along the whole gamut of subjects,” mixed assemblies whose success depended on the accessibility and amenability of intellectual discourse.52 The salon was, in short, a select society where intellectual dialogue thrived on the intermingling of the sexes. The salon’s rhetoric of inclusion enabled it to serve as a microcosm of the public world of letters, even as its domestic setting tempered the economic and political stakes that taxed public discourse. As Harriet Guest puts it, such gatherings “effect political ends because they remove men from their political context, reconfirming their identities as what Habermas calls вЂhuman beings pure and simple,’ as private men who participate in the literary public sphere.”53 While the salon was populated by men and women “bent on entertaining themselves either by showing talent or admiring it,” transplanting this spirit of competition into the home domesticated it and turned attention away from the acquisition of profit toward the cultivation of social relationships.54 Of special interest to Eliot, however, was the salon’s power to furnish women with an intellectual outlet that was both uninhibited and socially permissible. As Suzanne Graver has shown, Eliot struggled to reconcile what

she regarded as women’s natural capacity for sympathy with a world of labor predicated on the rejection of such values.55 The Page 104 →emotional virtues of women simply could not, in her view, survive the competitive, profit-driven world of labor. In principle, the salon allowed women to circumvent this dilemma by exerting their syncretic and sympathetic influence within the safe, uncorrupting space of the home. For Eliot, women’s special capacity for sympathy qualified them as ideal leaders of this fragmented, yet potentially groundbreaking world, “making possible the combination of the utmost exaltation in sentiment with the utmost simplicity of language.”56 Exemplifying intellectual tolerance in her conduct and speech, the salonniГЁre not only mediated among her guests, but also served as a kind of intellectual exemplar. The Marquise de Rambouillet, head of the seventeenth-century HГґtel de Rambouillet, was thus for Eliot “the very model of the woman who can act as an amalgam to the most incongruous elements.”57 In Berlin, a few months after composing “Woman in France,” Eliot became a fixture in Henriette Solmar’s salon, where “the best society of Berlin” congregated.58 The centerpiece of this community was Solmar herself, who boasted a unique capacity for moderating conversation. Eliot describes Solmar as a remarkably accomplished woman, probably between fifty and sixty, but of that agreeable Wesen which is so free from anything startling in person or manner and so at home in everything one can talk of, that you think of her simply as a delightful presence, and not as a woman of any particular age.59 Conversant in several languages, Solmar was for Eliot “the true type of the mistress of the salon,” capable of literally and figuratively translating among the members of her circle.60 In other words, Eliot would perceive in her lived experience a confirmation of her argument in “Woman in France”—that the salonniГЁre was uniquely suited to facilitating an atmosphere of open and honest critical exchange. Admittedly, Eliot’s suggestion that “women are peculiarly fitted to further such a combination” of perspectives depends upon an essentialist worldview that threatens to reinforce the traditional role of woman as emotional conduit or domestic helpmate.61 Given woman’s “greater tendency to mingle affection and imagination with passion, and thus subtilize it into sentiment” and her “instinctive fondness for lightness of treatment and airiness of expression,” she seems likelier to serve as a muse than to embark on a literary career.62 But whether one is inclined to embrace or refuse this turn to essentialism it is important to recognize Page 105 →that Eliot’s belief in distinctly “feminine” attributes is always paired with an appreciation for the many different forms female experience assumes in real life.63 As she would later put it in the prelude to Middlemarch (1871–72), “the limits of variation are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness of women’s coiffure and the favourite love-stories in prose and verse.”64 Thus, while Eliot’s understanding of the female intellect presumes that women are by nature sympathetic, she by no means relegates women to a single or a subordinate role in intellectual discourse. In “Woman in France, ” Eliot not only accepts female authorship as a viable outcome of salon culture; she claims that the salonniГЁres may have precipitated the emergence of the critical tradition itself.65 For instance, Mademoiselle d’Orleans, who headed a salon at the Palais de Luxembourg in the seventeenth century, requested that members of her circle submit portraits of themselves in which “defects and virtues were to be spoken of with like candor,” a project that ultimately gave rise to what Eliot refers to as the “genre precieux.”66 The term is laden with significance. The literary style known as prГ©ciositГ© was inspired by the banter of the salon, and the term prГ©cieuses by extension came to describe the salonniГЁres themselves. Perhaps the most wellknown use of the term emerges in MoliГЁre’s one-act comedy of manners, PrГ©cieuses Ridicules (1659), which aligns the pretentious airs of its female characters with a misguided self-importance some attributed to salon gatherings.67 For Eliot, however, the “genre precieux” was founded on precisely the principle of heterogeneity she espoused as editor of the Westminster. It relied, that is to say, on drawing together diverse personalities into a dynamic and animated community. According to the literary genealogy Eliot traces, these portraits were collected, published, and distributed as Divers Portraits (1659). Thirty years later, La BruyГЁre revived and adapted the genre in his translation of Theophrastus’s Characters. Although the genre’s greatest practitioners may have been male, in Eliot’s view the portrait genre is not idiosyncratically French or aristocratic, but rather assimilative, sympathetic, and feminine, a fact that would lead her to directly invoke the

genre years later in Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1878).68 Ultimately, then, Madame de SablГ© is for Eliot the “animated spirit of a society whence issued a new form of French literature”—not the portrait genre, but the literary journal.69 By Eliot’s account, FranГ§ois La Rochefoucauld’s famous collection of sayings, Maximes, originated in pieces of salon conversation and thus reflects the fragmented and Page 106 →wide-ranging community of the salon in which he participated. It is all the more appropriate, then, that La Rochefoucauld was only persuaded to publish the book by Sablé’s relentless prompting. Upon publication of the volume, SablГ© “prepared a notice of it for the only journal then existing—the Journal des Savants.”70 Her notice was scrupulous and evidently included a summary of the work, “opinions which had been formed for and against it,” and an endorsement of La Rochefoucauld’s argument.71 Dissatisfied with the “paragraph which stated the adverse opinion,” La Rochefoucauld undertook his own revisions of the notice prior to its publication: according to Eliot, the revised article was far more unilateral in its judgment.72 SablГ© had attempted to produce the kind of evenhanded and comprehensive review that Eliot idealized, but was prevented from doing so by the male writer benefiting from her patronage. Writing in a genre that in many ways looked ahead to the nineteenth-century review, SablГ© anticipated the obstacles women would later face in attempting to become professional reviewers and, to this extent, served as a critical prototype for Eliot. Capable of bringing together opposing viewpoints and distinct voices, the salonniГЁre cultivated a “common fund” of knowledge that could be made available equally to men and women.73 By figuring SablГ© as a kind of critics, Eliot suggests that periodical criticism originated in a dynamic and explicitly feminine site of intellectual sociability. La Rochefoucauld’s rejection of Sablé’s review points to the tension between femininity and criticism even at this early date. “In some points,” Eliot solemnly observes, “we see, the youth of journalism was not without promise of its future.”74 With this remark, Eliot raises a crucial question: exactly what kind of future would it be? In the end, Eliot associates the rise of the male-dominated periodical with the disappearance of the salon and similar acts of “editing out” the female voice. As Elizabeth Goldsmith and Dena Goodman note, it was in large part the “triumph of the press as a mode of cultural production” that led to the decline of the salon’s influence: “In the salon, women were praised for a style of speech and writing that was fundamentally interactive, social, unselfconscious, and self-effacing. As published authors, how could they uphold such standards?”75 For Eliot too, the rise of the periodical “business” coincided historically with the disappearance of the salon and the decline of the heterosocial ideal it embodied. Adopting the collective “we” first used by the literary clubs of the Spectator and the Tatler, Eliot describes an alienating world in which all social intercourse transpires through the periodical: Page 107 →We read the “Athenaeum” askance at the tea-table, and take notes from the “Philosophical Journal” at a soirГ©e; we invite our friends that we may thrust a book into their hands, and presuppose an exclusive desire in the “ladies” to discuss their own matters, “that we may crackle the Times” at our ease.76 Assuming an explicitly male persona, Eliot associates reading the Times with the masculine “we” who read reviews and leave the women to gossip among themselves. The ready-made judgments of periodical journals not only arrest conversation among the men who hungrily devour the reviews, but also deny the kind of mixed-gender gathering Eliot celebrates in “Woman in France.” For Eliot, then, the disproportionate power of periodical criticism was at least partially responsible for the decline of the very social forms that had given it vitality in the first place. Seen this way, Eliot’s wariness of the Victorian review was less about her own fear of the reviews than a sincere concern for the social life of criticism, which seemed increasingly to be marred by antisocial behavior. Eliot’s investment in criticism did not, as we have seen, terminate with the conclusion of her tenure at the Westminster. Indeed, her interest in critical exchange and literary networks persisted well into her career as a writer of fiction and is perhaps most powerfully conveyed in her 1859 novel Adam Bede.77 After reading early chapters of the novel, John Blackwood expressed reservations about Eliot’s treatment of the singularly unremarkable rector Mr. Irwine, intimating a wish that he would “sublime as the story goes on” and

become the moral exemplar so many readers would hope to find in a clergyman.78 Blackwood had expressed similar concerns about the clerical figures in Scenes of Clerical Life. In a particularly brazen move, Eliot publicly responded to Blackwood’s criticism in the seventeenth chapter of Adam Bede, “In Which the Story Pauses a Little.”79 Taking issue with Blackwood’s desire for more familiar and exemplary characters, Eliot ventriloquizes her “fair critic” with palpable satire: Do improve the facts a little, then; make them more accordant with those correct views which it is our privilege to possess. The world is not just what we like; do touch it up with a tasteful pencil, and make believe it is not quite such a mixed, entangled affair. Let all people who hold unexceptionable opinions act unexceptionably. Let your most faulty characters always be on the wrong side, and your virtuous ones on the right. Then we shall see at a glance whom we are to condemnPage 108 → and whom we are to approve. Then we shall be able to admire, without the slightest disturbance of our prepossessions: we shall hate and despise with that true ruminant relish which belongs to undoubting confidence.80 Eliot’s invective against the popular taste for moralizing tales betrays her well-established investment in realism—a method, as George Levine puts it, “that depends heavily on reaction against what the writer takes to have been misrepresentation.”81 In this case, Eliot highlights the tendency of the reading public (as well as publishers like Blackwood) to ignore the vital role that heterogeneity, conflict, and even uncertainty play in cultural advancement. The “fair critic” reads in order to become part of a fictional community that is both idealized and “accordant” with her “correct views” of the world. Tired of contending with “such a mixed, entangled affair,” this critic asks Eliot to reduce the novel’s disparate perspectives to a more intelligible, idealized, and presumably normative worldview. The readers and critics Eliot addresses are, in other words, resistant to the range of philosophies, perspectives, and gray areas presented by the realist novel. Contemporary reviewers repeatedly flouted Eliot’s desire to engage readers in the “mixed, entangled” business of her fiction. Despite rumors of Eliot’s reluctance to read reviews of her own work, her chief complaint at this time was that critical approbation of Adam Bede had led to an unsophisticated and undiscriminating reception of her work. It was in this spirit that Eliot denounced to John Blackwood the “damnatory praise from ignorant journalists” and in a subsequent letter reflected that “unless something looking like the real opinion of a tolerably educated writer in a respectable journal can be given, it would be better to abstain from вЂopinions of the press’ altogether.”82 Reflecting on the reviews of Adam Bede, she observed to Charles Bray that “praise is so much less gratifying than comprehension and sympathy.”83 According to Eliot, the critic’s office was not merely to endorse or decry the appearance of new novels but (following Bentham and Spencer) to analyze carefully the individual parts of a work in order to facilitate a better comprehension of the whole. The critic’s ability to access truth about literary form thus depended, as she observes in her 1868 “Notes on Form in Art,” on the Spencerian principle of heterogeneity: “the conception of wholes composed of parts more & more multiplied & highly differenced, yet more & more absolutely bound together by various conditions of common likeness or mutual dependence.”84 Such an interpretive model is Page 109 →by nature both critical, because it practices a probing and even intrusive vivisection of the text, and sympathetic, since it should also attempt to understand the relationship among the different elements of literary construction, as well as the relationship between the text and the social world it addresses. As a case in point, we might consider those widespread speculations in the press concerning the true identity of “George Eliot.” In April 1859, Henry Smith Andres wrote a letter to the editor of the Times claiming that the author of Adam Bede was Mr. Joseph Liggins of Nuneaton. G. H. Lewes proposed to write a satire in Eliot’s defense in which he would expose the newspaper critics responsible for spreading the Liggins theory as literary hacks: My idea is a letter to the editor written in indignant remonstrance against this squeamishness which would deprive me of my most telling paragraphs. As I have no ideas, and no knowledge, how can I get a living except by reporting the conversation, the gossip and the flying rumours of clubs and

coteries?85

With tongue in cheek, Lewes assumes the voice of a gossipmonger lamenting the injustice of those who would arrest the circulation of coterie rumors. Thus, while Eliot claims that the “coterie no longer acts on literature, ” Lewes insists that the coterie continued to wield a great deal of influence—no longer through the generative debates of the salon but rather through the mechanical repetition of club chatter. Eliot’s criticism of British women writers at the beginning of “Woman in France” thus divulges her anxiety about the absence of female voices in an intellectual world that needed the strong mediating influence of the salonnière. While restoring women writers to their rightful place at the center of British culture was important in itself, Eliot also regarded it as the only sure way of rescuing criticism from the atomizing effects of the market.

A Fellowship in High Knowledge: Dorothea Brooke as Female Critic When Eliot observed that she wanted “little of being a Medusa,” she signaled that her critical stature might be regarded as an arresting, possibly monstrous demonstration of female power and simultaneously leave her vulnerable to a tide of reviewing capable of neutralizing that power. Page 110 →Although it would be imprudent to read too much into Eliot’s claim that her position at the center of the Westminster circle had transformed her into a kind of Gorgon—paralyzing rather than enlivening critical dialogue—it is an apt starting-point for considering the relationship between Eliot’s gender politics and her approach to the social life of criticism. As HГ©lГЁne Cixous famously reminds us in “The Laugh of the Medusa,” the snake-haired Gorgon is a myth that has long embodied the threat of women’s irrational, indiscriminate, and hysterical use of power; it is the responsibility of the woman writer, she suggests, to give expression to the secret life of the Medusa and to rescue her from cultural infamy.86 It is thus fitting that Eliot’s disenchantment with the review should be expressed through a mythology that describes female surveillance as arresting, threatening, and even repugnant. Years later, Eliot would reproduce and critique this mythology of the dangerous female critic in her most celebrated novel, Middlemarch. While Dorothea Brooke has often been treated as a modern Antigone and would-be Saint Theresa, she also serves as a compelling figure for the female critic who is regarded as a menace by the learned men in her life. Although ultimately unable to realize her dream of joining a “fellowship in high knowledge,” Dorothea demonstrates both the potential of a Spencerian model of intellectual exchange and the enduring tensions between nineteenth-century femininity and critical discourse.87 From the beginning, Dorothea is represented as a woman of intellect who can only find an outlet through the far less exceptional men in her life, all of whom are either unwilling or unable to nurture her gifts. Mr. Brooke, a staunch if gentle patriarch, repeatedly insists that “there is a lightness about the feminine mind—a touch and go” that renders serious study “too taxing for a woman.”88 Yet as much as such comments call attention to Dorothea’s stifled intellectual life, the novel is uniquely concerned with the anxieties aroused by the possibility of unleashing her critical acumen. The first and arguably most powerful instance of this is Dorothea’s relationship with Mr. Casaubon, the dry-as-dust scholar who has spent his entire life composing a “Key to All Mythologies,” an attempt to reduce the world’s religions and customs to a single, universal belief system. If such an endeavor at first would seem admirable in its attempt to unify different schools of thought, it is ultimately a reductive system that fails to take into account the importance of conflict and intellectual diversity: But Mr. Casaubon’s theory of the elements which made the seed of all tradition was not likely to bruise itself unawares against discoveriesPage 111 → В .В .В .it was a method of interpretation which was not tested by the necessity of forming anything which had sharper collisions than an elaborate notion of Gog and Magog: it was as free from interruption as a plan for threading the stars together. And Dorothea had so often had to check her weariness and impatience over this questionable riddle-guessing, as it revealed itself to her instead of the fellowship in high knowledge which was to make life worthier!89 In its attempt to identify the underlying unity in all systems of thought, “The Key to All Mythologies” is

fundamentally opposed to Eliot’s own theory of intellectual progress and its celebration of “difference in the midst of likeness.” Whereas Casaubon seeks to erase distinctions among different cultural traditions (in a fashion that recalls Mill’s depiction of Bentham), Eliot is far more interested in recognizing how different perspectives might yield new and more progressive modes of thought. As Will Ladislaw notes, “new discoveries are constantly making new points of view.”90 In a word, the figure of Casaubon—an inert, detached scholar who is driven by ambition rather than by an impassioned quest for truth—constitutes yet another attack on those thinkers who attempt to work through neat, prescriptive frameworks, while eschewing the “mixed, entangled business” of critical dialogue. So reluctant is Casaubon to enter this “fellowship in high knowledge” that he develops an acute case of “criticophobia” himself. Although Casaubon agrees to assist Dorothea in her attempt to learn Greek and Latin, a project she ostensibly undertakes in order to better fulfill her role as his amanuensis, as her knowledge grows he comes to resent her “offensive capability of criticism.”91 “He had formerly observed with approbation,” we are told, “her capacity for worshipping the right object; he now foresaw with sudden terror that this capacity might be replaced by presumption, this worship by the most exasperating of all criticism, —that which sees vaguely a great many fine ends, and has not the least notion what it costs to reach them.”92 Dorothea’s budding critical power is especially threatening because, as his wife, she is duty-bound to serve as a sympathetic audience, nodding assent to his every hypothesis: “it seemed like a betrayal: the young creature who had worshipped him with perfect trust had quickly turned into the critical wife; and early instances of criticism and resentment had made an impression which no tenderness and submission afterwards could remove.”93 For Casaubon, Dorothea’s status as his wife precludes her engaging in any authentic critique of his work. Because Casaubon demands sympathy in the form of consolation Page 112 →and approval, femininity and criticism once again seem to be at odds. As we have seen, however, Eliot did not regard criticism as the negation of sympathy, to a large extent regarding them as compatible and mutually sustaining impulses. The apparent strain between Dorothea’s role as sympathetic wife and her critique of Casaubon’s scholarship is, by this logic, an illusory one. Casaubon’s view of femininity proves to be as myopic, reductive, and inflexible as his “Key to all Mythologies.” It is only in his eyes that Dorothea’s compassionate concern—her ability to see “many fine ends” instead of the single aim toward which he aspires—becomes the carping of “the critical wife.” Although Will Ladislaw proves to be more broad-minded than Casaubon, he too is suspicious of Dorothea’s critical sensibility, and for similar reasons. If Casaubon objects to receiving criticism from his spouse, Ladislaw is reluctant to receive criticism from a potential lover. When Mr. Brooke asks her opinion of a sketch executed by Ladislaw, Dorothea innocently remarks: “I am no judge of these thingsВ .В .В . I suppose there is some relation between pictures and nature which I am too ignorant to feel—just as you see what a Greek sentence stands for which means nothing to me.”94 Mr. Brooke naturally regards the comment as a sign of Dorothea’s acquiescence to his own belief in the natural limitations of the female intellect. Ladislaw, however, “took her words for a covert judgment, and was certain that she thought his sketch detestable.”95 Clearly, Dorothea’s remark has made a deep impression, for Ladislaw returns to the issue again when they meet in Rome: “I am thinking of the sort of figure I cut the first time I saw you, when you annihilated my poor sketch with your criticism.” “My criticism?” said Dorothea, wondering still more. “Surely not. I always feel particularly ignorant about painting.” “I suspected you of knowing so much, that you knew how to say just what was most cutting. You said—I dare say you don’t remember it as I do—that the relation of my sketch to nature was quite hidden from you. At least, you implied that.” Will could laugh now as well as smile. “That was really my ignorance,” said Dorothea, admiring Will’s good-humor.96

Whereas Casaubon’s distress ultimately proves to be warranted—Dorothea does, in fact, have reservations about his work—Ladislaw’s preoccupation with Dorothea’s criticism approaches paranoia, despite Page 113 →the good humor with which it is expressed. Dorothea’s verdict is not a witty defamation of his talent but rather a truthful expression of the ignorance she feels. In this case, Ladislaw’s extreme sensitivity to the signs of Dorothea’s critical faculty serves two purposes. First, it provides an additional gloss on the relationship between gender and critical thought. The work of criticism is again set apart from femininity, in this case because it is incompatible with an erotic ethos defined by a masculine pursuer and a feminine object of desire. Any act of criticism on Dorothea’s part renders Ladislaw an object of judgment rather than a sexual agent, thus seeming to divest him of both aesthetic and sexual power. Second, it exposes (to the reader, if not to Ladislaw) Dorothea’s actual powerlessness to offer such a critique. Dorothea’s self-acknowledged ignorance is, so far from a performance of female diffidence, actually an articulation of her incapacity to access the stores of knowledge that would allow her to assume the position of judge. To this extent, Dorothea’s critique of Ladislaw’s sketch lays bare Eliot’s concern for the position of the female critic whose power to judge is at once awesome—a potential threat to the aesthetic and sexual power of men—and insubstantial. Whether Dorothea withholds judgment or boldly asserts it, she cannot participate in critical dialogue without being labeled as an antagonistic and unfair critic. Despite her claim that scholarly attainments would better qualify her to assist Casaubon in his research, Dorothea’s private motives are far more self-directed. Though she never articulates these ambitions to Casaubon or Ladislaw, the narrator reports that Dorothea’s sense of her own ignorance reflects a corresponding awareness of her exclusion from the predominantly male world of scholarship she longs to join: It was not entirely out of devotion to her future husband that she wished to know Latin and Greek. Those provinces of masculine knowledge seemed to her a standing-ground from which all truth could be seen more truly. As it was, she constantly doubted her own conclusions, because she felt her own ignorance В .В .В .she wished, poor child, to be wise herself.97 Casaubon’s refusal to serve as the object of Dorothea’s criticism therefore signals not only his belief that a good wife must be an undiscriminating vessel of sympathy but also his revelation that Dorothea’s desires are not limited to the vicarious experience of his own scholarly pursuits. No longer simply an appendage of Casaubon, Dorothea asserts the possibilityPage 114 → of developing her own critical method, one both liberated from and enriched by nineteenth-century gender politics.98 Even without accessing these stores of knowledge, Dorothea finds herself in a better position than Casaubon to grasp the real defects of his philosophy. If Casaubon’s hyperawareness of Dorothea’s skepticism bespeaks a nervous sensitivity to her responsibilities as his wife, he is right to suspect her of having reservations about his work. After Casaubon’s death, Dorothea’s longing to join that “fellowship in high knowledge” is granted, with an impossible condition: she must devote her life to completing Casaubon’s manuscript. Dorothea’s skepticism of the “Key to all Mythologies” reflects her espousal of a critical worldview very much akin to that of Eliot herself: It was not wonderful that, in spite of her small instruction, her judgment in this matter was truer than his: for she looked with unbiased comparison and healthy sense at probabilities on which he had risked all his egoism. And now she pictured to herself the days, and months, and years which she must spend in sorting what might be called shattered mummies and fragments of a tradition which was itself a mosaic wrought from crushed ruins—sorting them as food for a theory which was already withered in the birth like an elfin child.99 Dorothea does not pursue this Sisyphean task, and her scathing criticism of Casaubon’s work is never made public. Forbidden to be critical of her husband’s work and compelled by duty actually to bring that work to fruition, Dorothea’s critical insight must remain sublimated. Instead, she becomes the center of her own community, an intellect that “had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible,” and whose “effectВ .В .В . on those around her was incalculably diffusive.”100

Despite this insistence that Dorothea retains some authority over her own community of thought, the scope of her critical influence remains restricted. As Suzanne Graver has rightly pointed out, the containment of female influence in Eliot’s fiction signals a concern that more organic social bonds were being challenged by professional, mercenary, or political alliances. Drawing on the work of Ferdinand TГ¶nnies, Graver concludes that Eliot’s fiction reflects a sociological vision that prefers a feminized though often elusive gemeinschaft (a community forged by organic bonds of kinship, shared values, and mutual understanding) to gesellschaft (a social structure motivated chiefly by subjective and pragmatic concerns).101 To some extent, Eliot’s Spencerian vision Page 115 →of the critical community reflects a similar judgment—driven by professional ambition and partisan interests, her intellectual community seemed increasingly to disrupt the natural process of differentiation and combination that might yield true critical insight. Without this would-be critic, Casaubon’s “Key to All Mythologies”—like Tertius Lydgate’s futile quest for the “primary webs or tissues” of life—must remain stagnant and incomplete.102 Seen this way, Middlemarch emerges as a reflection on how the exclusion of women like Dorothea from that “fellowship of high knowledge” might limit the progress of the social body as a whole. This is the argument Eliot famously advances in her 1856 review “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.” While typically regarded as Eliot’s declaration of independence from a group of writers she would later rival as a fellow novelist, “Silly Novels” identifies women’s writing and the critical establishment as mutually complicit in the decline of critical thought. Once again espousing a Spencerian model of community, Eliot argues that the nineteenth-century literary market has been overrun by a class of amateur women writers so lacking in originality that they might be classified according to a strict taxonomy. As she itemizes the shortcomings of each literary type (the “mind-and millinery species,” the “oracular species,” and so forth), Eliot invalidates the formulaic approach of lady novelists who are exclusively preoccupied with getting published and securing literary fame.103 This lampoon of lady novelists thus reveals serious concerns about a world of letters that was, true to Eliot’s prophecy, “sinking fast toward вЂhomogeneity.”104 If Spencer’s paradigm imagined a world in which ideas were constantly in flux, in this essay Eliot bears witness to a grimmer reality—a world in which literary forms not only resist change but actively strive to fit the existing mold. Breaking this cycle required the emergence of an intellectual class for whom culture would always rank superior to personal or professional interest.105 Hearkening back to the model of the salonniГЁre, Eliot imagines this redeemer to be a woman writer occupying the center of intellectual culture, much as she herself had done as editor of the Westminster. The “cultured woman,” Eliot reflects, like a really cultured man, is all the simpler and the less obtrusive for her knowledge; it has made her see herself and her opinions in something like just proportions; she does not make it a pedestal from which she flatters herself that she commands a complete view of men and things, but makes it a point of observation from which to form a right estimate of herself.106 Page 116 →Unlike the lady novelists and reviewers Eliot lampoons in “Silly Novels,” the cultured woman does not put her intellect on display to advance a personal agenda or glean profit. She instead absorbs knowledge for its own sake, allowing herself to be shaped by it and to engage with the many “fractional truths” populating the world of ideas.107 Because her knowledge is continually evolving, the cultured woman cannot be classified according to the kind of taxonomy delineated elsewhere in the essay. Indeed, she is the very personification of that “law of progress” elaborated in the 1851 prospectus. Perhaps most importantly, the “cultured woman” is one who, like Dorothea, admits the limits of her own knowledge, engaging in a constant, recursive interrogation of her ideas and those of her contemporaries. In effect, the cultured woman occupies what Amanda Anderson has called a position of “cultivated partiality”: although firmly grounded in a female intellectual tradition, her attitude toward that tradition is reflective, evenhanded, and at times even critical.108 When Eliot implores women writers to become “self-critics” in “Silly Novels,” she advocates for a female literary tradition that is both distinctly feminine and shaped by its engagements with a broader, heterogeneous culture. Although Eliot is specifically concerned with the status of the female critic who wields direct influence over public discourse, such a figure would remain unattainable until women writers were willing to turn their critical faculties inward. In this way, Eliot dismisses the possibility of a

single, unified intellectual collectivity and embraces instead the model of an enlightened individual able to mediate among many different, intersecting and contingent circles of knowledge. Yet even as Eliot takes issue with the failure of women writers to break the mold, in “Silly Novels” she pairs the literary hubris of lady novelists with a failure on the part of critics to establish an honest and rigorous standard for women’s writing. Though “lady novelists” may regurgitate hackneyed plotlines and character types, the reviewers had become equally formulaic in their treatment of women writers, tending to assess their work on the basis of the author’s sex rather than on the book’s unique merits or defects. Under such a critical regime, the reviewers’ discussion of talented women writers grows increasingly terse until, as in the case of Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte BrontГ«, and Harriet Martineau, “critical enthusiasm drops to the freezing point.”109 So far from inviting new voices into the discussion, the critical establishment had already taken a clear position on women writers: they were deemed either unskilled Page 117 →amateurs or bold interlopers. The gender bias was reprehensible in Eliot’s view not only because it violated her belief in a “common fund” of knowledge for men and women of intellect, but also because it threatened to edge out the strong female voices she regarded as vital to the cultivation of new critical networks. As she proceeds through this assessment of the reviewing community, Eliot’s language becomes increasingly gendered. “We are aware,” she reflects, “that our remarks are in a very different tone from that of the reviewers who, with perennial recurrence of precisely similar emotions, only paralleled, we imagine, in the experience of monthly nurses, tell one lady novelist after another that they вЂhail’ her productions вЂwith delight.’”110 By translating the difficulties of authorship into the drama of childbirth and its aftermath, Eliot figures the silly lady novelist in terms of biological sex—as a new mother still technically in confinement. This is certainly consistent with Eliot’s stern treatment of women writers who expect their works to be greeted with generous solicitude. Such writers regard their novels not as discrete contributions to a wider pool of ideas but as the very acme of literary achievement, as creative efforts both singular and unrivaled. What is most surprising about Eliot’s argument, though, is that she feminizes the male critic in order to highlight the mutual complicity of reviewers and women writers in the decline of critical discourse. Like the “monthly nurse” who cares for a new mother and child in the days and weeks following birth, the reviewer does not offer a frank appraisal of novels by silly lady novelists, viewing them instead as routine happenstance. Together, the solicitous reviewer and the solipsistic lady novelist cultivate a closed system of literary production incapable of admitting progressive views. Such novels are, in short, so common that they are not worth being considered on their individual merits. Eliot compares this critical indifference to the generosity of “the severer critics,” who discharge “a chivalrous duty in depriving the mere fact of feminine authorship of any false prestige.”111 In direct contrast to the chivalric posturing of the Romantic coteries discussed in chapter 3, which protected female authors at the expense of their professional advancement, for Eliot the true expression of literary gallantry is earnest, yet pointed criticism. Rather than supporting what Margaret Oliphant would later refer to as “that mutual admiration which keeps such groups together,” Eliot seemed to move ever closer to an intellectual community based on division and fragmentation.112 Page 118 →

The Critic in Exile: Impressions of Theophrastus Such While Dorothea’s fate certainly reflects the struggles of a would-be Saint Theresa, Eliot’s chief concern here seems to be the impossible situation of the female critic, who seeks but is repeatedly denied “fellowship in high knowledge.” In response to the Liggins affair, Eliot proposed a preface to the second edition of Adam Bede to be titled “A Remonstrance,” which would defend her story against being “told in all the variety of bad journalistic styles.”113 After some consideration, John Blackwood advised her not to include it in the final manuscript, fearing that it “might raise a nest of hornets about [her].”114 Eliot agreed but hinted at her desire to write a more extended piece on the ethics of reviewing, reminding Blackwood that if “any book happens to turn up à propos of which said doctrine could be gracefully introduced, I would willingly do that service to my future self and my fellow novelists.”115 Eliot never wrote this article and seems to have doubted whether it would ever have been printed. “Articles expressly on criticism or reviewing,” she solemnly

reflects, “are likely to be too invidious, I suppose.”116 For his own part, Blackwood felt that any public response to the Liggins affair would “be misinterpreted as a publishing dodge to reraise the discussion and stimulate curiosity” and destined to push “the myrmidons of the press” to infringe even further on Eliot’s privacy.117 In other words, Blackwood feared that Eliot’s attempt to articulate a formal theory of criticism would be taken as an act of self-promotion that would damage both her reputation and that of the firm. Ironically, Eliot’s desire to raise the level of critical discussion only threatened to exacerbate existing squabbles among competing circles of critics. Years later, however, Eliot’s sociology of criticism would at last find its way into print—in her final fulllength volume, the often-neglected Impressions of Theophrastus Such. In Impressions, literally a series of essayistic fragments classifying the various pathologies of Victorian literary culture, the antagonistic spirit that Eliot struggled to contain at the Westminster manifests as both an obstacle and a potential anodyne to the intellectual inertia she had resisted throughout her career. This spirit of combative heterogeneity is first signaled by the generic indeterminacy of the volume, which contains elements of natural history, the fable, the political essay, and autobiography. In effect, Impressions is a series of literary portraits, much like those she had described years earlier in “Woman in France.” The variety of genres paraded in Impressions reflects both the discursive heterogeneity Eliot prized and—particularly in its Page 119 →serial structure and what Oscar Browning calls its “weighty and periodic” style—her long-awaited critical treatise.118 Appropriately, it presents a Spencerian taxonomy that includes several relics from Eliot’s days as a reviewer: a Merman “pilloried and as good as mutilated” by the reviewers, the imitative writer Lentulus, the obsequious Hinze (who panders to learned ladies), the vain lady authoress Vorticella, and countless others.119 Though constituting a figurative salon, the circle featured in Impressions is hardly an ideal community. Impressions is, in this sense, the “remonstrance” Eliot had so long wished to unleash on the critics of her own time. Often neglected in discussions of Eliot’s fiction, Impressions provides a startling glimpse into Eliot’s sociological view of critical collectivity and its failure to embrace the principle of heterogeneity she felt was so vital to its cultural function. The narrator of Impressions, Theophrastus Such, is an unmarried, self-effacing male writer who introduces himself as “the author of a book you have probably not seen.”120 His literary career has been a series of hostile encounters with the critics, which he recounts in scenes of graphic violence. But while Theophrastus is eager “to keep the scourge in [his] own discriminating hand” as he reveals the shortcomings of his critics and colleagues, he is not sadistic but rather profoundly sympathetic; every criticism Theophrastus directs at other writers, he tells us, reflects a corresponding weakness in his own character.121 As Nancy Henry observes, for Theophrastus “criticism comes from within and without in the form of a double-sided mirror held up to those around him, but ruthlessly reflecting his own image back to him, scourging him to fashion himself according to the standards he would apply to others and bringing—writing him—into a community.”122 Like the salonniГЁre, Theophrastus draws connections among the characters he describes, but he does so by exposing their shared vices. As Theophrastus models “sympathetic criticism” in the treatment of his fellow writers, he also illustrates how very far his colleagues are from realizing this ideal themselves. Indeed, Impressions in many ways constitutes an extension and intensification of Eliot’s anxieties about a world in which individuals can only converse by recycling the same critical “impressions” over and over again. In the seventeenth essay of the volume, “Shadows of the Coming Race,” Theophrastus presents the death of critical dialogue as a kind of cultural apocalypse: As to the breed of the ingenious and intellectual, their nervous systems will at last have been overwrought in following the molecular Page 120 →revelations of the immensely more powerful unconscious race, and they will naturally, as the less energetic combinations of movements, subside like the flame of a candle in the sunlight.123 Taking the law of “survival of the fittest” to its extreme, Theophrastus concludes that the organism “most capable of incorporating new groups in harmonious relation” is the most likely to dominate.124 In

this dystopic vision, even a race of machines is more capable of sympathetic arrangement than the ostensibly rational, free-thinking leaders of his own intellectual cohort. Incapable of communicating with one another, the members of this cyber-community will produce “mute orations, mute rhapsodies, mute discussions, and no consciousness there even to enjoy the silence.”125 They can only constitute a “society of mutes,” much like the one Eliot had predicted in “Woman in France.”126 The dangers of arresting critical dialogue are made especially clear in the fifteenth essay, “Diseases of Small Authorship,” which chronicles the “criticophobia” of the authoress Vorticella. When visiting Vorticella, Theophrastus is asked to peruse the reviews of her only published book, a study of the Channel Islands, which she has proudly compiled into a kind of scrapbook. Struck by the overwhelmingly approving tone of the notices, Theophrastus quickly discerns that their praise is nothing more than lip service: “The force of this eulogy on the part of several reviewers,” he explains, “was much heightened by the incidental evidence of their fastidious and severe taste, which seemed to suffer considerably from the imperfections of our chief writers, even the dead and canonized.”127 Regurgitating a well-rehearsed catalog of literary accolades, the reviews amplify Vorticella’s egoism and thus make it impossible to cultivate a dialogue capable of accommodating new or dissenting opinions. As in “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” the critic who detects “no blemishes” in the work of this “recording angel” merely feeds the author’s vanity.128 Rather than guiding her to a better understanding of herself and her literary work, the reviews only reinforce Vorticella’s false impression of her own intellectual powers. As Theophrastus puts it, “her chief interest in new acquaintances was the possibility of lending them her book, entering into all details concerning it, and requesting them to read her album of вЂcritical opinions.’”129 Just as Eliot had feared in “Woman in France,” conversation has been replaced by the reading of reviews that fail to promote any kind of productive intellectual engagement. For Theophrastus, who remains skeptical of these endorsements, this makes any real Page 121 →attempt at intellectual sociability impossible. He can only offer evasive responses to Vorticella’s questions, which are raised solely to solicit further praise of her intellectual attainments. When she asks him to evaluate a negative review of her work, he subtly veils his own skepticism of her literary talents: “People’s impressions are so different.В .В .В . Some persons find вЂDon Quixote’ dull.”130 Observing that even an author as celebrated as Cervantes cannot escape adverse criticism, Theophrastus insists that dissent is a necessary part of any meaningful intellectual dialogue. The allusion to Don Quixote is especially appropriate, for like the knight who filters all reality through the conventions of romance, Vorticella can only engage with the world around her through the extravagant praise conveyed in the reviews. Like Casaubon, she remains deaf to all negative responses to her work, turning even Theophrastus’s disparaging remark to advantage. If impressions are liable to differ, she proposes, then her own book may be simply “too important for his taste.”131 Although Eliot once again appears to be singling out women writers for criticism—particularly those who depend upon their gender as a shield from negative reviews—she is also attentive to the discriminatory practices of readers and reviewers who continue to regard femininity and criticism as incompatible. Eliot’s critique of reviewers in Impressions offers a partial defense of the woman writer by highlighting the compelling connections between women’s writing and the practice of professional criticism. Echoing her earlier claims in “Silly Novels,” Eliot insists that the critic who assails female novelists must acknowledge that he shares and even contributes to their vices and struggles: The same motives, the same ideas, the same practices, are alternately admired and abhorred, lauded and denounced, according to their association with superficial differences, historical or actually social: even learned writers treating of great subjects often show an attitude of mind not greatly superior in its logic to that of the frivolous fine lady who is indignant at the frivolity of her maid.132 If in the 1850s, Eliot cast the reviewer as a monthly nurse pandering to self-absorbed lady writers, reviewers had now acquired so much cultural influence that they themselves resembled the frivolous lady who criticizes others for the vices she practices. The problems Eliot famously attributes to women writers—egoism, imitation, and intellectual myopia—she also attributes to the reviewers who assail them. While editor of the Westminster, she

sought to unite different perspectives, genres, and social groups in Page 122 →the interest of generating a progressive dialogue. By the end of her career Eliot had moved away from this purely syncretic approach and accepted antagonism as a vital part of any viable intellectual collectivity. In a sense, Eliot ended her career by embracing an approach more faithful to that of SablГ©, who saw criticizing members of her own salon as an act of intellectual fidelity that might provoke a sustained course of self-criticism. The chief obstacle to attaining this kind of intellectual sympathy was, as Eliot herself acknowledged, a tendency to rely upon “superficial differences.” This is the subject of the final essay in Impressions, “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” Here, Theophrastus is centrally concerned with establishing critical inquiry as a progress “towards finer and finer discrimination according to minute differences.”133 In other words, he reiterates the Spencerian belief that an understanding of the whole—whether that whole is an organism, a community, or an intellectual argument—requires an examination of its discrete parts. In the case of critical inquiry, points of convergence and disagreement contribute equally to the search for intellectual truth. Only by considering difference and likeness together can one break down artificial barriers between divergent points of view and facilitate the discovery of new knowledge. Although plainly building on the idiom of her Westminster essays, Eliot’s use of the word “discrimination” now carries a double meaning, allowing her to distinguish between intellectual discernment and feelings of cultural prejudice. Discriminating between individuals solely on the basis of “prominent resemblances” like race, religion, or sex constitutes, for Eliot, a coarse and reductive mode of criticism.134 In “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” Theophrastus famously illustrates this principle by comparing the British and Judaic traditions, both of which are haunted by a history of conquest, motivated by a sense of “peculiar destiny,” and scattered across the globe.135 Though a “primary rough classification” would accentuate the differences between the two cultural traditions, he argues, a more refined intellect would also recognize important similarities between them.136 Strikingly, critics have tended to focus on Eliot’s attention to Judaic culture in this essay while sidelining the larger point about critical “discrimination.” When we turn to the character of Theophrastus, however, it becomes apparent that Eliot’s impatience with judgments based on “primary rough classification” has more far-reaching applications. Just as Eliot’s reputation as a “fallen woman” resulted in what she once referred to as her “excommunication” from a more inclusive intellectual community, Theophrastus is discounted by his colleagues on the basis of his Page 123 →“awkward feet,” “the length of [his] upper lip,” and his manner of walking, all of which feed “unfavorable inferences concerning [his] mental quickness.”137 While Theophrastus recognizes that his physical idiosyncrasies have “nothing to do with the subtle discrimination of ideas,” he remains powerless before the tide of critical opinion, which discounts his works “as if they were anonymous pictures.”138 Eliot thus presents in Impressions the portrait of a sociological critic like herself, who is surrounded and impeded by creatures existing in states of arrested development. Theophrastus too fears that he is “sinking fast toward вЂhomogeneity’” and attributes this decline to the limited social vision and discriminatory practices of his contemporaries.139 At the heart of Eliot’s critique, then, is a concern that the principle of critical heterogeneity and sociable dissent she so prized was irreconcilable with the hierarchical arrangements of the real world, which issued verdicts—both positive and negative—based purely on the basis of biological identity. Such judgments reflect, to Eliot’s mind, no judgment at all. In the end, Theophrastus stands apart from a wider intellectual community, though he creates an incipient fellowship by recording and assembling his “impressions.” Like Jenny Distaff, Alda, Dorothea, and so many other would-be critics, he stands curiously at the margins—neither detached from nor fully inhabiting the social life of criticism. In the 1870s, Eliot held regular gatherings at the home she shared with G. H. Lewes, the Priory, in effect creating the kind of community she had idealized in “Woman in France.” Eliot’s Sunday afternoons at the Priory have, like rumors of her “criticophobia,” become part of the mythology surrounding her career. According to some accounts, this attempt at recuperating the literary coteries of the past appears to have been only a partial success. As Ina Taylor explains, Eliot’s assemblies at the Priory came to resemble “a shrine to the great genius” rather than the open intellectual exchange she had envisioned.140 Sir Sidney Colvin, an occasional guest at the Priory, attributes this failure to the novelist’s inability to translate the sympathetic

spirit of her writings into daily life: The Sunday afternoon receptions at the Priory were not always quite free from stiffness, the presiding genius allowing herself—so at least some of us thought—to be treated a little too markedly and formally as such. Perhaps, however, the secret was that she by nature lacked the lightness of human touch by which a hostess can diffuse among a mixed company of guests an atmosphere of social ease.141 Page 124 →Such an atmosphere of “social ease” was understandably difficult to create during brief, private audiences with the great author. Though Eliot’s literary legacy served, in a sense, to make these intellectual gatherings possible, some visitors found it challenging to stand on equal footing with the famed literary genius, opting either to lionize her or to parade their own accomplishments. The description of Eliot’s failures as a hostess again recalls Anthony Trollope’s description of Mrs. Proudie in Framley Parsonage. Mrs. Proudie’s marks of social distinction—“her keen wit, her untold money, and loud laughing voice”—make it impossible to realize her desire for true companionship: “Everything about her was calculated to attract those whom she could not value, and to scare from her the sort of friend to whom she would fain have linked her lot.”142 Yet as Kathleen McCormack has demonstrated, Eliot’s social world both during and after her elopement with Lewes may not have been nearly as restricted as scholars have previously thought. Closely examining Lewes’s unpublished diaries and papers alongside Eliot’s correspondence, McCormack makes a compelling case for regarding their social circle—especially during their European travels and at the Priory—as dynamic, inclusive, and intellectually productive.143 These were “emphatically literary salons, ” sites of vibrant intellectual exchange that were frequented by literary novices and celebrities alike.144 Both in conversation and in print, the members of this community engaged in significant collaborations and debates. So far from being “supremely dull occasions, with few women in attendance, and guests approaching the Sibyl one by one to express their almost pious devotion,” the Sundays at the Priory were dynamic, inclusive, and for many of the guests professionally significant events.145 Like Theophrastus, Eliot has been misrepresented as a reluctant and ultimately reclusive critic, despite her plain investment in the theory and practice of sociable criticism. In the 1850s Eliot avoided becoming directly involved in the struggle for women’s rights, preferring gradual change to sudden and radical reform. When approached by Bessie Parkes to write for the English Woman’s Journal, Eliot declined and was strangely relieved to hear that it had ceased being advertised as a magazine “Conducted by Women.”146 Years later, Eliot requested that William Blackwood “never ask my opinion of articles or books about women, because I have no taste for them, and we are always bad judges of that which we have no taste for.”147 Yet Eliot’s apparent distaste for women’s writing, like her alleged distaste for criticism, paradoxically reveals her deep investment in it. Though Eliot refused to contribute to the English Page 125 →Woman’s Journal, she gave Bessie Parkes copious advice regarding the magazine’s critical function. In an 1858 letter to Parkes, Eliot writes: The state of weekly and monthly book-reviewing is to me so nauseating—such a miserable hodgepodge of conceited incompetence, hackneyed phrases, unscrupulous praise and unscrupulous blame, that I should like you to use your present opportunity of sending a clear little current along that muddy gutter.148 For Eliot, then, the most powerful agent of social change continued to be the “cultured woman” who, by taking a discursive high ground, could alter the very nature of critical engagements. We might detect in this impulse a forerunner to Amanda Anderson’s The Way We Argue Now (2006), which suggests as an alternative to a world of fractured partisanships a model of communicative ethics in which such factions are willing to interrogate the foundations of their own positions and participate in a debate that is not limited by the demands of identity politics.149 There is certainly something very similar in Eliot’s and Anderson’s desire for an intellectual community that can acknowledge difference without relying upon it as the basis for all critical judgment. In the end, though, Eliot is hardly optimistic about the promise of such a system, and in

Impressions she proposes that, lacking any hope of a syncretic community of thinkers, we must regard criticism less as a process of intellectual synthesis (à la Casaubon) than as a project in which fragmentation, divergence, and even exclusion has its place—in other words, a process in which resolution is not always the final object of discourse. In this respect, as we shall see, Eliot anticipated the work of her counterparts at the end of the century, who sought less to embrace difference than to transcend it altogether.

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Chapter 5 Critics without Borders The Antisocial Criticism of Eliza Lynn Linton and Vernon Lee In an 1898 interview, critic and poet Alice Meynell was asked to comment on the capacity of women to write for professional journals and reviews: “With regard to the fitness of women for journalistic work in general, do you not think, Mrs. Meynell, that the faculties of quick perception, grasp of detail and graphic description which are commonly supposed to belong particularly to women, specially fits them for modern journalism? I am afraid, however, that this is raising a question of sex.” “I really do not think that it is so much a question of men and women, as of individuals. Many women are, I am afraid, woefully lacking in observation, and decidedly dull in perception. While, on the other hand, many men fail miserably in reasoning power, and many women excel in it.”1 The exchange is noteworthy in several respects. The very premise of the conversation—the presumption that women may be more suited for critical work than their male counterparts—indicates that women had attained a kind of institutional legitimacy in the late nineteenth century that would have been unimaginable for Jenny Distaff or Mrs. Page 127 →Crackenthorpe a century earlier. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, articles on the literary professions routinely referred to “men and women of the press,” and critical writing was increasingly touted as a viable occupation for women, suggestively listed in instructional literature alongside teaching, nursing, business, and theology. Still, the interviewer’s reluctance to broach a “question of sex” signals an even more revolutionary development—the possibility not only that women could equal men in the field of critical writing but that the “question of sex” might be transcended altogether.2 As female critics began to assume a more prominent role in the social life of criticism—founding organizations devoted to their professional advancement and establishing virtual networks through a growing number of femalerun periodicals—moving beyond sex seemed like a distinct possibility. Yet the emergence of such networks was in many ways a mixed blessing. If the material conditions of the publishing world now permitted women to control their own resources, changes in the popular imagination were slower to take hold. Because female sociability was presumed to be unsuitable and even disruptive to the daily rituals of the press office or publishing house, aspiring female critics at the end of the century were sometimes advised to modify their physical appearance and behavior in the workplace, to unsex themselves without actually adopting, as George Eliot warned, “the swaggering gait of a bad actress in male attire.”3 It was a delicate balancing act, and women who did not successfully imitate this model were often aligned in public discourse with forms of aberrant femininity: the New Woman, the “girl of the period,” or the mannish woman. Even conciliatory gestures, while outwardly inviting their participation in the practice of professional criticism, encouraged women to adopt a code of behavior that seemed to reinscribe the model of the woman writer as “proper lady.” To some extent, these strained efforts at inclusion recall the work of Anna Jameson, who (as discussed in chapter 3) exposed how the deference paid to female critics paradoxically relegated them to a scripted role in critical discourse. Strangely, institutional consolidation seemed to give new life to old prejudices against female judgment. As M. F. Billington noted in 1896, while women’s names increasingly lined the columns of the major critical outlets, “to the outside worldВ .В .В . we remain a mystery.”4 The cultural status of the female critic was profoundly indeterminate, torn between a growing recognition of women’s capacity for joining existing literary networks and widespread support for a more static model of professional femininity. As the following pages illustrate, efforts to Page 128 →render the social life of criticism more cohesive simultaneously vindicated and problematized the category of the female critic. Women who did not

fit the new “mold” of professional femininity—women like Eliza Lynn Linton and Vernon Lee—were often derided as antisocial dissenters. For Linton and Lee, the challenge was not how to make a name for themselves but rather how to avoid classification as female critics. These writers, each in her own way, adopted an iconoclastic mode of criticism that was motivated by the longing to confront, reform, or even to transcend the taxonomizing impulses of their contemporaries. Strikingly, the efforts of these writers to come to terms with the classification of the “female critic”—to find a sense of belonging without being actually appropriated by any single group—anticipates the efforts of contemporary scholars, many of whom continue to contest the viability of any intellectual community defined primarily by gender. Their ostensibly antisocial behavior, that is to say, was actually an expression of their deep investment in the social life of criticism.

Tootles and Screeds: The Problem of Classification Before exploring the specific approaches of Linton and Lee to this problem, it is first important to understand how social classification informed the female critic’s position within the larger social economy at the end of the nineteenth century. If the primary reason for women’s limited influence in the field of criticism was, as Edith Simcox noted in 1887, their restricted access to the “social life of the intellect,” this barrier had been partly eradicated by the founding of new heterosocial and female societies committed to professional literary work.5 Between 1888 and 1906, the number of women’s clubs in London listed in the Englishwoman’s Yearbook and Directory skyrocketed from seven to forty-seven.6 Rather than honing their authority within the precincts of an exclusive club or “brotherhood” of scholars, many women now turned to officially sanctioned institutions for professional training and support. The Writer’s Club, an organization espousing “both social and professional” aims, responded to this need in 1894 by supporting “women writers upon the press for whom, strangely enough, there is no such liberal provision in the offices of the great London newspapers.”7 The same year, the founding of the Society of Women Journalists created a centralized community that could defend “the personal and professional interests of its members, andВ .В .В . maintain and improve the status of journalism as a professionPage 129 → for women.”8 The Institute for Women Journalists was founded the following year, and in 1897 women were proclaimed eligible for membership in the esteemed Society of Authors. As Eva Anstruther observed, “Every year the roll of members lengthens, every year entrance fees go up by leaps and bounds, and in the minds of proprietors, committee, and members alike, visions of Pall Mall palaces are shadowed.”9 The success of these organizations was borne out by the emergence of countless new publications specifically geared toward and in many cases managed by women, including the suggestively titled Women’s Suffrage Journal (1870–90), Women’s Advocate (1874), Women and Work (1874–76), Women’s Union Journal (1876–90), Women’s Penny Paper (1888–93), and Woman’s Signal (1894–99), to name only a few.10 The appearance of such critical forums not only indicates that women were more often assuming the role of editors, publishers, and critics but also reflects a growing inclination on the part of female readers to align themselves with a more expansive network of shared interests and experiences. Those who contributed to women’s periodicals were able to build a political platform on the basis of what Molly Youngkin has called a “feminist realist” aesthetic, seeking to bring about a transformation in consciousness through the representation of subjective experience.11 As professional life acquired a more cohesive shape, a corresponding spirit of cohesion seems to have informed the once diffuse community of women writers, many of whom could now collaborate and pool resources in the running of their own periodicals, publishing firms, and professional associations. As Amy Levy put it in 1888, “what has hitherto been felt as a vague longing—the desire among women for a corporate life, for a wider human fellowship, a richer social opportunity—has assumed the definite shape of a practical demand, now that so many women of all ranks are controllers of their own resources.”12 To all appearances, the social life of criticism was becoming increasingly organized, specialized, and professional. But as the female critic became a recognizable public figure, she also became a more clearly marked target for detractors. In the press, an expansive literature dismissed female critics as bold insurgents whose only aim was the unlawful usurpation of the seat of judgment. In 1895, J. D. Andrews described this figure as created, at least in part, by “the union of Journalism and Invention.”13 Practically leaping from the pages of the Victorian reviews, the female critic was now “very much on the carpet, and is the lion of the social gathering.”14

According to Andrews, two species of female critic were especially typical of the British literary landscape at this time. The first was the Tootle, “an amiable being, much-lovedPage 130 → of Editors” who performs her knowledge in a ludicrous and hysterical manner, producing leader articles that proceed unsystematically through “Dr. Johnson, Madame Pompadour, Charles Mathews, Mohammed, Sheridan, Ptolemy, and the labyrinths of the Pyramids to the hidden principle of hydrostatics.”15 The second was the Screed, “whose mission is to shock, to come upon you suddenly, as the frumious Bandersnatch, to make your hair curl, and your flesh creep.”16 Together, these inimitable types purvey a double satire on the female critic, who is represented as either blissfully unaware of her literary excesses—ungoverned and ungovernable—or an intellectual fanatic whom (following the analogy to the “frumious Bandersnatch” featured in Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”) one must “shun” as a creature both nonsensical and disquieting. Attacks on female critics and other advanced women abounded in the press, and many of them aligned the professionalization of women with a kind of dysfunctional femininity. A satire in Judy (1867–1907) alluded mockingly to “вЂthe girl of the period’—and of the periodical,” thus implying that departures from traditional models of femininity might be reliably traced to female contributors to the periodical press.17 Years later, Punch Magazine (1841–2002) depicted the same figure as an intellectual charlatan, discovering in books specious evidence of her own oppression: These shapes are things of mirage and the mist, Gendered by genius with a mental twist; By male hysteria, Amazonian sham, And the smart world’s great Fin de SiГЁcle flam!18 This “Donna Quixote” is not merely a transgressor; she is an errant scholar whose addled and undisciplined mind has succumbed to the impracticable discourse of women’s rights propounded—or, as the satirist playfully quips, “gendered”—by effeminate men and “Amazonian” women. An accompanying illustration depicts the modern woman literally inhabiting the seat of judgment and surrounded by the fantastic creatures of her warped imagination (figure 9). Among the refuse scattered at the foot of her throne, one discerns a volume by Mona Caird, feminist critic and author of “A Defence of the So-Called Wild Women” (1892), a piece that repulsed attacks on the advanced woman by claiming that “the immutable and stereotyped вЂnature’ of women” was no more than a social fiction.19 In the Punch caricature, the allusion to Caird associates the figure of Donna Quixote with very specific claims in support Page 131 →of female critics, while also (as the caption indicates) dismissing that ideology as “a world of disorderly notions, picked out of books, crowded into his (her) imagination.” The suggestive elision of male and female pronouns in the caption, an excerpt from Don Quixote (1605/1615), not only reinforces the connection between the intellectual woman and the errant knight of Cervantes’s tale but also underscores the problematic gendering of women who abandon the domestic hearth in the quixotic pursuit of knowledge and critical authority.20 Figure 9: Donna Quixote, Punch (28 April 1894), 194 These disparaging stereotypes point to a more sweeping trend in the treatment of female critics. If the Tootles of the world aligned the female critic with hysterical excess, the Screeds represent an unsexed and virile ferocity. The “girl of the periodical” was, that is to say, either overtly and pitifully sexed or a neuter writer whose unsexing rendered her especially menacing and unnatural. “But really and essentially what is she?” Andrews continues. “Well, the wits have been at work defining Page 132 →her. She is вЂa new darn on the old blue stocking’—вЂmannishness but not manliness’—вЂMadam losing her head to become Adam.’”21 The figure of the “mannish woman” became an especially prominent and dreaded figure in discussions of female critics. In 1872, one writer announced that “public matters will make [women] mannish, and a mannish woman is of all women the most disagreeable and the most to be shunned.”22 The Woman’s Book noted that the most “eminent thinkers and essayistsВ .В .В . dread the effect of political,

professional, and business life upon woman,” which is bound to facilitate the “appearance of the mannish women upon the scene.”23 Even as women were afforded new opportunities to participate in professional life, the period’s major critical outlets reflect a widespread concern that such advances might contradict, as Charles Harper put it in 1894, the dictates of “nature, which never contemplated the production of a learned or a muscular woman.”24 One of the signature qualities of the professional female critic, then, was her problematic gender identity. Now that she had found a place within the professional clubs and networks that supported her calling, a new question threatened to compromise her authority: was the female critic to be treated as a man, a woman, or something else altogether? As these satires indicate, one of the chief objections to female critics continued to be their ostensibly native lack of sociable instincts, which made it difficult to classify them alongside their male colleagues.25 H. M. Stannard recalls that “ridicule was freely poured out upon the idea” of founding the heterosocial Writer’s Club. “We were told,” she notes, “that women did not need such an institution; terrible pictures were drawn of hearths desolated, married happiness ruined, children shamefully neglected, and other horrors which would inevitably arise through the formation of this unholy and wicked thing.”26 An 1869 article in Tinsley’s Magazine (1867–92) accordingly rehearsed the familiar claim that the women’s club was not a site of social cohesion but rather of antisocial behavior: “The women who want to shut themselves off entirely from male society have already plenty of means of doing so. It is not a club they want, but a convent. And if they object to sisterhoods of all kinds, they may spend their days in the entomological rooms of the British Museum, where no man or woman born is likely to speak to them.”27 For this writer, women eager to “specialize” by joining professional organizations or literary cliques were in fact recoiling from more organic forms of social engagement; their efforts at distinguishing themselves by belonging to such groups only served to relegate them to an already existing taxonomy of female types. The suggestion that such women might be Page 133 →best suited to the “entomological rooms of the British Museum” thus implies not merely that they find a quiet corner of academia wherein to pursue their eccentric habits, but that they might themselves be properly considered as oddities of the intellectual world who, like rare beetles, should be studied, classified, and safely stored behind a sheet of glass. Even more provocative than these overt attacks, however, are the subtle ways in which the instructional literature designed to assist aspiring female critics at times also helped to codify and reinforce such stereotypes. In a 1904 pamphlet, Press Work for Women, Frances Low suggests that women might have greater success writing on fashion, needlework, and other traditionally “female employments,” thus reinforcing the notion that women were less suited to critical writing than to topics that would call upon their knowledge of the domestic sphere.28 The editor of the Review of Reviews (1890–1936), W. T. Stead, disagreed, insisting that women might succeed in all areas of the press, including criticism. According to Stead, the sexual division of labor does not apply to presswork, and female aspirants must therefore relinquish the claims of gender if they wish to compete with their male colleagues: They must not presume upon sex, and imagine that because they are women therefore they have a right to a situation or an engagement whenever they choose to apply for it. To be a woman confers many privileges and inflicts many disabilities; but if you were hundred times a woman, that would give you no right to a niche in the journalistic profession. If you want to be a journalist, you must succeed as a journalist—not as a woman or as a man.29 On the face of it, Stead’s suggestion that women should be recognized on the basis of their literary merits—that the profession should be essentially blind to the categories of sex—would seem to be a relatively progressive one for its time. The difficulty of sustaining such a position, however, becomes apparent as the onus for attaining such a genderless worldview devolves entirely upon the female critic, who must cautiously walk the line between forsaking sex and comporting herself as a respectable woman: I don’t want her to be unladylike. The woman who is mannish and forward and generally aggressive simply throws away her chances and competes voluntarily at a disadvantage. For no editor in his senses wants either mannish women or womanish men on his staff. What he Page 134 →does

want is a staff that will do whatever work turns up without making scenes, or consulting clocks, or standing upon its conventional dignities.30

Here the successful female critic is imagined to be a woman who retains all the modesty and selflessness of the domestic angel, while repudiating any claim to sexual difference. She must be essentially unsexed, while also performing an explicitly feminine code of deference. By the same token, Stead’s argument is underwritten by the presumption that without the guidance he offers, female critics will either perform a hysterical femininity—“making scenes” and “standing upon conventional dignities”—or become that unsettling type, the “mannish woman.” This is not to undermine the genuine concern for professional women writers conveyed by Stead’s piece but rather to call attention to the pervasiveness of late nineteenthcentury caricatures of the female critic. Even Stead’s charitable interest in clarifying how women ought ideally to conduct themselves as professional writers has the curious effect of reinforcing existing stereotypes. Like J. D. Andrews, Stead is determined to prevent women from becoming either Tootles or Screeds.31 Arnold Bennett’s advice in Journalism for Women (1898) examines the same problem through a more strictly sociological lens. Although Bennett contends that “there should not be any essential functional disparity between the journalist male and the journalist female,” he also maintains that critical writing by women is on the whole substandard.32 Women, he contends, lack the training that equips male writers for literary work and thus remain ignorant of accepted protocols, even as they send their articles to press. They have “not yet understood the codes of conduct prevailing in the temples so recently opened to them. On the hearth, their respect for the exigencies of that mysterious business is unimpeachable; somehow, admittance to the shrine engenders a certain forgetfulness.”33 The distinction Bennett draws between the “shrines” and “temples” of professional journalism and the secluded “hearth” is suggestive. Likening women’s formal admission into the profession to initiation into a sacred cult or secret society, Bennett reminds us that women writers were still relatively new to the social life of criticism: They cannot imagine the possibility of mere carelessness or omission interfering with the superhuman regularity and integrity of [the periodical’s] existence. The simple fact of course is that in journalism, as probably in no other profession, success depends wholly upon the Page 135 →loyal cooperation, the perfect reliability, of a number of people—some great, some small, but none irresponsible.34 Bennett’s characterization here is not simply an attempt to discredit the emerging generation of female aspirants. Indeed, he takes great pains to decipher the rituals of periodical publishing for them, and his concerns that women are not fully acquainted with the rituals of professional conduct are by no means unfounded.35 Like Stead, however, Bennett’s advice is predicated on the presumption that corporate life poses special challenges for women writers. These writings thus ask the female critic to undertake a dubious balancing act, abandoning certain elements of female sociability while openly performing others. If thinkers like Stead and Bennett sought to resolve this problem by training women writers to a better understanding of professional life, others expressed their anxiety by aligning women writers—and female critics in particular—with aberrant forms of femininity. Whether patrons or adversaries of professional women, writers on the subject frequently maligned female critics as hysterically feminine or mannish interlopers, while celebrating a vague and seemingly unattainable middle ground between the two. To a large extent, then, this more inclusive professional culture reflected a continuing anxiety about the cultural status of the female critic. Ann Ardis has argued that the “naming” of the New Woman was as much a liability as an advantage for aspiring professional women. As it cultivated a sense of shared identity among independent, working women, it also afforded their opponents a powerful and reductive stereotype upon which they might superimpose their objections to women’s work. Sally Ledger has likewise argued that by establishing such categories, “editors and hacks of the periodical press unwittingly prised open a discursive space for her, a space which was quickly filled by feminist textual productions sympathetic—not antagonistic—towards the claims of the New Woman and her sisters in the late nineteenth-century women’s

movement.”36 A similar claim can be made of female critics during the period. Being recognized as women writers—with special resources and organizations devoted to their cause—certainly made it possible for them to enjoy a wider range of professional opportunities. But it also added force to claims that women were illequipped for the social life of criticism, providing an ideological bulwark upon which skeptics could mount their calumny. In a word, the Victorians faced a dilemma that continues to be a problem for scholars of gender today: how to balance a sensitivity to the professional ascendancy of women Page 136 →writers against an abstract belief that intellectual work transcends the categories of sex and gender?

The Shrieking Sisterhood: Eliza Lynn Linton and the Limits of Community The inclusion of women within the critical establishment was accompanied by very public deliberations over how women might best accommodate their behavior to the workplace. In many cases, the female critic was instructed to choose between a presumably natural surrender to domesticity and the performative conditions of professional life. This discursive tension finds a striking example in the career of Eliza Lynn Linton. Linton was in many ways a casualty of this particular moment: compelled to choose between being either a Screed or a Tootle, she found herself shunned by advanced women and their antagonists alike. As we shall see, however, her attempts to navigate the tension between femininity and professional culture ultimately led her to deploy a critical methodology determined to question the forms of social classification that relegated women like herself to the margins. The bare outlines of Linton’s life suggest a strong similarity to the professional aims and experiences of other “advanced” women of the day. At the age of twenty-three, she left home to pursue a writing career in London against the wishes of her father, who was, according to George Somes Layard, “one of the large majority in those days who had a strong prejudice against intellectual pursuits for women.”37 Over the course of her career, Linton would produce over thirty novels that defied religious and sexual custom, always maintaining her financial independence through regular contributions to the periodical press. When Linton first arrived in London, she became part of a society that included Sir Charles Babbage, Herbert Spencer, Robert Owen, Charles Bray, Thomas Carlyle, and Walter Savage Landor, among other literary notables. In the 1860s she regularly held parties where major literary figures of the day (including Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray) assembled, attempting effectively “to establish her own salon.”38 By the 1870s, Linton had joined “a sort of London Bohemia,” which was in the words of one member “an undefined association constructed out of chance companionship of many men and women professionally engaged in art, or letters, or politics.”39 Financially independent and freely inhabiting Page 137 →the literary networks of London, Linton would seem to have been the very picture of the liberated professional woman writer. Yet even at the beginning of her career, it was apparent to many that Linton was not like others of her trade. Following the publication of her second novel, Amymone (1848), a reviewer from Bentley’s Miscellany (1836–68) explained that the authoress was “not one of your scolding Britomarts, who make angry words cover strangely immoral tendencies in her argument.В .В .В . Therefore she must be set apart from others of the sisterhood.”40 What set Linton apart was her critical, at times even trenchant approach to other women writers. Linton’s most memorable work was a series of provocative essays for the Saturday Review denouncing the advanced woman, perhaps most famously her 1868 piece “The Girl of the Period.” In this essay, Linton condemns the “modern girl” for her lack of modesty, her interest in life beyond the home, and her corresponding disregard for the sanctity of marriage and motherhood. The essay served as the springboard for a series of pieces on related topics, including “Grim Females” (1868), “Modern Man-Haters” (1871), “The Shrieking Sisterhood” (1878), and “The Wild Women as Social Insurgents” (1891), to name only a few. As the titles of these works suggest, Linton seemed to harbor a distinct aversion to the advanced woman, regarding her as a morbid, unrestrained, and grotesque distortion of traditional feminine values. On the surface, Linton’s views would seem to be deeply hypocritical: determined to break the mold herself, she consigned other women to a classificatory system that tended to malign or curtail the scope of their influence.41 Linton’s purported campaign against the advanced woman was deprecated from all corners of the literary world. Most reviewers were so incensed that they resorted to personal attacks, speculating at length on the identity

of the essay’s anonymous author and, in a striking and ironic twist, aligning Linton with the very stereotypes she sought to dismantle. A response in the Tomahawk (1867–70) “Written in a Club Library” opened by calling Linton’s gender into question: “A little too sweeping, my dear sir, or rather, my sweet madam—a man could not have written such a very spiteful leader, fair one with the locks of grey (they are grey I’m sure)—a little too sweeping.”42 In the same issue, a visual caricature imagined the author of these essays as a bitter old maid, a “prurient prude” whose sense of sexual propriety is so inflated that even the legs of her easel must be modestly concealed by pantalets (figure 10). Squinting rancorously at the canvas, the female critic paints the modern woman as Page 138 →a conceited harpy, a glaring misrepresentation of the charming young girl who poses in the background. As the Tomahawk claimed to defend women against her detractors, then, that chivalric gesture was underwritten by a presumption that the female critic was a narrowminded partisan who was loath to seek fellowship with her own kind. Once again, the female critic is presumed to be essentially antisocial and indecorous. Only a woman (and most likely a “Screed”), the reviewer suggests, could be capable of such a caustic assault on members of her own sex. Figure 10: The Girl of the Period! Tomahawk (4 April 1868), 139 Tinsley’s Magazine offered a slightly different approach to the essay in “The Reviewer of the Period.” Like the Tomahawk, Tinsley’s deplored Linton’s essay as a gross generalization and slander on womankind, “a sort of war-dance on the verge of indecency,” the chief object of which was to shock readers rather than to promote social progress.43 The critic had “over-stepped the bounds of journalistic decency,” proving that it was not the girl of the period but rather the “reviewer of the period” who was in need of reform.44 Once again, the sex of the critic emerges Page 139 →as an important consideration. But whereas the Tomahawk assumed that such calumny could only be directed at women by one of their own, the Tinsley’s reviewer attributes the essay to a male critic: “No one but a man could have written like this; and his feminine readers may console themselves with the reflection that the writer, if he carries out his views, will live to repent of them, when the decades have brought dyspepsia and dinner-pills.”45 It is telling that responses to “The Girl of the Period” evince such a preoccupation with the sex of its author. Certainly, the fact that the reviewers regarded Linton’s caustic pronouncements as either the virile indifference of a male critic or the catty insults of a sexless woman helps to underscore the inconsistencies and tensions underlying attempts to classify the female critic. In the abstract, the female critic was expected to realize one of two social characterizations: that of the ardent feminist, vigilantly defending the rights of women to participate in traditionally masculine pursuits (including smoking, bicycling, and adopting a profession), or that of the narrow-minded and hypocritical spinster. In either case, she was regarded as morbidly unfeminine. That Linton should be aligned with such a stereotype, even as she derided the advanced woman for deviating from normative gender roles, illustrates just how pervasive this paradigm was at the time. When Linton’s real identity and sex became public, the reaction shifted once again. Alerted to the fact that the presumably misogynist writer was “herself a revolted daughter, a woman who pursued the вЂmasculine’ profession of journalism,” Linton’s opponents derided her as a turncoat who had renounced the very sisterhood that defended her right to join the ranks of professional writers.46 As George Paston noted in 1901, “It was not perhaps so much her wild and whirling accusations against her own sex that roused the resentment of Mrs. Lynn Linton’s feminine contemporaries, as what they held to be her self-righteousness, and her usurpation, without any particular qualifications, of the seat of judgment.”47 Linton was, to borrow Andrews’s evocative term, widely regarded as a “Screed,” a female critic whose intellectual zeal rendered her unfeminine, ill-tempered, and antisocial. Even in contemporary scholarship, Linton’s work as a critic has earned her a reputation as a misogynist, an ambitious “anti-feminist propagandist” whose loyalty to normative gender roles pitted her against members of her own sex.48 George Somes Layard offers the most compassionate account of Linton’s life, but both he and Herbert Van Thal suggest that her practice of modeling female emancipation while seeming to promote more traditional female stereotypesPage 140 → stemmed from a deep-seated ambivalence about her own professional status.49 In her biography of Linton, Woman against Women in Victorian England (1987), Nancy Fix Anderson offers a complex psychosexual narrative of Linton as a “masculine” woman and conflicted lesbian whose attitude toward her

own sex was always deeply troubled.50 In striking contrast, Andrea L. Broomfield argues that Linton’s purportedly misogynist essays do not express her personal views on women, but were instead intended to entertain readers of popular journalism, which reduced social issues to sensational (and sellable) lampoons: by this logic, Linton’s perceived misogyny was itself a spurious, though masterful, act of literary posing.51 One of the more striking accounts of Linton’s career has been proffered by Eveleen Richards, who aligns Linton’s treatment of women with her long-standing interest in socioscientific discourse, observing that her desire to join predominantly male intellectual forums reveals her to be an inconsistent or even unreliable critic of gender. According to Richards, Linton objected strongly to Thomas Huxley’s decision to exclude women from meetings of the Ethnological Society on the grounds that they were biologically ill-equipped for rigorous study. Even as she rejected Huxley’s argument regarding the scope of female intellect, however, Linton’s views on women seem to be grounded in a similar presumption that women were by nature suited for domestic work and “could no more emancipateВ themselves from the laws of biology than the earth could free itself from the law of gravitation.”52 Linton’s desire to participate in male forms of sociability—and to transcend her “natural” classification as a woman who must remain apart from such forums—thus would seem to chafe against her published claims that women had been assigned important and predominantly domestic functions by nature and biology. Yet when the Bentley’s reviewer insists on setting Linton “apart from others of the sisterhood,” the insinuation is that Linton was a member of that sisterhood, albeit an inimitable and often dissenting one. Linton’s critical and fictional writings, while not adopting a strictly feminist agenda, nevertheless indicate that her understanding of the female intellect was not nearly as retrograde as so many of her readers have suggested. As Linton acknowledges in her essay “Emancipated Woman” (1884), “we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that the Rights of Woman is a cause, and one not wholly uncalled for nor unrighteousВ .В .В . that both society and the laws unite to oppress and wrong us.”53 While Linton’s caricatures of the advanced woman would seem to render her complicit in the movement to relegate women like herself to “the entomological Page 141 →rooms of the British Museum,” her critical and fictional writings—not to mention her adamant opposition to the exclusionary tactics of men like Huxley—also demonstrate a special interest in exploring the difficulty with which female critics navigated a professional culture keen on drawing such distinctions. If advanced women were the frequent objects of Linton’s scrutiny, it is because she felt they had too readily acceded to a sociological model that limited their potential. Although Linton’s work would seem committed to a static taxonomy of social types, she was deeply invested in exposing the fissures within those taxonomies, an approach that was largely informed by her interest in socioscientific discourse. In particular, Linton was attracted by the work of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, both of whom treat classification as a methodological tool that might disclose previously unperceived links and gaps in complex biological and historical networks. As Darwin puts it, “that community of descent” which is revealed through systems of biological classification “is the hidden bond which naturalists have been unconsciously seeking, and not some unknown plan of creation, or the enunciation of genial propositions, and the mere putting together and separating objects more or less alike.”54 In other words, Darwin viewed classification less as a means of establishing differences between different biological types than as a tool for perceiving the often obscured linkages among them. Spencer articulates a similar argument in The Principles of Sociology (1874–75), noting that classification sets in relief the emergence of transitional types—creatures who present evidence of evolutionary progress and cannot therefore be relegated to existing categories. He explains such transitional types in these terms: “In metamorphoses, then, so far as they are traceable, we discern general truths harmonizing with those disclosed by comparison of types. With social organisms, as withВ individualВ organisms, the structure becomes adapted to the activity. In the one case as in the other, if circumstances entail a fundamental change in the mode of activity, there by and by results a fundamental change in the form of structure.”55 By this logic, a transitional “type” affords the perceptive viewer a glimpse into more sweeping changes in social and intellectual life: changes in individual categories reflect vital changes in the social structure itself. Like Darwin and Spencer, whose work she revered and frequently invokes in her critical work, Linton does not

treat classification as an incontrovertible scientific record; on the contrary, it is a method of inquiry that helps to clarify the relationship between emerging “types” of women and existing social networks. As an illustration of this principle, Page 142 →we might turn to Linton’s treatment of the advanced woman. Though Linton is often supposed to have maligned this social type—whether out of a fidelity to traditional values or professional jealousy—she ultimately regards such women as neither ideal nor aberrations. The advanced woman is, as Linton suggests in “Our Past and Future” (1884), an inelegant but necessary stage in the history of intellectual life. “All transitional states,” Linton writes, are more or less unlovely, even though the transition is from a lower to a higher type. В .В .В .Perhaps the modern woman is to be judged by the same principle; perhaps the cause of all her faults and eccentricities, the answer to her present moral unloveliness, is to be found in the imperfection inseparable from the period of growth—in the amorphous condition of a development that is yet unfinished.56 Echoing Spencer’s understanding of transitional stages, Linton recognizes that all social types, however jarring and unfamiliar, reflect transitional variations and transmutations in the social body. Admittedly, Linton’s pronouncement is more an apology than a bold defense of the advanced woman, for she describes as “faults and eccentricities” behaviors that many women deemed (and today continue to deem) acceptable or even desirable. Yet she also makes quite clear that the “modern woman” is not intrinsically objectionable: she merely bears the evidence of her transitional state in a manner that accentuates the distance between the past and future place of women within the social structure. Seen this way, even the “girl of the period—and the periodical” might ultimately prove to be a boon to the social body. As Linton herself concedes: “How often the flower of good lies in the evil seed! Indeed, what is the loveliest plant we know but the transmutation of soiling earths and foul gases? And may not this be an analogy with human history, and the instinctive direction of national thought?”57 Spencer seems to have recognized Linton’s interest in transitional types, noting in an 1897 letter his suspicion that her interest in female types was motivated by something other than a commitment to traditional gender roles. “You have rather obtained for yourself the reputation for holding a brief for men versus women,” he writes, “whereas I rather think the fact is that you simply aim to check that over-exaltation of women which has long been dominant.”58 As Spencer astutely suggests, Linton’s apparent sallies against women were in fact strategic attempts to clarify Page 143 →a distorted view of the social economy while highlighting those “types” that threatened to hamper the natural course of social evolution. When she did finally confront Huxley about the admission of women into the Ethnological Society, then, Linton appropriately framed the position of intellectual women in terms of a larger “struggle for existence.”59 “You know how few opportunities we women have,” she writes, for getting any serious or valuable talk with men. We meet you in “Society” with crowds of friends about & in an atmosphere of finery & artificiality. Suppose I, or any woman—let her be as fascinating as possible—were to bombard you with scientific talk—would you not rather go off to the stupidest little girl who had not a thought above her pretty frock, than begin a discussion on the Origin of Species.60 Presenting the intellectual sphere as subject to the same “Battle of Life” to be found in nature, Linton concludes that women should not be denied “the means of knowledge & of active thought, of extended views—such as we get from attending learned discussions” purely on the basis of sexual difference.61 To do so would be to artificially hinder the natural course of social development. But while sympathetic to the abuses sustained by women both past and present, Linton also remained wary of these emerging female organizations and networks, which she felt reflected the worst tendencies of late Victorian intellectual life. Linton attacked the figure of the advanced woman not because she did not herself wish to improve the condition of her own sex but rather because she objected to a monolithic concept of “the sex” that threatened to shore up old prejudices against women’s intellectual capacities. In “The Shrieking

Sisterhood,” she writes: “We by no means put it forward as an original remark when we say that Nature does her grandest works of construction in silence, and that all great historical reforms have been brought about either by long and quiet preparation, or by sudden and authoritative action. The inference from which is, that no great good has ever been done by shrieking.”62 The real problem with professional women and the societies devoted to their advancement, then, was that they consciously inhabited a collectivity that threatened to reinforce rather than transcend the categories assigned to them by detractors. In the end, Linton’s critical work invokes a taxonomy of nineteenth-century women not in order to vilify them but rather to demonstrate the importance of moving beyond such categories. Page 144 →

“A First-Rate Fellow”: The Case of Jane Osborne A revealing illustration of this approach emerges in Linton’s often overlooked novel Sowing the Wind (1867), which relates an account of the female critic based largely upon Linton’s own inauguration into the profession. In this novel, Linton brings to the fore the difficulty of classifying the female critic, a transitional figure whose admission to the social life of criticism renders her at once monstrous and heroic. The action of the novel revolves around the relationship between Jane Osborne, an iconoclastic female critic who writes for the Comet, and her cousin Isola, a young woman who is entirely under the control of her domineering husband, St. John Aylott. Despite Linton’s reputation as a supporter of more traditional gender roles, the novel is unusually critical of the domestic angel, Isola. Upon first meeting her, Jane encourages Isola to confess the imperfections of her conjugal life. Spurred on by Jane’s strident pronouncements on the subjugation of women, Isola admits that St. John has denied her control over her money, the cultivation of relationships outside of the home, or even the freedom to express thoughts and desires unconnected to his own. Isola’s private misgivings about a life exclusively devoted to her husband—a life of “arbitrary rule and blind submission”—are given a brash, yet accurate articulation by Jane.63 In this case, Linton presents Jane as a vociferous and outspoken, though salutary influence on her cousin, “вЂa bath of life’ to the woman stifled by conventionalities and denied the free use of even thought.”64 Indeed, one of Jane’s signature qualities is a desire to improve the lives of her friends and family, an instinct that is perhaps most evident in her effort to financially support her mother and Isola in their time of need. In a novel lacking strong male breadwinners, somebody must earn a living, and this responsibility consistently falls to Jane. As had been the case for Jameson and Oliphant, Jane’s intellectual labors are at least partially motivated by a sense of domestic duty, and her decision to pursue a literary career is treated in the novel as a practical and even respectable course of action.65 On the whole, this accords with Linton’s outlook on professional women writers. In her essay “Plain Girls” (1868), Linton argues that women both can and should seek employment as critics, provided that they have the necessary intellectual discipline. “The real objection to literary women, ” she writes, “is that women, with a few notable exceptions, are not yet properly educated to write well, or to criticise well what others write. Remove this objection by improving the curriculum of feminine education, and there is hardly any other.”66 For Linton, Page 145 →who is often presumed to have opposed women’s participation in public labor, literary work presented unique opportunities for women like Jane Osborne who had not been “marked out by Heaven for a married life.”67 Of course, her suggestion that women must be educated to a proper understanding of critical practice revisits the question that would occupy so many writers toward the end of the nineteenth century: how exactly should the female critic conduct herself in a professional setting? Like Stead and Bennett, Jane’s colleagues at the press continually remind us that in order to succeed as a professional critic she must forfeit her gender and perform instead a kind of attenuated masculinity. Even Smith, the editor of the Comet and a self-proclaimed patron of female critics, confesses that the “womanish woman” is an endless source of aggravation at the press office: If you pull them up for their faults, and rap their knuckles as you would a man’s, they fire up and stand upon their dignity as “ladies”—the little fools! The fact is the creatures want the cream

of both states—the independence and money-getting power of men, and the conventional respect of drawing-room ladies: which is ridiculous, you know, and can’t be done.68

Smith’s argument is one that Linton seems to have endorsed. Much like George Eliot, Linton believed that an individual’s work should be judged on its merits alone. The successful female critic must choose to forgo the advantages of sex, effectively relinquishing her gender in the interest of “entering the fray.”69 In “Affronted Womanhood” (1868), Linton accused women’s advocates of maintaining a safe distance from real social conflict, calling for social equality even as they demanded protection under the chivalric customs that had once undergirded their domestic confinement: “But what women do not see is that all this poetic flattery comes originally from the idealizing passion of men, and that, left to themselves, with only each other for critics and analyzers, they would soon find themselves stripped of their superfluous moral finery and reduced to the bare core of uncompromising truth.”70 Contending that the “poetic flattery” of men needs to be checked by a more detached view, Linton suggests that this task can only be accomplished when women themselves become critics. According to Linton, then, it is only through a concentrated critical assault on existing feminine types that women can show that they are prepared to accept the responsibility that equal participation in the world of professional criticism demands. Page 146 →“If they come down into the arena to fight,” she reflects, “they must fight subject to the conditions of the arena.”71 From her first encounter with the editors of the Comet, Jane Osborne demonstrates a facility for navigating the masculine world of business. That she knows how to speak like a man is treated as an admirable quality in the novel, a testimony to her worldliness, prudence, and poise. Harvey Wyndham, the subeditor who interviews Jane for the Comet, is impressed by her departure from the behaviors enumerated by Smith: “He liked her direct tone—вЂno nonsense about her,’ he thought; and felt decidedly disposed to befriend her, in spite of his professional dislike to woman’s work and professional jealousy of interference in the press.”72 Jane’s intellect, energy, and frank understanding of how to conduct herself within the predominantly male world of the press are all treated as positive qualities. If she is unkempt and somewhat abrasive in speech, such idiosyncrasies do not negate the fact that her “influence would be pure and healthy.”73 Nevertheless, Jane’s generosity, competence, and work ethic consistently come into view at the expense of her femininity, and her deviation from sexual norms is a matter of constant comment and anxiety in the narrative. She is frequently described as “a first-rate fellow” or a “fine old chap,” and the staff at the Comet refer to her with unfeigned affection as “Johnny Osborne.”74 These epithets, while not always disparaging, call attention to the intractable tension between Jane’s career and her sex: It was the one weakness of this strong-minded woman—she liked to have her sex ignored, and to be treated as a man among men, with no more respect, no more softness, no more consideration. It was the greatest compliment that could be paid her, she always said; and when Harvey Wyndham wanted specially to elate her he called her a good fellow and a fine old chap, and placed the more decent pages of the slang dictionary at her disposal.75 If Jane’s ability to transcend gender is an asset at the press office, in private life it transforms her into “a rude, unlovely boy-woman,” “a perfect ogress,” or (as she herself puts it) “something quite like Beauty’s Beast.”76 The more time Jane passes among her male colleagues, the more she relinquishes “what little amount of feminality she ever possessed” and becomes unable to sustain normal social relationships.77 In the end, Jane’s independence and commitment to the project of criticism, both in her writing and in her personal relationships, prove a hindrance to Page 147 →real self-determination, “and while really grand in some aspects of her character—really noble and heroic—she was irritating by her unwomanly want of all mental grace or beauty.”78 Jane is certainly not an exemplar of the professional female critic, but it is neither her intellectual talent nor her desire for an independent life that renders her behavior objectionable. If Isola is limited by her husband’s insistence that she conform to a model of submissive femininity, Jane is similarly constrained by her editor’s insistence that she conform to the rituals of professional masculinity. Over time, her performance of these rituals

produces a classic case of what Dror Wahrman has dubbed “gender panic.” Jane’s attempts to adapt to a male-dominated workplace ultimately do not authorize playful acts of gender-bending but instead shore up her reputation as a masculine type, effecting a “shift from mutability to essence, from imaginable fluidity to fixity, from the potential for individual deviation from general identity categories to an individual identity stamped indelibly on each and every person.”79 In other words, even as Jane adapts to a professional context in which traditionally masculine behaviors such as outspokenness, pragmatism, and self-determination are lauded—as she transcends the conventional male-female binary—she solidifies her association with the category of “manly woman.” Jane describes herself paradoxically as “the most unlovely disagreeable woman in the world, though not a bad fellow at heart.”80 Though unsuccessful in her performance of femininity, Jane is “not bad” at playing the role of a spirited and congenial “fellow” of the press. That spirit of collegiality is, as Jane herself observes, one of the principle rewards of the literary life, and it is strictly opposed to the domestic career that women like Isola pursue: Ah, you may talk as you like, Isola!—babies, and love, and the graces and prettinesses are all very fine, I dare say, but give me the real solid pleasure of work—a man’s work—work that influences the world—work that is power! To sit behind the scenes and pull the strings—to know that what one says as We in the “Comet” is taken among thinking men as a new gospel, when if one had said it as I, Jane Osborne, it would have been sneered at as woman’s babble—to feel that strange thrill of secret mental power—no, I would not give up that for all the happiness of your so called womanly women!81 Longing to become a part of the corporate “We” that dispenses critical judgment, Jane sacrifices the feminine “I” whose utterances are regardedPage 148 → merely as “woman’s babble.” Jane’s departure from the behavior of a proper woman—her inability to hold her tongue, to temper her criticisms, to avoid slang, to maintain a discreet distance between herself and members of the opposite sex—renders her “disagreeable” and even revolting to her companions. Her heart is, without a doubt, in the right place, and yet Jane’s public life prevents her from abiding by the social responsibilities demanded of her sex. She is “not a bad fellow, butВ .В .В . not a good woman; scarcely a woman in the moral sense at all.”82 Linton’s depiction of Jane Osborne in Sowing the Wind helps to illustrate just how awkward and impracticable the characterization of the female critic was at the end of the nineteenth century. Jane’s attempt to transcend gender does not prevent her from heroically supporting her family, advising her friends, or producing first-rate critical writing. Her influence remains unobstructed by these brazen acts of gender-bending. At bottom, Jane’s problem is not her independence, her intellect, or even her penchant for dispensing blunt, unvarnished criticism: it is the impossible choice that the professional world forces her to make. While literary culture is more than ever in need of female critics like Jane, her chosen profession demands that she relinquish her gender and risk being labeled as antisocial, unfeminine, and unnatural. Jane thus represents both the promise of the professional female critic and the dangers posed by her attempts to fulfill the model of unsexed femininity the profession demands. Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of Linton’s legacy, both then and now, is that her apparently antifeminist writings were treated as part of a more sweepingly antisocial worldview. Belonging neither to the cult of domestic womanhood nor to the community of emancipated “working” women, Linton came to be known as an unscrupulous, ambitious, and angry loner. As George Paston observes, “Mrs. Lynn Linton, it would appear, was regarded as a sociologist by her disciples, but her mental myopia incapacitated her from reading the signs of the times, and her teaching at this period was distinctly antisocial.”83 In Leaves from a Life (1908), Jane Panton recalls attending a party at the home of the novelist Shirley Brooks where Linton was given the gift of “a pen-wiper in the shape of a waspВ .В .В . accompanied by a dulcet rhyme insinuating that the power to sting should always be used mercifully.”84 She was, Panton continues, “looked upon by us with suspicion and dislike” both for her novels, which dealt in unconventional religious and sexual themes, and for her acerbic criticism.85 In some ways, Linton’s self-fashioning as an Page 149 →outspoken and uncompromising critic led even her would-be allies to regard her as ruthless and unfeminine.

In “Ourselves,” an essay written in 1869 and republished in 1884, Linton defended her approach by, in effect, reviewing her own essays for the Saturday Review. This piece—originally published anonymously and accompanied only by the suggestive attribution “By a Woman”—serves as a sort of counterpoint to the aggressive stance Linton had assumed in her previous essays on the Woman Question. “A literary friend of ours,” she writes, “hits us very hard about every Saturday now. I say friend despite of his bludgeon and the tremendous blows resulting, because plain-speaking is, in a general way, a more friendly proceeding than flattery, though a mortifying one.”86 Linton’s defense of her “literary friend” at the Saturday Review adopts an entirely different tone from the “Girl of the Period” essays, one that is less aggressive and more responsive to the irate reactions her essays generated. Taking her cue from other reviewers of her work, Linton speculates on the sex of the Saturday Reviewer: Besides, wicked wags do say that the hardest of those papers are written by certain of ourselves, and that if the foe has spied out the nakedness of the land, it is a woman who has bound the red thread across the window. If the frisky Matron is scarified, and the Girl of the Period castigated, and small follies generally held up to ridicule and reprehension, there are not wanting bold tongues to declare that the hardest thing said can only be the truth, seeing that it is said with that connaissance de cause which only sex can give. Is it so? And is our hebdomadal flayer a woman like ourselves, pointing out our evils for the good to follow, and sternly calling us into the way of righteousness, with an accompaniment of lashes well laid on? Is she—or they—cruel only to be kind? Perhaps.87 Here Linton adopts a gentler tone than in her more bombastic articles for the Saturday Review, admitting the severity of her attacks on the advanced woman but meekly proposing that this apparent cruelty might be motivated by a sense of fellowship and patronage—not the seething rage of a misogynist but rather the counsel of a conscientious critic. In the words of Jane Osborne, “It is not a soft manner but a true heart that one wants—isn’t it? The thing which binds men together is not the best form of address, or the correct way of standing or speaking, but truth and brotherliness and help and honesty.”88 As Linton attempted Page 150 →to differentiate herself from the nefarious “type” of the unnatural and unfeminine female critic, she also sought to cultivate among her readers a willingness to look beyond the strident language of her essays, which aspired to shock them into an awareness of her own social vision. Over the course of her career, Linton would insist again and again that the future of professional women depended on their willingness to engage with criticism and become arbiters of literary and cultural judgment. Although women are generally deemed to be “self-conscious,” Linton explains, that self-consciousness tends to “be of a very peculiar and feminine sort—a consciousness, not of themselves in themselves, but of the reflection of themselves in others, of the impression they make on the world around.”89 In other words, Linton regards women as pathologically concerned with how others judge them, rather than astutely aware of their own character, intellect, and quality. Consequently, members of the “sisterhood” regard any attempts at addressing the weaknesses of women as a wholesale denunciation: When a critic then ventures to open this inner existence, and to give woman a peep at herself, we cannot be astonished at the scream of indignation which greets his efforts. But we may be permitted to repeat that the scream proves, not that he knows nothing of woman, but that woman knows nothing of herself.90 Identifying exclusively as women, without contemplating what kinds of women they might be, the “shriekers” can only find recourse in exaggerated and counterproductive stereotypes, leaving themselves open to public ridicule and exclusion. If, however, women were successfully to “enter the fray”—responding productively to criticism and becoming, as Eliot too had recommended, more selfcritical—they might begin to play a more direct role in shaping intellectual culture. Linton’s suggestion that women turn their attention inward would be taken up by her contemporary, Vernon Lee (nГ©e Violet Paget). As we shall see, Lee was deeply invested in a model of critical judgment that was simultaneously grounded in the individual’s subjective impressions of the world and reinforced through a larger community of ideas. Whereas Linton’s work presents the female critic as a “transitional” figure trapped between categories—a sign that the world of letters was perhaps evolving in new and unanticipated directions—Lee

would recommend that the most effective criticism strives to elude identity categories altogether. Page 151 →

An Antisocial Tirade: Vernon Lee’s Althea Vernon Lee was in many ways a real-life Jane Osborne, whose public persona did not align neatly either with the sisterhood of advanced women or with the Victorian “Angel in the House.” In 1888, Current Opinion (1888–1925) described her as “very plain, decidedly masculine in appearance, andВ .В .В . fond of sitting with her legs crossed and of smoking cigarettes.”91 Elizabeth Robins Pennell remembered Lee as “masculine in her looks as in her books,” and the Times (1785–present) remarked upon her “masculine reach of thought.”92 But if Lee’s appearance—her preference for wearing her hair short, donning a masculine style of dress, and adopting a male pseudonym—threatened to align her with unflattering stereotypes of the advanced woman, the “virile virulence” of her prose was also widely regarded as evidence of real genius.93 Lee managed, in a way that Jane Osborne had not, to adopt the behaviors of the professional male critic.94 Walking that precarious line between masculinity and femininity was an important part of Lee’s critical posture. Like her predecessors, Lee was aware that it could be difficult for a female critic to obtain a fair hearing from the reviewers. “I am sure,” she remarked in a letter to Henrietta Jenkin, “no one reads a woman’s writing on art, history, or aesthetics with anything but mitigated contempt.”95 Unlike Linton, however, Lee never truly masked her identity from the public. Her sex was an open secret among the literary circles of the day, and most of the major Victorian reviews openly refer to her in terms akin to those adopted by the Spectator—as the “clever woman who calls herself вЂVernon Lee.’”96 Rather than serving as a veil of anonymity, Lee’s pseudonym was a provocation designed to critique and destabilize the social categories that so frequently entered into late Victorian discussions of authorship.97 As she noted in an 1875 letter to Cornelia Turner, the name “has the advantage of leaving undecided whether the writer be a man or a woman.”98 Lee presented herself before the public not as a male critic but rather as a critic of indeterminate sex. The adoption of a pseudonym was thus not merely a strategy for deflecting the gender bias of her readers; it actually put on display the elision of gender categories, provoking readers to question the lines that continued to be drawn between the sexes in professional life. By and large, the scholarship has treated Vernon Lee as a cultural exception. Hilary Fraser notes that Lee was in many respects “in between” Page 152 →identities, and Nicole Fluhr has rightly highlighted the manner in which Lee’s fictional work rejects “the notion of a unified or singular subjectivity.”99 Vineta Colby has called attention to her “protean” identity as a thinker, observing that Lee “fits into no single category. She was too late to be a Victorian, too early to be a Modernist. She was a nonmilitant feminist, a sexually repressed lesbian, an aesthete, a cautious socialist, a secular humanist.”100 In short, contemporary scholars have tended to focus on Lee’s obsession with intellectual vistas, remembering her as a writer who was crucially invested in opening up imaginative spaces where traditional boundaries might be transgressed. There is good reason for this. Lee’s belief in the flexibility of social categories was undoubtedly nurtured by her own cosmopolitan upbringing. She was born in France in 1856, her English mother Matilda Paget having fled England after the death of her first husband. Matilda soon remarried a man of European extraction and traveled throughout Europe with her two children (Lee and her half brother Eugene Lee-Hamilton) in tow. In part owing to these early perambulations, and in part owing to her mother’s bohemian proclivities, Lee seems to have regarded herself as a kind of “bourgeois gypsy” whose intellectual life took shape within a self-consciously cosmopolitan setting.101 When her family removed to the Italian villa, Il Palmerino, she transformed it into one of the preeminent English salons in Europe. Mary Robinson was astounded by the incredible diversity of the guest list at Casa Paget: “How many men and women,” she writes, “of how many types, characters, and nationalities!”102 Although the salon attracted many noteworthy English visitors (Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and John Addington Symonds were regular fixtures), they also hosted a bevy of expatriate artists, including Anatole France, Ouida (Marie Louise RamГ©), Henry James, and others. Lee’s earliest

publications all appeared in non-English, European journals, and one of her earliest essays, a piece addressing the need to revitalize Italian culture, was signed simply “un cosmopolitana.”103 According to Aldous Huxley, Lee spoke Italian “with the kind of literary perfection which can only be achieved by a foreigner who has completely mastered the language but still speaks it from the outside, so to say, as an artist consciously manipulating his medium.”104 Lee was, in short, adept at transcending seemingly fixed cultural boundaries without ever adopting a clear subject position for herself. Both cosmopolitan and transgender, Lee would seem to be as difficult to align with a clear method or cultural vantage point as Linton had been. Yet characterizing Lee’s work as essentially “protean,” while certainly Page 153 →valid, also presents certain obstacles in the study of her work. By treating Lee as the product of a transitional moment—an intellectual shape-shifter who was unable or unwilling to commit to a single way of viewing the world—one risks underrating Lee’s construction of a very distinctive and coherent critical methodology. If Lee shared Linton’s fascination with aberrant forms of femininity, she regarded them less as fleeting types than as intellectual exemplars who posed a direct challenge to the politics of professional belonging. By focusing attention on the convergences between Lee’s criticism and her engagement with social theory, it becomes apparent that Lee’s dynamic boundary-crossing was part of a critical method able to reconcile the discursive tension that frustrated the efforts of so many aspiring female critics (including Linton and Lee herself)—the tension between being recognized as a member of the wider critical community and being singled out on the basis of sex. Encountering the social even as she transcends it, Vernon Lee was less protean thinker than an anticategorical critic, whose mission to resist social classification shaped both the methodology and the substance of her critical work. Lee’s understanding of the sociable critic was influenced by the work of psychologist and social theorist William James. Although Lee would later break with James on the grounds of personal and philosophical differences, his understanding of the “social self” constitutes an important bulwark of her critical method.105 In Principles of Psychology (1890), James argues that the self consists of several different parts: the material self, the social self, and the spiritual self. “Properly speaking,” James writes, “a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind.В .В .В . But as the individuals who carry the images fall naturally into classes, we may practically say that he has as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinions he cares.”106 In effect, James asserts that we behave and perceive ourselves differently when engaging with different social groups, so that identity is always variegated and contingent. While divisions within the self may sometimes constitute a “discordant splitting,” they may just as readily yield “a perfectly harmonious division of labor, as where one tender to his children is stern to the soldiers or prisoners under his command.”107 By this logic, the wellbalanced and perceptive intellect is one that resists closure, giving free reign to the social instinct and thereby always expanding its power of judgment. Lee would invoke this idea of the “social self” throughout her career, proclaiming that a greater recognition of its complexity and power Page 154 →might help to invigorate the critical mind. In her 1904 essay “The Nature of Literature II” (a piece that later appeared in her 1923 collection The Handling of Words and Other Studies in Literary Psychology), Lee echoes James’s claim that the mind is by nature sociable, ever seeking to expand its scope of understanding through intellectual congress with others. The problem, Lee avers, is that this spirit of fellowship “appears but fitfully in our neighbours and in ourselves,” so that one must seek out that ideal form of social intercourse less through immediate associations than through the kind of virtual networking afforded by the written word.108 Following James—who observed that “whilst the innermost of the empirical selves of a man is a Self of the social sort, it yet can find its only adequate Socius in an ideal world”—Lee turns to the text as a social imaginary where encounters unlikely or even impossible in the real world might take place.109 For instance, she describes the presumably solitary act of reading a book as drawing the reader into community with an entire universe of characters who, unlike one’s acquaintances in real life, expose their innermost thoughts and feelings to public view. The innumerable hosts, more potent than the heavenly ones, created by poet and novelist are, in great measure, the consolers of our inevitable secret loneliness: they are those to whom, by the deed of

fancy, we can give ourselves utterly, as we give only to that which we have chosen and, may be, to that we have created. Among these, less clear, but how much more potent for his illusive reality, is the Writer himself! Every Writer is, to our fancy, an essential man, because he shows us only his essence, keeping the casual and deciduous for actual life. Hence, we expect in the Writer a man of deeper life, higher power, than ourselves or our neighbours.110

For Lee, the imaginative community of the text is not limited to the fictional characters created by the novelist; it is a communicative landscape wherein every act of reading is also a collaboration between the writer and his audience.111 In an 1895 essay on Ralph Waldo Emerson published in the Contemporary Review (1866–present), Lee describes the writer as continually exerting his will upon the reader, seeking through the strategic deployment of style and narrative structure to call forth very specific responses and emotions in the imagination of his audience. Readers, in turn, must reinvent in their minds the scenes, characters, and developments described by the author. The process of reading is thus, as Lee puts it, a kind of “action and reaction, give and take, between Page 155 →reader and writer.”112 According to this figuration, the writer becomes not only the author of companionable characters—as the manufacturer of sociable feeling, he becomes himself the reader’s most vital source of community and empathy. For Lee, the social life of criticism only truly coalesces within the mind of the critic who participates in an engaged and yet detached intertextual relationship with others. Lee was so committed to this idea that in Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics (1912)—fittingly, a collaborative work she composed years later with Clementina (Kit) AnstrutherThomson—she would advance the thesis that all aesthetic experience is essentially empathetic.113 Although Lee maintains that personal impressions, as distinct from objective criteria, form the basis for all aesthetic judgment, in this work she also claims that the assessment of any work of art inspires the projection of one’s personal sensations and impressions outward. Thus, even the most subjective and apparently solitary engagement with words on the page will ultimately require that the astute critic reach beyond himself, drawing for his critical judgment upon acute feeling for others. Of course, Lee’s work with Anstruther-Thomson appeared much later and focuses more pointedly on the science of human cognition. It is in her early critical works that she reflects most directly upon the relationship between sociable criticism and gender as such. An important illustration of this approach emerges in her 1885 volume Baldwin, a series of fictional dialogues on literary, aesthetic, and philosophical subjects. At the center of this volume is the eponymous Baldwin, a fictional male critic who exists on the “borderland between fact and fancy.”114 Putting her sociological theory of reading into practice, Lee describes Baldwin as the joint creation of herself and the reader. He is a “creature somehow mysteriously born of ourselves and of [our friends],” embodying the collaborative work accomplished by the reader and writer as they come together within the communicative landscape of the text.115 Every work of literature thus ends by being a sociable activity that depends implicitly upon the longing to communicate with and to comprehend the thoughts of others. If reading seems at first to be a profoundly solitary exercise, for Lee it is one of the most intimate, cooperative, and companionable behaviors of modern life. It is therefore appropriate that Baldwin also bears some resemblance to Lee herself. “The accident of education,” she tells us, “exclusively at home and in exceptional solitude, has placed this not very feminine man to some measure at a woman’s standpoint, devoid of all discipline and tradition, full of irregularities and individualities.”116 Although Lee frames female experience as “devoid of all discipline and tradition” by Page 156 →virtue of women’s limited access to more public and recognized forms of intellectual colloquy, she strikingly presents this “woman’s standpoint” as a critical virtue—as the source of that capacious and adaptable mindset for which Baldwin becomes known. What is more, the early perambulations of Baldwin’s family, much like Lee’s own, have “made this very English Briton see questions of all sorts through variously tinted cosmopolitan glasses.”117 Like Lee, Baldwin is both masculine and feminine, Briton and foreigner, insider and outsider. He is, in short, a composite figure who represents the expansive understanding of the critic as it collides and converges with the impressions of others.

Such an understanding of criticism was especially important to Lee, who, following some of the most noted aesthetic theorists of the period, felt that literary and aesthetic judgment was increasingly linked to the subjective experience of the reader or critic. One detects this strain of thought as much in Pater’s figuration of the aesthetic experience as a “swarm of impressions” as in Wilde’s suggestion that the critic’s chief aim is “to chronicle his own impressions.”118 Underlying each of these aesthetic philosophies is a profound cynicism regarding objective standards for aesthetic judgment. If critics formerly attempted to judge art, literature, or philosophy “according to certain abstract rules,” Lee observes, the “new school of criticism” is far more concerned with the marks culture leaves upon the “mind of the individual critic.”119 Lee remains deeply skeptical of any systemic approach to critical judgment and ultimately regards a continual negotiation between the objective and the situated view, with its manifold contingencies and qualifications, as the only one the individual can safely rely upon. As Baldwin himself remarks, Myself, the longer I live, the more also do I feel how completely this world is made up of relative appreciations; how useless and absurd it is to attempt to get at a positive one. We must think according to our mind’s organization; we must continually select the judgments of others and balance them against each other and our own; and other folk must do the same with ours.120 If the world is indeed “made up of relative appreciations,” as Baldwin suggests, then the critic’s task is to balance his own impressions against those of his contemporaries, absorbing some and rejecting others. Such a comparison does not necessarily result in the production of new knowledge. Indeed, the mode of critical inquiry articulated by Lee is seldom motivated by the search for a “positive” resolution; instead, it is a process Page 157 →that allows the individual to better understand his own mind and the effects that a particular work of art has upon it. By engaging with the impressions of others, continually constituting and reconstituting the boundaries of the self, the critic effectively reads and writes himself into community, practicing what Jodie Dean describes as a kind of “reflective solidarity” that continually revises the relationship between the self and others.121 The literary sociology articulated by Lee is not simply a way of understanding how the individual reader engages with text; it is a way of understanding how identity takes shape within a constantly shifting, inclusive, and impressionistic intellectual network, in effect making it possible to imagine “a вЂwe’ without labels.”122 Lee’s approach to criticism is thus, to the smallest detail, sociological in orientation. The most effective critics will experience personal transformation through aesthetic experience and the sympathetic, sociable instinct it necessarily entails. By the same token, Lee regards social classification as equivalent to the dissolution of social feeling and critical thought alike. As she observes in a review of Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1895)—the socioscientific treatise that famously classified some of the most formative intellects of the period as morbid and dissolute—any attempt to distinguish categorically between normal and abnormal behavior “vitiates our sense of likeness and unlikeness” and fosters “suspicion, irreverence, animosity towards others.”123 Put another way, establishing a “hard-and-fast line between ourselves and any of our fellow creatures” runs the risk of disguising the degeneracy of “normal” social life.124 To this extent, Lee anticipates Michel Foucault’s claim that identity categories, as the output of social institutions, tend to curtail individual autonomy. If, as Foucault suggests, identity categories are forged by institutions that exert power over the individual, then an emancipated identity can never be moored to systems of classification but must instead remain open to variations, reinterpretations, and new developments. “The relationships we have to have with ourselves are not,” Foucault observes, “ones of identity, rather, they must be relationships of differentiation, of creation, of innovation.”125 Seen this way, the sexually indeterminate pseudonym accompanying all of Lee’s critical writings serves as a constant reminder that the critic must embrace a flexible approach to social categories, balancing an appreciation for individual identity against the many different, overlapping, and contingent factors that characterize social life. Nowhere is this more apparent than in her review of Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s Women and Economics (1898). Like Linton, Lee had serious reservations about the emerging “sisterhood” of professional writers. Page 158 →Yet her skepticism was not motivated, as in the case of Linton, by “any ridicule which may attach to it” or “the perception of the less enjoyable peculiarities of its devotees.”126 Her chief objection was

that the very articulation of a Woman Question placed undue emphasis on sex as a category of social classification: Indeed, when I seek the depths of my consciousness, I think the real mischief lay in that word “Woman.” For while that movement was, of course, intended to break down the barriers—legal, professional, educational and social—which still exist between the sexes, the inevitable pitting of one of these sexes against the other, the inevitable harping on what can or cannot, or must or must not be done, said or thought by women, because they are not men (women! women! everlastingly women!), produced a special feeling, pervading, overpowering, unendurable (like that of visiting a harem or a nunnery), due to that perpetual obtrusion of the one fact of sex, while the other fact of human nature, the universal, chaste fact represented by the word Homo as distinguished from the mere Vir and Femina, seemed for the moment lost sight of.127 In the “attempt to break down barriers,” she proposes, women’s advocates paradoxically reinforce distinctions between the sexes, transforming the female population into a kind of “harem or a nunnery” whose inhabitants are assigned a single, homogeneous experience and worldview. For Lee, as for Linton, the Woman Question constitutes merely another attempt to sequester women from the wider heterosocial community, while glossing over subtle yet important distinctions among women of different national, political, or sexual orientations. In this way, Lee’s position on the advancement of women looks ahead to recent postfeminist critiques of the designation “woman.”128 As Sally Robinson observes in Engendering the Subject (1991), “The processes by which one becomes a woman are multiple and sometimes contradictory, and the category of вЂwomen’ itself is, thus, a category marked by differences and instabilities.”129 Lee understood from personal experience how much women differed based on national, sexual, and political contingencies. While identifying as a woman, Lee bridled against being classified primarily according to biological sex, even in the interest of political or professional advancement. In the end, Lee’s analysis of Women and Economics is essentially a chronicle of her own conversion to feminism—a conversion that, curiouslyPage 159 → enough, depended upon rejecting a unilateral focus on sex and gender. By her own account, Lee was persuaded by a single sentence in Gilman’s work: “Women are over-sexed.”130 Lee’s gloss on Gilman is illuminating: “What we mean by over-sexed is that, while men are a great many things besides being males—soldiers and sailors, tinkers and tailors, and all the rest of the nursery rhyme—women are, first and foremost females, and then again females, and then—still more females.”131 Valued chiefly for their service as wives and mothers, women not only fail to develop other aspects of their identities; they also appeal to sex “instead of depending upon their intelligence, their strength, endurance, and honesty.”132 So far from seeking to reinforce the fact of biological sex, Gilman’s argument stages an objection to the very practice of social classification. Her suggestion that even the purportedly natural categories of sex might be subject to a kind of degeneration—that sex itself might be led to deviate from its natural course of development—aroused Lee’s interest in the possibility of establishing productive connections between what we now call “identity politics” and the social body.133 While Lee’s agreement with Gilman and Grand might seem unsurprising, what is striking is her manner of incorporating this argument against classification into her understanding of female critical consciousness. Although she was regularly deemed a “protean” or “unsexed” critic, gender was vital in shaping Lee’s critical method, and in her 1894 series of critical dialogues, Althea, Lee would resurrect Baldwin, this time presenting him as the mentor of a promising female critic. Like Lee’s earlier work, Althea valorizes the communicable landscape of the text. As Lee herself notes in the preface, “the ideas and tendencies distributed among my half-dozen speakers are my own ideas and tendencies, various, shifting, but never really conflicting.”134 Whereas Jameson had used the dialogue form years earlier as a way of placing herself within an already existing field of scholarship, Lee is far more concerned with demonstrating the range of positions that her critical imagination might accommodate, “so that the whole of a dialogue, the various parts united or balanced, will give the impressions, fluctuating, consecutive, but consistent, which I find in my mind, or my notebook.”135 We are reminded repeatedly that Baldwin alone does not constitute a critical authority but must be balanced, enhanced, motivated, and even corrected by the female aspirant at his side. As Lee herself puts it,

“once having learned the names, so to speak, of her instincts, the premises of her unconscious arguments, she becomes, as necessarily, the precursor of many of Baldwin’s best thoughts, the perfecter of most of them.”136 Whereas BaldwinPage 160 → was initially presented as the product of Lee’s engagements with others—in Althea she presents Baldwin as only one of the many social selves that inform Lee’s intellectual disposition. There are significant differences between Lee’s approach to critical practice in Althea and her earlier treatment of the same subject in Baldwin. Perhaps most notably, Lee’s new fictional critic, Althea, is a woman. In her shrewd biographical study of Lee, Christa Zorn has suggested that Althea represents Lee’s growing attraction to a homosocial and distinctly female hermeneutic.137 This development is especially apparent, Zorn suggests, in the dialogue “On Friendship,” where Althea’s feminine appeal to intuition and her unspoken bond with Signora Elena allow her to reverse the post-Enlightenment understanding of masculine reason and intellect as superior to instinct and feeling, both qualities traditionally assigned to women. Ultimately, Zorn suggests, “Althea (the female) transcends Baldwin (the male), thus challenging the traditional dogma in Western aesthetics which construes man as the perfecter of woman, as the beautiful soul who has no other virtue than being beautiful.”138 Certainly, Lee’s characterization of Althea challenges the presumption that she, as a female critic, must remain in the position of a pupil passively receiving the lessons of her enlightened male instructor. Curiously, however, such a reading of Althea finds recourse in precisely those binary understandings of gender that Lee seeks to elide. As Zorn notes, Baldwin’s gender is somewhat indeterminate—though physically male, his experiences and education have rendered somewhat feminine this “not very feminine man,” so that “signifier and signified are not congruent.”139 Thus, while Zorn regards Althea as signaling Lee’s movement toward a critical and social theory that depends upon homosocial and specifically feminine modes of thought, it is also important to recognize her vision of a critical methodology that resists such categories. Rather than insisting upon a critical ethos that is either feminine or homosocial, Lee attempts in this dialogue to demonstrate how a critic might manage to elide classification—moving effortlessly from one social self to another—and yet retain the social spirit that renders productive criticism possible. In other words, “On Friendship” constitutes Lee’s endeavor to theorize an anticategorical approach to the social life of criticism—one that balances the critic’s distinct subject position against the many different social selves prompted by her engagements with others. In Althea, Lee confronts and even embraces the discursive tension that characterized her own professional experience,Page 161 → imagining the possibility of a female critic who can be at once sexed and unsexed. Baldwin is an implicit object of critique in Althea, and the volume carefully enumerates the limitations of a critical methodology based entirely on a detached experience of the social world. Baldwin readily acknowledges the important role social intercourse plays in the development of the critical mind. Again building on James’s theory of the social self, he suggests that one can only truly expand one’s intellectual scope by engaging with others: Let us examine our consciousness, independent and original creatures that we are, and answer sincerely, how much it would contain had we never come in contact with others, in reality or in books? Where do I end, and you begin? Who can answer? We are not definite, distinct existences, floating in a moral and intellectual vacuum; we are for ever meeting, crossing, encroaching, living next one another, in one another, part of ourselves left behind in others, part of them become ourselves: a flux of thought, feeling, experience, aspiration, a complex, interchanging life, which is the life eternal, not of the individual, but of the race.140 But even as Baldwin celebrates the shifting and impressionistic nature of identity, he also finds that such a stance requires maintaining a discrete distance from his interlocutors. In this respect, Baldwin would seem to embrace an almost Arnoldian mode of disinterestedness. Just as Matthew Arnold had insisted that criticism thrives only “by resolutely following the law of its own nature, which is to be a free play of the mind on all subjects which it touches,” so too does Baldwin eschew affiliation with any single school or thought.141 Unfortunately, Baldwin’s insistence on critical detachment also leads him into the same error as the myopic thinkers he so often disparages. Like more polemical thinkers, he finally rejects “the notion of combining all fractions in the

common pleasure of a free disinterested play of mind,” choosing instead to remain aloof from all of them, so that his fellow human beings become as much the objects of his contemplation as the words they utter.142 It is this curious friction between the critical and the social self that has led Baldwin to become a fount of “aesthetic pessimism” who can regard a friend in the light of “mere intellectual excitement.”143 He excels in the work of analyzing purely abstract and aesthetic questions, treating his companions Page 162 →as sources of “aesthetic pleasure; pleasures apparently unconsciously unreal to himself.144 Yet, as Baldwin himself puts it, this state of affairs renders him little more than “A creature troubled with the desire to create, yet able only to criticize; consumed (which is worse) with the desire to affirm, yet condemned to deny.”145 In the end, his commitment to the “free play of ideas” paradoxically prevents him from engaging in the very important work of synthetic, sociable discourse. It was a concern that Lee shared in common with Baldwin. In 1884, she wrote: The world is overstocked with mixed natures, and one of the great wearinesses, one of the great pains of spiritual life, is the perception that we can never rest satisfied with any individual, that we must forever see faults, inconsistences [sic], must forever take exception; that we cannot give up our soul to absolute reverence, love, satisfaction. Hence the poignant desire to obtain from art what we cannot obtain from reality, to create beings whom we can understand without criticizing, without sorting good from evil; to create friends whom we can love completely.146 By the 1880s, Lee was already questioning the wisdom of relying so doggedly upon the social text as a source of critical insight. In “On Friendship,” Lee’s skepticism finds a mouthpiece in Signora Elena, who is especially intent on highlighting how Baldwin’s interest in absorbing the impressions of others has depleted his capacity for critical production. A sharp counterpoint to Baldwin’s theory of critical detachment, Signora Elena insists that true understanding becomes impossible “if we hold aloof from others, allowing them to be only subjects for duty and objects of aesthetic contemplation.”147 While she concedes that the best critic engages in the “gradual assimilation of the standards, the ideals, the potentialities even of others,” Signora Elena also notes that this impressionistic and variable mode of discourse must be tempered by sympathy.148 Her skepticism is well placed, as Baldwin himself notes. Because Baldwin remains detached from those with whom he engages, he places himself always in an adversarial relation to others, frequently indulging in the kind of monologic discourse for which Lee herself was frequently criticized.149 It is perhaps for this reason that Baldwin is demoted to a subordinate role in Althea. Having “departed this vague life of reality,” his precepts no longer stand on their own but must instead be complemented by the insights of others and more fully incorporated into the Page 163 →social life of criticism.150 In Althea, Lee thus amends her earlier claim that the most effective critic renounces any clear subject position by introducing a female critic able to elude labels without sacrificing a direct and sympathetic engagement with other thinkers. Her characterization of Althea, of course, raises an important question: how could Lee, who so fervidly resisted static categories of gender, simultaneously promote a model of criticism that seems to preserve those categories? We might speculate that Lee chose to gender Althea female because, for her readers, the desultory knowledge Lee wished to associate with the aspiring critic would have been deemed more suitable to a woman. But it is also worth noting that “Lady Althea,” despite the sequestered life that she leads, is just as apt to disrupt conventional gender categories as her friend Baldwin. Her face is “rather that of a beautiful boy than of a woman,” and Lee describes her head as “less like a woman’s, in its large placid beauty and intellectual candour, than like that of some antique youth’s in whose marble effigy we fancy we recognize one of the speakers of the Phaedo or the Euthydemus.”151 Althea is both feminine and masculine, expressive of both youthful vitality and mature reflection. Her as yet unformed identity is not so much an indication of ignorance as of her potential to imbibe, encompass, encounter, and combat the judgments of others. Consequently, Lee’s resistance to categories becomes a rewriting of the masculine woman, the New Woman, and other stereotypes often aligned with the female critic. Althea is sexually indeterminate, undeveloped, ignorant, sometimes strident, and occasionally misguided in her judgments. But in Lee’s eyes these apparent shortcomings are an unmitigated good and help to establish this female critic as both unclassifiable and as the archetype of modern critical judgment.

At the outset, Althea seems to be in many respects Baldwin’s subordinate—wide-eyed, docile, and eager to imbibe his lessons about art and life. Yet what at times appears to be simplicity or ingenuousness on Althea’s part is ultimately, for Lee, a source of critical leverage. At one point, Althea is described as “listening silently, with that quiet eagerness which had struck Baldwin years ago, but ripened now into a curious expression of power, the power of absolute ingenuousness, of complete openness of mind.”152 Althea’s curiosity does not, by this account, indicate her lack of knowledge: it is, on the contrary, a sign of her capacity to engage openly with the impressions of others in a way Baldwin himself finds unbearable. It is perhaps for this reason that Althea is so consistently compared to “one of the youths in Plato’s Dialogues.”153 Like the Page 164 →Platonic youth, Althea brings to her meetings with Baldwin a spirit of ingenuousness and intellectual sympathy. Also like the Platonic youth, Althea’s pursuit of knowledge does not emphasize the acquisition of new ideas, calling instead upon something akin to anamnesis, Plato’s theory (articulated especially in Meno and Phaedo) that learning is truly a process of rediscovering the knowledge we already possess: as Althea herself puts it, she discovers through her dialogues with Baldwin “something that must have been there always, and always understood” but never clearly articulated.154 Appearing like “Philosophy in person, descended from some fresco,” Althea elides the need to choose between self and society, using social congress as a mode of awakening her latent critical instincts, drawing strength from the social body without passively imbibing the ideas of others. In this way, we can understand her comparison to the Platonic youth not only as part of a “homoerotic code” but also as Lee’s invocation of a critic whose natural understanding is provoked through dialogue and social engagement.155 If Baldwin represents a critic who, like Lee, embraces difference and eschews social classification, Althea is a sort of critic-in-the-making whose “notions and decisions require to be disputed or explained only by natures more complex, more struggling, less fortunate than herself; to be tempered by characters better acquainted with weakness and sorrow.”156 Whereas Baldwin emerges as a fully formed critic who helps to instruct and enlighten his interlocutors, Althea has not benefited from the kind of worldly experience that has shaped Baldwin’s intellect and must be trained through social engagement to a more critical view of the world. Her pliability, as distinct from that of Baldwin, encourages a more sympathetic and productive mode of critical exchange. In this way, Althea also serves as the representative of a more democratic model of critical inquiry. In a letter to her mother, Lee observed of Althea: It is far the most important book I have so far written, and a great immeasurable advance on Baldwin. В .В .В .It is a study, on the whole, not of everybody’s duty, but of the duties of those who have spiritual conceptions and compensations, and, being freer than others from the ties of the world (desire for pleasure, prosperity, ambition, vanity) ought to act as pioneers for those far more numerous persons whom circumstances and temper render less free.157 The transition from Baldwin to Althea thus reflects a corresponding transition in Lee’s critical agenda. While her earlier volume actually dispensesPage 165 → critical judgments and represents them as the outcome of Baldwin’s willingness to absorb many different cultural perspectives, Althea proposes a far more sociable model of criticism, inviting her fellow intellectual “pioneers” to speak for those who cannot join the conversation. Figuratively, Althea is not merely a model critic but a model for how one might become a critic. In effect, Althea traces the intellectual awakening and development of a female critic and, in so doing, guides the reader through a similar awakening. As in the case of Linton, Lee’s critical ethos opened her up to accusations that she was an antisocial thinker seeking to disband rather than to promote community. John Addington Symonds described Lee as a self-involved thinker who “posed as an oracle.”158 And when Mary Ward proposed in 1893 that Lee publish “a paper to some big review, so as to get a clear identity before the public,” Lee rejected the suggestion, not wanting to “sacrifice all intellectual private life to reading up for articles.”159 Lee’s acquaintances thus seemed to vacillate between regarding her as an intellectual recluse who preferred the company of books to real social interaction, and treating her as an egocentric thinker who was so preoccupied with the spectacle of her own influence that she failed to engage in any meaningful way with her companions. Of her own work, however, Lee would insist: “This is no anti-social tirade.”160 Certainly, Althea represents

criticism as a form of sociable exchange that depends upon the sympathetic communion of equals who are able to accommodate without reifying social difference. In “The Use of the Soul,” the final dialogue in Althea, Lee explores the question of the “spiritual life”—her term for a life that balances personal reflection and social engagement. It is ultimately Althea who names and articulates a comprehensive vision of the spiritual life, though she calls upon Baldwin’s assistance to provide logical justification for what to her are self-evident truths. Baldwin does so, paying credit to Althea’s “inborn” understanding that “sympathy helped by imagination and reason, sympathy with everything living, must positively honeycomb our existence with interests.”161 The theory itself reflects Lee’s interest in bridging the gap between critical detachment and engagement with an associational network that threatened to curtail the individual’s freedom of thought. Althea seems to articulate Lee’s own desire to be a critic both aligned with and detached from a larger community of thinkers. What is perhaps most striking about this intervention, however, is Althea’s response. Suspicious of Baldwin’s influence over her, she “indignantly” retorts: “You mean that such are all the things you have taught me to assume, or Page 166 →rather to think about at all.”162 So far from seeking to claim Althea’s wisdom for himself, Baldwin is eager to demonstrate that Althea is no mere mouthpiece for his own teachings and gently insists: “Let me expound Lady Althea’s notion of spiritual life, the notion for which I may have casually furnished her with formulae, but of which she has most certainly furnished me with the example.”163 Baldwin’s rejoinder is both earnest and accurate. It is ultimately Althea who serves as the “example” of Baldwin’s critical method—not because of her “feminine” intuition (for she does apprehend much through reason and study) but because she fails to recognize any conflict between the formation of her critical judgment and a more sustained and sympathetic relation to social life. Unlike Baldwin, she is able to engage productively with others, allowing them to arouse her latent critical spirit while evading classification as an ingenuous youth, a rationalist, a dreamer, or a female critic. To this extent, Lee foretells the insights of contemporary critics like Niveditha Menon, who has noted that the feminist critic should never be forced to choose between the situated and the detached view. “By engaging in an epistemology that transcends the binaries of objectivity and subjectivity,” Menon writes, “feminists are able to embrace the idea that knowledge of social reality is marred not only by the sociopolitical context of вЂreality,’ but also by the personal concerns and commitments of the researcher involved in the knowledge production.”164 Lee’s concern for multiple, overlapping, and contingent forms of identity pointedly anticipates the twenty-first-century turn to intersectionality, an approach that takes into account the mutual complicity of gender, race, class, and other social categories in shoring up forms of cultural oppression.165 Indeed, we might liken Lee’s critical agenda to what Leslie McCall refers to as an anticategorical approach to intersectionality. According to such an approach, “Social life is considered too irreducibly complex—overflowing with multiple and fluid determinations of both subjects and structures—to make fixed categories anything but simplifying social fictions that produced inequalities in the process of producing differences.”166 Any attempt at erecting boundaries between social categories, that is to say, limits the individual’s capacity for self-reflection and is therefore a disruptive and fundamentally antisocial act. For Lee—who regarded herself as both Italian and English, masculine and feminine, insider and outsider—the true critic of literature and culture must always question the ostensibly stable networks upon which cultural institutions and traditions are based. Sociability is about far more than obtaining membership Page 167 →or legitimacy within a larger professional community—it is, by this logic, the methodological foundation for all critical work. At the time of her death, Lee was assembling another book of critical essays, entitled Sibylla. Importantly, the title of this piece calls upon a distinctly gendered model of prophecy. Like a sage, the sibyl possesses prophetic powers that allow her to rescue or even reinvent society. Yet according to Greek myth the sibyl was also an uncontrollable, effusive, and cryptic figure.167 In this spirit, the sibyl calls to mind the nineteenth-century stereotype of the female critic as an interloper from another world, speaking a very different, sometimes mystifying language. The very title of the piece conflates a common suspicion that female critics might descend into hysteria with a recognition that her utterances might, precisely owing to their transgressive nature, prove illuminating or even transformative. In the words of Heraclitus, the sibyl was a woman “with raging mouths uttering things solemn, rude, and unadorned”—transgressive perhaps, but also insightful and visionary.168 Taking this iconoclastic figure as its framing conceit, Sibylla speculates on the intellectual legacies of the

nineteenth century, as well as on the historical rupture between the Victorian past and Lee’s twentieth-century present. In a fragment titled “Wholesale Salvation,” Lee reflects on “our intelligentsia’s habit of thinking in generalities and abstractionsВ .В .В . in a categorical and sweeping way.”169 True to her earlier writings, Lee rejects the possibility of “wholesale salvation”—that is, she regards as quixotic the expectation that any social conflict can be brought to a perfect resolution. Her approach to social reform is, like her approach to social identity, aspirational, fluid, and contingent. Susan Stanford Friedman, in her piece “The Futures of Feminist Criticism,” describes the methodology of twenty-first-century feminism in terms strikingly akin to those Vernon Lee herself adopted. “It depends,” Friedman observes, “on juxtaposition and collage, associational positing of networks and linkages across continents and through time.”170 This book has not only embraced such a methodology; it has also shown that as the relationship between gender and the social life of criticism is constantly changing in response to new social theories and formations, we return again and again to the same questions. Criticism is always in the process ofВ becoming. Intellectual queries do not always generate clear answers, but the search for resolution—the work of criticism itself—sometimes gives rise to new, unexpected, and often edifying forms of Page 168 →association. As Baldwin remarks to Althea, “the spiritual communities of the future, nay, the only spiritual communities which have ever existed, are the living, fluctuating communities of thought and sympathy, of free individual belief and aspiration.”171 Although not always operating within congenial or inclusive communities of thought, the female critics explored in the preceding chapters responded to fluctuations and variations within the social life of criticism and, in so doing, helped to reveal the striking connections between critical practice and gender politics. To some extent, our critical forebears anticipated our own questions and disputes about essentialism, border-crossing, performativity, and the canon. Though they speak across a great historical distance, their insights belong to our own historical moment. The “futures of feminist criticism,” that is to say, may very well reside in the past.

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Epilogue A Society of Outsiders Feminist Criticism and Collectivity after the Nineteenth Century The story is a familiar one. Lost in reflection, Virginia Woolf wanders onto a plot of grass near the imaginary university town of Oxbridge and is stopped for trespassing: “he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me.”1 Woolf’s failed attempt to join the scholars traversing the grounds of Oxbridge underscores a habitual tension between female critics and social life. Relegated to the gravel, Woolf must confine herself to well-traveled pathways while overlooking the more promising, unexplored sites of literary production that surround her on either side. Resuming her train of thought, Woolf recalls an essay by nineteenth-century critic Charles Lamb and imagines literally “follow[ing] Lamb’s footsteps” to the library that houses his works.2 At the door to the library, she is turned away once more. A ubiquitous reference point in modern feminist theory, Woolf serves as a historical and intellectual bridge between the critics discussed in the preceding chapters and the contemporary critical landscape. Woolf’s writings reflect a desire to recuperate a discrete tradition of women’s writing, and in A Room of One’s Own (1929) she describes her determined and repeatedly thwarted attempts to construct such a tradition by perusing the catalog listings at the British Library. Yet if Woolf begins by seekingPage 170 → to identify writings by and about women, she eventually articulates a longing to transcend the categories of sex and gender, convinced that the “androgynous mind” is more “resonant and porous.”3 It is a proposition that not only recalls the anticategorical politics of Vernon Lee but also anticipates the increasingly blurry lines between masculine and feminine that have sometimes characterized the contemporary world. The example of Woolf is, I think, an instructive one. Embodying at once a desire to understand “women’s writing” and a growing suspicion of that category, Woolf’s critical writings hint at the possibility of managing the growing rifts within the wider community of feminist critics today. In the preceding chapters, I have focused especially on female critics who reflect on gender politics, occasionally highlighting some of the important connections between these incipient attempts at theorizing female critical consciousness and the work of contemporary theorists. It is therefore only natural to consider at this point how the history presented in this book might inform inquiries pursued by feminist scholars at the present moment. Did the inclusion of feminist criticism in the academy signal a watershed in gender studies or, as many scholars have suggested in recent years, its demise? Is it possible to speak of a unified community of feminist critics, or has the term, cast into uncertainty by the conflicting aims of women from different cultures and political viewpoints, lost any ideological coherence? Has the social life of criticism dissolved in the wake of poststructuralism, or has it merely assumed a different form? The following pages may not provide definitive answers to these questions. They will, however, suggest how we might begin to broach them and, adopting a recursive approach to the history of criticism, become more sensitive to the potential that resides in our own moment of discursive tension. In many ways, the university had by Woolf’s time become what the coffeehouse, coterie, and periodical cliques were to critics in the nineteenth century. It was a site of authority that might confer the stamp of intellectual legitimacy but also a space where information, connections, and conversation were to be found. It thus seems appropriate to begin this epilogue by reflecting upon how the social life of criticism was impacted by the entrance of feminist criticism into the home of today’s critics—the academy. The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed the first significant efforts to bring women into the university. In 1869, Emily Davies and Barbara Bodichon (both members of Jameson’s Langham Place circle) founded Girton College, the first university established exclusively for women, followed only a decade later by the foundingPage 171 → of Newnham College. But though women increasingly attended university in the opening decades of the twentieth

century, they were not yet treated as equal members of the academic community. Women were not permitted to take degrees at Oxford until 1920, and it was not until 1947 that they were formally admitted to Cambridge. The late 1960s is often identified as the period when women began to enter the academy in significant numbers as scholars and teachers. At this moment, in the words of Hortense Spillers, “the room of one’s own explodes its four walls to embrace the classroom, the library, and the various mechanisms of institutional and media life, including conferences, the lecture platformВ .В .В . and collections of critical essays.”4 The advent of feminist criticism in the academy promised to disperse new approaches to sex and gender to a wider audience of scholars, students, and readers. In a very real way, women would seem to have become legitimate players in the social life of criticism. For many, however, institutional sanction was not without its drawbacks. Admission to the academy, while seeming to confer legitimacy upon feminist scholarship, also raised concerns that inclusion would, in the words of Hilary Rose, “lead to cooption and political weakness” or even “ghettoization and containment.”5 In part, Rose’s remark reflects a concern that feminist criticism might be rendered guilty by association, absorbing and vindicating the patriarchal strictures it was presumably meant to undermine. It also hints at a more sinister hermeneutic: if feminist criticism were to become part of an academy steeped for centuries in patriarchal tradition, how was it to avoid being subjected to the pressures of institutional surveillance and conformity? As Ellen Mayock and Domnica Radulescu put it, “The academy, with its capital вЂA,’ ivory towers, tall columns, and aged codes of honor and civility, is both a real place and a metaphorical space that sends explicit and implicit signals about the tradition of white male privilege and hierarchy.”6 Thus, at least one question that has emerged since the appearance of feminist criticism in the academy is this: can feminist criticism retain its efficacy while housed within the walls of an institution tied to a history of gender discrimination? Some scholars have proposed that academia is intrinsically patriarchal and thus fundamentally at odds with feminist thought. Sue Jackson, for one, argues that all academic discourse is founded upon a “patriarchal base” that emphasizes hierarchy, objectivity, and epistemological certainty. Such a discursive framework, according to Jackson, denies what Luce Irigaray has called the “different conceptual realm” to which Page 172 →women belong, so that female participants in academic discourse are always compelled to use a language and conceptual framework that does not come naturally.7 Whether one espouses the historicist perspective of Mayock and Radulescu or the psycholinguistic approach of Jackson, a common concern emerges. If the feminist critic becomes part of the establishment, she runs the risk of being subjected to the discursive constraints of academic culture, while also forgoing the advantages of belonging to an oppositional culture and possibly even abandoning her orientation as feminist. One thinks again of Bessie Parkes’s contention, first invoked in chapter 2: “a subject cannot be at once popular and unpopular, rich and poor, clothed in purple and fine linen, and undergoing incessant fear of a social martyrdom.”8 Still others emphasize not the power but rather the impotence of academia as an agent of social change. The university has long been perceived as an elite community speaking to a selective audience and concerned with preserving a specialized and presumably more selective body of cultural knowledge, despite recent efforts to bring the study of popular literature and cultural media into the classroom. The epithet “ivory tower” bespeaks not merely the idealism of the university setting but also its isolation. For many, the influence of the feminist critic has been circumscribed not only by the marginalization of the university but also by the inevitable rift between those who belong to this select world and those who do not. As Jane Gallop notes, the 1980s saw a growing distance between the academic feminist, who found herself increasingly viewed as a legitimate member of the profession, and women outside of the academy, who looked on in despair as the Equal Rights Amendment was defeated.9 Ironically, then, the feminist critic in the academy came sometimes to be aligned with forms of exclusivity that once worked against her. In her essay “What Do Female Critics Want?” Sandra Gilbert writes: “we seem lately to have been left to speak more and more to one another rather than to those of you вЂout there’ whose minds we passionately want to reach.”10 Since the entrance of women into the university as professional scholars, a variety of tensions within the academy have hampered the ability of the feminist critic to speak from a position of critical distance (since she is now part of the establishment), to speak to other feminist critics (since they speak from so many different and often conflicting vantage points), or to speak to

those beyond the academy (who are not always receptive to the language of high theory). With its inclusion in the academy, then, feminist criticism has been curiously aligned with varying degrees of social isolation and atomization.11Page 173 → Some have even suggested that institutional sanction has actually helped to bring about its erasure. As Nancy Hartstock points out, the tendency to regard feminist criticism as passГ© was buttressed by a sweeping dismissal of poststructuralism within the academy. “Why is it,” she inquires, “that just at the moment when so many of us who have been silenced begin to demand the right to name ourselves, to act as subjects rather than objects of history, that just then the concept of subjecthood becomes problematic?”12 Susan Gubar takes this query a step further, asking why “sex and gender became especially contested terms during the period when an appreciable number of women finally began to earn the money that enabled them to rent or own, furnish, and decorate rooms of their own”?13 In short, thinkers from a wide variety of ideological positions have imagined contemporary feminist criticism to be insular and antisocial, or as so beset by internal strife that it can scarcely be regarded as a community at all. I want to propose that the presumption that feminist criticism has attained its purpose, was a passing theoretical “trend,” or has entered a phase of self-annihilating atomization, stems from a limited understanding of its history—from a failure to recognize its centuries-old negotiations with these very issues. It is not that feminist criticism is on the wane; as the preceding chapters have demonstrated, feminist criticism has long existed and even thrived at moments of ideological crisis. And its relationship to social institutions and networks has always perforce been a matter of dispute. If the advent of feminist criticism in the academy seems to have created something of an existential crisis within the feminist community, it is worth noting that we have been here before—that Eliza Haywood, Anna Jameson, George Eliot, Vernon Lee, and Eliza Lynn Linton found rhetorical leverage at moments of discursive uncertainty that seemed simultaneously to announce and deny their power of speech. We might think of these female critics in the same way Woolf thought of Mary Wollstonecraft: “she is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living.”14 The problem that Woolf faced in trying to articulate her own understanding of women’s writing was precisely the problem we continue to face today. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf reflects upon the difficulty with which women write about their own sex: “And again I am reminded by dipping into newspapers and novels and biographies that when a woman speaks to women she should have something very unpleasant up her sleeve. Women are hard on women. Women dislike women. Women—butPage 174 → are you not sick to death of the word? I can assure you that I am.”15 For Woolf, writing about women was difficult not merely owing to the presumption that women must always be particularly severe on members of their own sex—that they lack sociable instincts—but because the word “women” risks undermining precisely the spirit of autonomy that feminism seeks to attain. The question for modern practitioners of feminist criticism is twofold. In the first place, what is the place of feminist criticism within a much larger and ever expanding community of theoretical perspectives? Second, what is the place of the individual critic within a community of feminist critics that seems increasingly on the brink of disbanding? One of the signature shifts in feminist criticism over the last several centuries was undoubtedly the evolution of the presumably masculine “we” that dominated literary reviews in the nineteenth century to the possibility of a feminist “we” that claimed a share in the discussion. Yet that promise of a coherent community of feminist thinkers seems to have waned with a growing skepticism of “woman” as a descriptive category, a fact that has thrown countless feminist scholars into epistemological crisis. If not antisocial, feminist thought seems at least to be moving increasingly beyond the social. Seyla Benhabib puts the problem eloquently in her article “From Identity Politics to Social Feminism”: In fact, we no longer know who “we” are. Postmodernist theorists tell us that this “we,” even if only invoked as a rhetorical gesture of public speech and writing, is politically suspect, in that it tries to create a seeming community of opinion and views where there is usually none. Relishing in diversity, basking in fragmentation, enjoying the play of differences and celebrating the opacity, fracturing, and heteronomy of it all—this is a dominant mood in much of contemporary feminist

theory and practice.16

Paradoxically, the “crisis” of the feminist critical community has been wrought by the tendency of feminist criticism to develop—rapidly and in many different directions—over the last several decades. Scholars now recognize that a working-class white woman in America may not share the same understanding of sex, gender, and self as a middle-class African American woman. Even within particular identity categories, there is no guaranteeing that all women will share the same experiences, values, or aims. The result of this innovation—one that remains faithful to feminism’s roots in its recognition of difference, marginalization, Page 175 →and the multiplicity of cultural identity—is that feminism as a coherent philosophical idea has gradually faded from view. For Benhabib, there is a very real threat to even this kind of diffuse community of feminist thought. With an increasing focus on discrete racially or geographically situated feminisms, she suggests, “feminist theory is in danger of losing the forest for the trees.”17 The preceding chapters have demonstrated that the kind of fragmentation that is regarded as characteristic of feminist thought today was in fact always there. In the nineteenth century, women longing to engage in these battles did not rush onto the field under a common banner: Anna Jameson was keen on establishing professional networks for women like herself, but George Eliot was reluctant to be associated with entirely female collectivities, and Vernon Lee rejected the concept of fixed affiliations altogether. When we are confronted by the prospect of an ostensibly incoherent or even nonexistent community of feminist theorists, we might therefore remind ourselves that communities are not always founded upon shared platforms and beliefs. I am not simply suggesting that we embrace fragmentation, luxuriating in “the opacity, fracturing, and heteronomy of it all.”18 There are real concerns about the place of the feminist critic both within the academy and within a larger community of feminist thinkers. Yet these fragmentations have always existed, from the days of George Eliot, back to Mary Wollstonecraft, and doubtless long before. The mistake is in seeing differences of opinion solely as symptoms of disintegration rather than signs of movement. It is in attempting to account for these fissures that important differences and similarities begin to materialize—in other words, it is through the conversations we have about feminist methods that we forge the community that so often seems to be lacking. As bell hooks has suggested of the academic classroom, feminism does not signify a particular ideological stance so much as a methodology: Feminist education—the feminist classroom—is and should be a place where there is a sense of struggle, where there is visible acknowledgment of the union of theory and practice, where we work together as teachers and students to overcome the estrangement and alienation that have become so much the norm in the contemporary university.19 Where there is difference of opinion, there is the promise of community. We need not and should not ignore what scholars have variously delineated as the “crisis in” or “death of” feminist criticism. But we can Page 176 →confront these problems with a recognition that strife and multiplicity has constituted a crucial part of the history of the female and of the feminist critic. Building upon such a history, we might regard the feminist critical community less as a coherent movement than as a kind of association—in other words, a “mental connection between an object and ideas that have some relation to it,” whether those relations reflect compatibility, contiguity, divergence, or opposition.20 As our understanding of the origins and epistemological foundations of feminist criticism become more stereoscopic, we would do well to recognize that it is not a passing theoretical trend but rather a formative influence in the history of criticism, one that has consistently helped to shape and reshape the contours, terms, and directions of critical debate. Woolf’s ultimate aim was not to storm the library or to wander endlessly in the gravel. As she is repeatedly thwarted in her quest to unearth a tradition of women’s writing, Woolf begins to detect a connection between her own fraught excursions into the archives and the experiences of her nineteenth-century forebears. In the twentieth century, as in earlier periods, the female critic struggled to find a place among her male colleagues, and Woolf marvels at “how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the

same criticism.”21 Prohibited from either treading her own path or following that of her predecessor, Woolf is left only with a question: what exactly is a woman’s place in the world of criticism? This is the question with which this project began, and Woolf is in many ways the logical place to end it. Following on the heels of Oliphant’s “Old Saloon” and George Eliot’s virtual salon, Woolf famously proposes that “a room of one’s own” represents both the practical requirements for literary success—a regular income and freedom from domestic duties—and a recognition of professional status. Arnold Bennett reviewed Woolf’s essay for the Evening Standard (1827–present), lauding her literary skill and yet disputing her views of male authorship: “I beg to state that I have myself written long and formidable novels in bedrooms whose doors certainly had no locks, and in the full dreadful knowledge that I had not five hundred a year of my own—nor fifty.”22 Bennett makes an important point: marginalization within the world of letters was never strictly a matter of gender. But his literal interpretation of Woolf’s argument also overlooks its deeper symbolic meaning. Becoming a female critic required much more than a room of one’s own; it also required navigating a very complex politics of belonging, which is quite a Page 177 →different thing. In a way, inhabiting “a room of one’s own,” assuming the role of a professional critic, inevitably meant reaching beyond the walls of that room. It meant joining—and often reimagining——the social life of criticism. If we accept the fact that the community of feminist thinkers today is a community, albeit one bound together by difference and discord, we must also ask how such a diffuse alliance can have any real impact on broader political, social, and cultural matters. Woolf’s answer to this question comes across perhaps even more forcefully in her 1938 volume, Three Guineas, a sequence of three essays in which she considers requests for financial support she has received from three very different sources: a committee raising funds for the building of a women’s college, an organization in support of female employment, and a society to prevent war. Woolf figures the last of these institutions, the campaign to protect “intellectual liberty and culture” from the threat of fascism, as perhaps the most pressing and provoking lobby.23 While Woolf yearns to see “men and women working together for the same cause,” she cannot forget that the very culture now championing intellectual liberty had historically denied it to women.24 Indeed, the very concept of a “society” to prevent war raises for Woolf the specter of the clubs, associations, and institutions that had for so long held female aspirants at arm’s length: The very word “society” sets tolling in memory the dismal bells of a harsh music: shall not, shall not, shall not. You shall not learn; you shall not earn; you shall not own; you shall not—such was the society relationship of brother to sister for many centuries. And though it is possible, and to the optimistic credible, that in time a new society may ring a carillon of splendid harmony, and your letter heralds it, that day is far distant. Inevitably we ask ourselves, is there not something in the conglomeration of people into societies that releases what is most selfish and violent, least rational and humane in the individuals themselves? Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill- fitting form that distorts the truth; deforms the mind; fetters the will.25 Joining the global antiwar movement is, in Woolf’s view, impracticable because doing so would require that she abandon her autonomous quest for knowledge, submitting instead to a collective identity that does not necessarily collate with her own. As an alternative, Woolf recommends that women who wish to defend intellectual liberty do so by operating Page 178 →at the borderlines of such institutions. Issuing judgments from this liminal zone, the female critic can and, as we have seen, has revised critical practice in ways prohibited by institutional codes and strictures. This new society “would have no honorary treasurer, for it would need no funds. It would have no office, no committee, no secretary; it would call no meetings; it would hold no conferences. If name it must have, it could be called the Outsiders’ Society.”26 So far from imitating or subverting the rituals attached to male clubs and organizations, this society of outsiders “must be anonymous and elastic before everything” and bound together only by a shared history of exclusion and desire to develop a more progressive intellectual community.27 To this extent, Woolf’s vision of intellectual community is more akin to Matthew Arnold’s vision of a “nationally diffused” culture than to the centralized Society of Women Journalists.28 Woolf’s feminist critic goes far beyond feminist ends; though she appears to belong to

an oppositional culture that defines itself against the existing tradition of male criticism, she ultimately seeks to repair rather than to erase the dominant culture. Like Vernon Lee, Woolf views these competing intellectual arenas not as oppositional or antagonistic, but rather as complementary, collaborative, and ever subject to negotiation. In one sense, the female critics and reviewers discussed in this book might be said to constitute a kind of “Outsiders’ Society.” Like Woolf’s outsiders, they were dispersed throughout Britain, communicated across time, occasionally wrote under the shield of anonymity, and pursued very different critical agendas; they cultivated community “by the means that a different sex, a different tradition, a different education” have made available to women.29 Their methodology, like that of Woolf’s outsiders, was by nature decentralized, diverse, and experimental: Broadly speaking, the main distinction between us who are outside society and you who are inside society must be that whereas you will make use of the means provided by your position—leagues, conferences, campaigns, great names, and all such public measures as your wealth and political influence place within your reach—we, remaining outside, will experiment not with public means in public but with private means in private. Those experiments will not be merely critical but creative.30 By suggesting that women work by “private means in private,” Woolf does not align herself with the model of the solitary, deferential female critic that Jameson had worked so hard to combat; on the contrary, Woolf Page 179 →claims that those belonging to this “Outsider’s Society” are free to speak and write without the backing of centralized institutions or organizations. While women writers continued to suffer for their “unfeminine” acts of literary prowess, a growing number of them enjoyed public success in the twentieth century. According to Woolf, though, the alterity of women writers aligns them with a discourse that is not necessarily tangible or coherent, but is instead diffuse, variegated, and profoundly transformative.31 The marginalization of women in the intellectual professions has, Woolf contends, compelled them to embrace a wide range of critical strategies, combining criticism and imagination in order to revise the social fictions that threatened to silence them. Of course, the designation “outsider’s society” also risks reifying women’s exclusion from mainstream discourse at the expense of confronting the conditions that perpetuate divisions between the sexes. Woolf’s own experience as a member of the heterosocial Bloomsbury group would seem to suggest an alternative approach to this model of association.32 Unlike its predecessors, Bloomsbury was so averse to institutional consolidation that its very existence has become an open question. As Nigel Nicolson observes, the term “Bloomsbury” was used privately among members but disowned in public, a practice that reflects a reluctance to be “labeled as belonging to a single set, like a class at school, where they all had friends and careers outside that set, and often disagreed profoundly with those within it.”33 Nicolson thus figures Bloomsbury as a secret society that constantly annihilated and reinvented itself, sometimes endangered by and sometimes thriving on disagreement. Although the interpersonal dynamics of Bloomsbury were complicated and often troubling, it combined Woolf’s heterosocial ideal with the subversive spirit she invokes in Three Guineas.34 Between her lived experience and the social imaginaries posited in her writing, Woolf thus advances a new vision of intellectual collectivity, the power of which depends on the ability of each individual to connect with different intellectual factions and to transport knowledge from one circle of thinkers to the next. By this logic, the modern intellectual community might draw its power from remaining tenuous, fragmented, and shifting, continually negotiating its boundaries and redefining its scope. My aim here is not to suggest that ideological rifts can be easily overwritten or forgotten, nor is it to endorse Woolf’s society of outsiders as the one best calculated to address these divisions. But I do believe that disagreement—especially when it is deeply felt and hotly contested—can be as much a sign of sympathy as it is a sign of alienation. In The Way Page 180 →We Argue Now (2006), Amanda Anderson invites scholars to recognize the complexities and “productive tension” inherent in critical discourse, a tension that potentially makes it possible to balance the capacity for detached reflection against a sensitivity to situated identities.35 We can and should disagree with one another, but we must not see such disagreements as foreclosing the possibility of

community. If we heed the lessons of the past, we must recognize the social life of criticism as a space of discursive tension that can be generative. I think again of Virginia Woolf wandering the paths of Oxbridge. If exclusion from the world of authoritative scholarship threatened to limit Woolf’s access to the stores of learning housed there, inclusion meant subscribing to a particular set of ideological investments and possibly foreclosing the opportunity to break new intellectual ground. “I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out,” she remarks, looking through the library window, “and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.”36 The last remark reflects one of the points of discursive tension I have traced throughout this book. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, female critics were neither excluded from nor invited into the critical establishment, existing instead in a state of constant rhetorical negotiation. Today, it continues to be a dilemma. While some would claim that the feminist critic has been locked within the academy, invited into Oxbridge and subjected to the surveillance of its traditions and discursive practices, others propose that she remains decidedly outside of the academy—that she has not been fully accepted into the fold. One of the things we can learn from this history of the feminist critic is that we need not choose between these two options.37 Feminist criticism can be both robust and under assault, an enduring community and a series of different and often divisive perspectives. It is possible to be in two places at once.

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Notes Chapter 1 1. “Literary Women,” Littell’s Living Age 81.1047 (25 June 1864), 609–10. 609. 2. Candidus, “Wightwickism,” Fraser’s Magazine 22.129 (September 1840), 359–72. 361. 3. Charlotte O’Conor Eccles, “Experiences of a Woman Journalist,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 153 (June 1893), 830–38. 831. 4. Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 218. A similar concern for the material circumstances of authorship informs Catherine Gallagher’s groundbreaking work, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 5. Betty A. Schellenberg, “Beyond Feminist Literary History? Re-historicizing the Mid-EighteenthCentury Woman Writer,” Women and Literary History, ed. Katherine Binhammer and Jeanne Wood (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003), 74–91. 75. Of particular relevance in the context of this study is Joanne Shattock’s insightful analysis of journalistic networks, which she deems vital to securing literary patronage and publishing opportunities for male and female writers alike. Treating the literary network as a matter of professional survival, Shattock notes that if women were excluded from many of the male-dominated forums where professional relationships were cultivated, “networking by women writers was conducted more in public than has been recognized” (137). See Joanne Shattock, “Professional Networking, Masculine and Feminine,” Victorian Periodicals Review 44.2 (Summer 2011), 128–40. 6. Betty A. Schellenberg, The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 11. See also Margaret Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Susan Staves, A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Norma Clarke, The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters (London: Pimlico, 2004). Page 182 →7. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 42. 8. Nina Auerbach, Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 11. Earlier studies documenting stereotypes of the learned women include Deirdre David, Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987); Dorothy Mermin, Godiva’s Ride: Women of Letters in England, 1830–1880 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993; and Joan N. Burstyn, Victorian Education and the Ideal of Womanhood (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980). 9. John Dryden, “Prologue to the Conquest of Granada,” Selected Poems (New York: Penguin, 2002), 95. 10. Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 26–52. 49. 11. See especially Paul Trolander, Literary Sociability in Early Modern England: The Epistolary Record (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2014); Paul Trolander and Zeynep Tenger, Sociable Criticism in England, 1625–1725 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007); Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite, eds., Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 12. I am thinking especially of the work of scholars like Andrew Piper, who has developed several digital projects mapping such networks (including most notably “Global Currents” (http://diggingintodata.org/awards/2013/project/global-currents-cultures-literary-networks-1050-1900) and “The Sociability of Detection” (http://txtlab.org/?p=158), and of Hoyt Long and Richard So, whose project “Literary Networks: New Computational Methods in the Sociology of Culture” (https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/literarynetworks/ ) promises to offer new methodological perspectives on the digitization of intellectual communities. Margaret Beetham offers an insightful comparison of

nineteenth-century and twenty-first-century technologies of writing, with special attention to gender politics, in “Periodicals and the New Media: Women and Imagined Communities,” Women’s Studies International Forum 29.3 (May–June 2006), 231–40. 13. See, for example, Andrea Broomfield and Sally Mitchell, eds., Prose byВ Victorian Women: An AnthologyВ (New York: Garland, 1996);В Folger Collective on Early Women Critics, ed.,В Women Critics, 1660–1820: An AnthologyВ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); Margaret Beetham and Kay Boardman, eds.,В Victorian Women’s Magazines: An AnthologyВ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001); Solveig C. Robinson, ed.,В A Serious Occupation: Literary Criticism by Victorian Women WritersВ (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2003); and the collection by Susan Gubar and Sandra K. Gilbert, eds.,В Feminist Literary Theory and CriticismВ (New York: Norton, 2007). 14. See Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own: Domesticity and Desire in the Women’s Magazines, 1800–1914 (London: Routledge, 1996) and Barbara Onslow, Women of the Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000). 15. Beetham, Magazine, 20. 16. See Kathryn Shevelow, Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical (London: Routledge, 1989). 17. See also Jennifer Phegley, Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004). Phegley suggests that outlets like the Victoria Press helped Page 183 →to set a clear program of feminist education for readers and thus assisted in the consolidation of the women’s movement, noting that the material conditions of publishing largely excluded women from the work of criticism: “The demise of the serialized novel and the circulating library, which effectively ended the dominance of the family literary magazine; the increasing specialization of magazines into distinct target audiences, which further separated male and female readers; and the development of English literature as an acceptable field for academic study, which entrenched the profession of criticism as a predominantly male pursuit, worked to exclude women from mainstream literary and cultural discourse despite the gains they had made at mid-century. These changes led to the exclusion of women from the development of the literary canon as readers, authors, and critics until the late twentieth century” (197). Like Phegley, I am interested in understanding the story of the female critic as more than a straightforward narrative of progress, though my treatment of this narrative focuses more pointedly on the cultural representation of the female critic. 18. Linda Peterson, Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 103. 19. Jill Rappaport, Giving Women: Alliance and Exchange in Victorian Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 11. 20. Rappaport, Giving Women, 10. 21. Barry Wellman and S. D. Berkowitz, eds., Social Structures: A Network Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), i. 22. J. Boissevain, “Network Analysis: A Reappraisal,” Current Anthropology 20 (1979): 392-94, 393. 23. I am, of course, invoking Benedict Anderson’s theory of “imagined communities.” See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 24. Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3. 25. Augustine Birrell, William Hazlitt (London: Macmillan, 1902), 106. 26. See William Hazlitt, The Round Table: A Collection of Essays on Literature, Men, and Manners (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1817). 27. Carol Stewart, The Eighteenth-Century Novel and the Secularization of Ethics (Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), 23. 28. Brake points to the examples of the Metaphysical society (associated with the Contemporary Review), the Punch table, the Tobacco Parliament (featured in Macmillan’s Magazine), and the Fraserians to reinforce this point. See Laurel Brake, “вЂTime’s Turbulence’: Mapping Journalism Networks,” Victorian Periodicals Review 44.2 (Summer 2011), 115–27. 121.

29. Margaret Oliphant, vol. 1 of Annals of a Publishing House: Blackwood and His Sons, Their Magazine and Friends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 197. David Finkelstein provides important context for understanding Oliphant’s relationship with the Blackwood publishing firm. See David Finkelstein, The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002). 30. Oliphant, Annals, 199. 31. Mark Parker, Literary Magazines and British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 115. 32. Oliphant, Annals, 198. Page 184 →33. Margaret Oliphant to William Blackwood, 27 November 1886, Papers of William Blackwood and Sons, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. 34. Joanne Shattock and Elisabeth Jay, eds., vol. 6 of The Selected Works of Margaret Oliphant. Literary Criticism 1870–76 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), 1. 35. Solveig Robinson explores Oliphant’s “assumption of a masculine mask in her criticism” in her insightful study of Oliphant’s later criticism, “Expanding a вЂLimited Orbit’: Margaret Oliphant, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, and the Development of a Critical Voice,” Victorian Periodicals Review 38.2 (Summer 2005), 199–220. 36. Margaret Oliphant, “The Old Saloon,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 144.875 (September 1888), 419–43. 419. 37. Margaret Oliphant, “In Maga’s Library: The Old Saloon,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 141.855 (January 1887), 126–53. 126. 38. Oliphant, “In Maga’s Library,” 127. 39. Oliphant, “In Maga’s Library,” 127. 40. Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 24. 41. Klancher, English Reading Audiences, 51. 42. Klancher, English Reading Audiences, 23. 43. Klancher, English Reading Audiences, 23. 44. Laura Runge, Gender and Language in British Literary Criticism, 1660–1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 4. 45. Runge, Gender and Language, 8. 46. Margaret Oliphant, The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant (Toronto: Broadview, 2002), 31. 47. Margaret Oliphant, Autobiography and Letters, ed. Mrs. Harry Coghill (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1974), 240–41. For more on Oliphant’s work for Blackwood’s, see Joan Bellamy, “Margaret Oliphant, вЂmightier than the mightiest of her sex,’” in Women, Scholarship, and Criticism c. 1790–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 143–58; Vineta Colby and Robert A. Colby, The Equivocal Virtue: Mrs. Oliphant and the Literary Marketplace (New York: Archon Books, 1966); Elisabeth Jay, Margaret Oliphant: A Fiction to Herself. A Literary Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); and Merryn Williams, “Feminist or Antifeminist? Oliphant and the Woman Question,” Margaret Oliphant: Critical Essays on a Gentle Subversive, ed. D. J. Trela (London: Associated University Presses, 1995), 165–80. 48. Margaret Oliphant to John Blackwood, 1855, Papers of William Blackwood and Sons. 49. Solveig Robinson’s interesting account of Oliphant’s relationship with Blackwood’s in “Expanding a Limited Orbit” discusses the “Old Saloon” series and Blackwood’s charges of favoritism. 50. Margaret Oliphant, letter to William Blackwood, 9 November 1892, Papers of William Blackwood and Sons. 51. Margaret Oliphant, letter to William Blackwood, 9 November 1892, Papers of William Blackwood and Sons. 52. See Phillip Smallwood, “Problems in the Definition of Criticism,” British Journal of Aesthetics 36.3 (July 1996), 252–64. Terry Castle likewise notes that much eighteenth-century criticism by women appears in “rather more spontaneous and informal contexts,” such as private correspondence, journals, and manuscripts. See Terry Castle, “Women and Literary Criticism,” The Cambridge

History of Literary Criticism:Page 185 → The Eighteenth Century, ed. George Alexander Kennedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 434–55. 443. 53. Mark Shoenfield, British Periodicals and Romantic Identity: The “Literary Lower Empire” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 25. 54. Georg Simmel, “Sociability,” Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 127–40. 140. 55. Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de SiГЁcle (London: Virago, 1996), 9. 56. Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education: With a View of the Principles and Conduct Prevalent Among Women of Rank and Fortune (Salem: Samuel West, 1809), 141. 57. Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 3. 58. Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 56. 59. George Eliot, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” Westminster Review 66 (October 1856), 243–54. 254. Chapter 2 1. Frances Burney, The Witlings, The Complete Plays of Frances Burney: Comedies (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1995), 12. 2. Burney, The Witlings, 213. 3. Burney, The Witlings, 21. 4. John Gay and John Breval, Three Hours after Marriage: With the Confederates and the Two Keys (Painesville, Ohio: Lake Erie College Press, 1961), 7. 5. Katherine M. Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966), 180. See also Shevelow, Women and Print Culture. 6. Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, The works of the right honourable Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (London: J.F. Dove, 1825), 375. 7. Many works did, of course, celebrate the virtues of the bluestockings. Sarah Scott’s A Description of Millennium Hall (1762), for instance, depicts a fictional bluestocking circle as a utopian community in which learning, labor, and responsibility are shared equally among women whose full potential would otherwise have been suppressed by overbearing men. George Ballard’s less overtly feminist work Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain (1752) depicts the bluestockings as emblems of a powerful and more enlightened national culture. See Sarah Scott, A Description of Millennium Hall (Toronto: Broadview, 1995); George Ballard, Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1985). 8. Robert J. Allen, The Clubs of Augustan London (Hamden: Archon Books, 1967), 230. 9. John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 35; Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 3. 10. Tom Taylor, “The Clubs of London,” National Review 8 (April 1857), 295–334. 302. 11. Edward Forbes Robinson, The Early History of Coffee Houses in England (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, TrГјbner, 1893), 106. Page 186 →12. John Timbs, Clubs and Club Life in London (London: Chatto and Windus, 1908), 1. 13. JГјrgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 32. 14. Markham Ellis’s impressive anthology includes several illuminating examples of coffeehouse satires from the period: for example, A Character of Coffee and Coffee-Houses (1661), News from the Coffee-House (1667), and A Bridle for the Tongue: Or, a Curb to Evil discourse (1678). See EighteenthCentury Coffee-House Culture (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006). 15. Qtd. in Aytoun Ellis, The Penny Universities: A History of the Coffee-Houses (London: Secker and Warburg, 1956), 44.

16. Erin Skye Mackie, Market Г la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in “The Tatler” and “The Spectator” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 89. 17. See Habermas, Structural Transformation, 41–43. 18. The Case of the Coffee-Men of London and Westminster or, an Account of the Impositions and Abuses, put upon Them and the whole Town, by the present Set of News-Writers, in Markman Ellis, Coffee-House Culture, 89–130. 113. 19. Case of the Coffee-Men, 141. 20. Just a few years before The Case of the Coffee-Men, Daniel Defoe’s Review (1702–14) included a special column “Mercure Scandale: or, Advice from the Scandalous Club,” which presented the minutes of a fictional “Corporation long since established in Paris” whose chief aim was to expose the “Scandalous Mistakes, Ignorances, and Contradictions” of the press and thus induce “the Authors of Publick Intelligence, to write with somthing [sic] more caution” (Defoe 2: 15; 6: 39; 7: 43). In a sense, the Scandalous Club had already broached the coffee-men’s call for a paper issuing from the coffeehouses and committed to reforming print media. Daniel Defoe, vol. 1 of A Review of the Affairs of France and of all Europe as Influenc’d by that Nation, ed. John McVeagh (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2004). 21. Most women who frequented coffeehouses were proprietors or servants who attended gatherings “only under special circumstances and not as equals” (Markman Ellis, Coffee-House Culture, 5). These so-called coffee-women, as Brian Cowan notes, became the objects of “undue if not immodest attention” from male patrons, or were regarded as “distractions from the serious business of masculine employments” (244). In other words, the associational networks through which public discourse was fostered, transmitted, and transformed were not in reality either unrestricted or classless. Not entirely barred from these spaces of intellectual colloquy, women were not welcomed as equal participants in them either. See Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 22. Walter Graham, The Beginnings of English Literary Periodicals: A Study of Periodical Literature, 1665–1715 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1926), 15–16. 23. Memoirs of the Society of Grub Street (London: J. Wilford, 1737), 1. 24. Society of Grub Street, 1. 25. A similar approach was adopted by Edinburgh’s The Critical Club (1738), which disavowed the misanthropy of “false Criticks,” claiming instead to be “Friends to Mankind” (Letters, 6, 7). It is worth acknowledging that the Critical Club, as distinguished from its London counterparts, included two female members, both of them embodying classic eighteenth-century female stereotypes: old Lady Courtly, a precursor to the stern censor Mrs. Grundy, and her daughter, the slightly “coquettish” Miss Page 187 →Jeanie (Letters, 12). See Letters of the Critical Club, Containing Miscellaneous Observations upon Men, Manners, and Writings (Edinburgh: W. Cheyne, 1738). 26. Josiah Conder, Reviewers review’d. To which is subjoined a brief history of the periodical reviews published in England and Scotland (London: Jonathan Charles O’Reid, 1811), 4. 27. John Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: A Study of the Idiosyncratic and the Humane in Modern Literature (London: Macmillan, 1969), 23. 28. Robert J. Allen in Clubs of Augustan London provides a useful overview of periodicals that followed in this tradition, which includes the London Magazine, the Reveur, the Tribune, the Grub-street Journal, the Intelligencer, the Plain Dealer, the Guardian, the Theatre, the Lover, and Gray’s-Inn Journal. For a more extensive discussion of the early English periodical, also see Graham, English Literary Periodicals. 29. The Mirror, vol. 1 (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1809), 1. 30. The Mirror, 259. 31. The Lounger, vol. 1 (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1804), 280–81. 32. Bessie Rayner Parkes, “On the Adoption of Professional Life by Women,” Englishwoman’s Journal 2.7 (September 1859), 1–10. 3. 33. For an especially engaging analysis of the masculine public sphere, see Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). 34. Amanda Vickery, introduction, Women, Privilege, and Power: British Politics, 1750 to the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 1–56. 3.

35. Lawrence Klein and Dena Goodman have offered two of the most influential statements challenging the division between the public and private sphere. See Lawrence E. Klein, “Gender and the Public/Private Distinction in the Eighteenth Century: Some Questions about Evidence and Analytic Procedure,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29.1 (1995), 97–109; Dena Goodman, “Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime,” History and Theory 31 (1992), 1–20. 36. Moyra Haslett, Pope to Burney, 1714–1779: Scriblerians to Bluestockings (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), 159. 37. Haslett, Pope to Burney, 159. 38. See, for example, Robert W. Jones, Gender and the Formation of Taste in Eighteenth-Century Britain: The Analysis of Beauty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); E. J. Clery, The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England: Literature, Commerce and Luxury (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004); and John Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse: Sensibility and Community in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1987). 39. See Dror Wahrman, “Percy’s Prologue: From Gender Play to Gender Panic in EighteenthCentury England,” Past and Present 159 (May 1998), 113–60. 40. Noteworthy feminist challenges to Habermas appear in Women, Writing, and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830, ed. Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, ClГ-ona Г“ Gallchoir, and Penny Warburton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). See also Women and the Public Sphere: A Critique of Sociology and Politics, ed. Janet Siltanen and Michelle Stanworth (London: Hutchinson, 1989). 41. Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 1: 49, 99. 42. David Hume, “Of Essay Writing,” Selected Essays, ed. Stephen Copley and Andrew Edgar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1–4. Page 188 →43. Hume, “Of Essay Writing,” 3. 44. Jones, Gender, 117. 45. For more on the treatment of female judgment in eighteenth-century conduct books, see Ellen MesserDavidow, “вЂFor Softness She’: Gender Ideology and Aesthetics in Eighteenth-Century England, ” Eighteenth-Century Women and the Arts, ed. Frederick M. Keener and Susan E. Lorsch (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 45–55. 46. Steele, Spectator, 10: 1, 46. 47. Markham Ellis, “Coffee-Women, The Spectator and the Public Sphere in the Early Eighteenth Century,” in Eger et al., Women, 27–52. 30. 48. Markham Ellis, Coffee-House Culture, 75. 49. Legal limitations—women’s lack of direct control over their finances and inability to act as autonomous legal subjects—posed practical impediments to participation in metropolitan club life, which typically entailed paying subscriptions and lending a hand in the club’s financial and legal governance. See especially Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 194–233. 50. Not surprisingly, one policy the periodical clubs shared in common with real social formations was the marginalization of women. Female and heterosocial assemblies certainly existed in the eighteenth century, but they were less common, often restricted to traditionally feminine diversions (such as philanthropy or music), and typically regulated by men. While women were not categorically banned from such spaces, as Steven Pinkus and Helen Berry have noted, they did not usually participate in the same way as their male counterparts.В So far from taking an equal share in the intellectual life of the coffeehouse, women were often regarded as unwelcome interruptions in an otherwise masculine space, and the roles they did fill only served to reinforce a tacit prohibition against admitting women among the official ranks of clubbable gentlemen.В See Steven Pinkus, “вЂCoffee Politicians Does Create’: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture,” Journal of Modern HistoryВ 67.4 (December 1995), 807–34; Helen Berry, “Rethinking Politeness in Eighteenth-Century England: Moll King’s Coffeehouse and the Significance of вЂFlash Talk,’” Transactions of the Royal Historical SocietyВ 11 (2001), 65–81. 51. Women who participated in public gatherings were anything but unaware of the censure their behavior threatened to arouse.В The group of women who founded the “Fair Intellectual-Club” in 1720 seem

to have been especially self-conscious about their public image. In an account published that year, presumably at the request of a gentleman belonging to the Athenian Society, the secretary takes special pains to stress the assembly’s commitment to sound reason, well-regulated conversation, and a “Constitution” designed to preserve the kind of order generally thought to be lacking in female assemblies. In the words of the club’s president, they wanted to “give no just Occasion to othersВ .В .В . to censure or ridicule” (An Account,В 14). The history of the club is related with an attention to setting and following rules, as well as palpable anxiety about how their male counterparts at the Athenian Society are likely to respond. It is for this reason that the president insists that they “read proper Books” to assist their course of improvement: “How else,” she remarks, “shall weВ .В .В . refute these scandalous Aspersions cast upon our Sex, that we are made up of Pride, Affectation, Inconstancy, Falshood [sic], Treachery, Tyranny, Lust, Ambition, Wantonness, Levity, Disguise, Coquetry, and the like ill Things, so often in the Mouths and Writings of Men?” (An Account, В 17–18). See An Account of the Fair Intellectual-Club in Edinburgh: in a Letter to a Honourable Member of an Athenian Society there. By a young Lady, the Secretary of the Club (Edinburgh: J. McEuen, 1720). Page 189 →52. The New Art and Mystery of Gossiping. Being a genuine Account of all the Women’s Clubs in and about the City and Suburbs of London, with the Manner of their Club Orders (London: 1760), 10. 53. Arthur Murphy’s “Proposal for a Female Coffee-House” (1756) inВ The Gray’s Inn JournalВ betrays a similar anxiety, though here the threat of female community is suggestively conflated with a critique of male sociability. The fictive editor of the journal, Mr. Ranger, finds himself in conversation with two accomplished young ladies, one of whom, Harriet, contends that the male coffeehouses are inherently antisocial: “It’s a vexatious Thing to see how these Men are always contriving Places for their own Accommodation, without Troubling their Heads about the Women. The odious Things are always herding with one another, and the Ladies are sequestred [sic] from all the Joys of these convenient Meetings” (Murphy, 231). In one sense, Harriet’s fantasy of a female coffeehouse reflects her desire for the freedom from social constraint that a homosocial community might afford. As tempting as it might be to regard Harriet as a proto-feminist figure, however, Murphy’s account ultimately does not condone such a reading. Mr. Ranger is finally unwilling to defend Harriet’s proposal. With biting sarcasm, he proposes a “System of Rules” that should be adopted by all female assemblies (Murphy, 232). Among the guidelines Ranger provides are stipulations that they “shall not fall to pulling caps in Company, but take another Opportunity to vindicate their Honour” and that “a single white ball should be sufficient” to admit any young woman because it is “improbable that a real Beauty will obtain that Favour from any one of her Sex” (Murphy, 232). Once again, female community is imagined to be a site of disorder because women are by nature incapable of forging bonds of intimacy. Envisioning a space where a woman may gamble, drink to excess, and “brag of her Intrigues, her Amours, and her Designs with any young Man,” Ranger only reinforces the presumption that female assemblies breed social chaos (Murphy, 232). See Arthur Murphy, “Proposal for a Female CoffeeHouse,” in Markman Ellis, Coffee-House Culture, 229–34. 54. Sarah Fielding, The Adventures of David Simple (New York: Penguin, 2002), 73, 75. A parallel account appears in Spectator 217, which describes a “Club of She-Romps.” These ladies “are no sooner come together than we throw off all that Modesty and Reservedness with which our Sex are obliged to disguise themselves in publick Places” (Spectator 217, 145). From this point on, the account becomes overtly sexualized: “I am not able to express the Pleasure we enjoy from ten at Night till four in the Morning, in being as rude as you Men can be, for your Lives. As our Play runs high the Room is immediately filled with broken Fans, torn Petticoats, Lappets of Head-dresses, Flounces, Furbelows, Garters, and Working-Aprons. I had forgot to tell you at first that besides the Coaches we come in our selves, there is one which stands always empty to carry off our dead Men, for so we call all those Fragments and Tatters with which the Room is strewed, and which we pack up together in Bundles, and put into the aforesaid Coach” (Spectator 217, 145). Once behind closed doors, the She-Romps disrobe, a signal that they have shed the social customs and virtues demanded of women in “publick Places.” As the room becomes strewn with the ravished symbols of femininity, Club-Night becomes an opportunity for the women to vacate assigned gender roles, leaving behind only a trail of “dead Men.” Shedding the

trappings of femininity, they become a violent, uncontainable, and potentially contagious threat to normative gender roles and express a wicked desire to extend their influence beyond the walls of the club: every month the women gather together to “Demolish a Prude, that is, we get some queer formal Creature in among us, and unrig her in an Page 190 →instant” (Spectator 217, 145). Having adopted the masculine practice of clubbing as their own, the only form of sociability the women can practice is one that is conspicuously unsociable and promises quite literally to dismantle feminine virtue. 55. Fielding, 75. 56. “I have been this three Years perswading Sagissa to leave it off,” the fictional editor Isaac Bickerstaff reflects, “but she talks so much, and is so learned, that she is above Contradiction” (Tatler 1.35, 257). Sagissa’s obstinacy on the issue ultimately proves to be a social liability. While entertaining guests in her drawing room, Sagissa sneaks into her closet to receive a kiss from her “eager Gallant”: “being unused to Snuff, some Grains from off her upper Lip made him sneeze aloud, which alarm’d the Visitants, and has made a Discovery, that profound Reading, very much Intelligence, and a general Knowledge of who and who’s together, cannot fill up her vacant Hours so much, but that she is sometimes oblig’d to descend to Entertainments less intellectual.” Richard Steele, The Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 1.35, 257. In the case of Sagissa, the adoption of purportedly male habits—reading, snuff, and sexual conquest—are mutually complicit in the defacement of her femininity and signal her abdication of her proper role as hostess. 57. Tom Taylor, “The Clubs of London,” 304. 58. Steele, The Tatler, 3.29, 218. 59. Steele, The Tatler, 1.1, 15. 60. Shevelow, Women and Print Culture, 24. 61. Steele, Tatler, 1.37, 267. 62. Steele, Tatler, 1.37, 267–68. 63. Steele, Tatler, 1.10, 89. 64. Steele, Tatler, 1.10, 87. 65. Steele, Tatler, 1.75, 515. 66. Steele, Tatler, 1.75, 515. 67. Clery, Feminization Debate, 82. 68. Steele, Tatler, 1.10, 87. 69. Steele, Tatler, 1.33, 243. 70. Steele, Tatler, 1.10, 90. 71. Steele, Tatler, 1.10, 90. 72. Steele, Tatler, 1.10, 91. 73. Steele, Tatler, 1.10, 91, my translation. The original passage reads: “Creticum et critique sont deux mots assez approchans pour tromper une Femme qui n’entend pas le Latin.” 74. Steele, Tatler, 1.10, 89. 75. See Alison Adburgham, Women in Print: Writing Women and Women’s Magazines from the Restoration to the Accession of Victoria (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1972). 76. Eve Tavor Bannet argues that Addison and Steele “shared a similar patriarchal view of the duties вЂbecoming’ to women” and helped to reinforce “its predominant portrayal of women as flirts, jilts, henpeckers, and animals that delight вЂin Finery’” (84). See Eve Tavor Bannet, “Haywood’s Spectator and the Female World,” Fair Philosopher: Eliza Haywood and “The Female Spectator”, ed. Lynn Marie Wright and Donald J. Newman (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006), 82–101. 77. Richard Steele, The Guardian 1.155 (8 September 1713), 504–6. 506. 78. Steele, Guardian, 505. 79. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 2. 80. Mary de la RiviГЁre Manley, The Female Tatler, ed. Fidelis Morgan (London: J. M. Page 191 →Dent and Sons, 1992), 1. Though most scholars agree that Mary de la RiviГЁre Manley authored the initial issues, for the purposes of this argument the sex of the author is ultimately less significant than how the text represents the female critic and her relationship to the periodical club tradition. As Erin Skye Mackie, Ionia Italia, and others point out, the Female Tatler may have been produced by many different hands. A

compelling case has been made that Manley and Thomas Baker collaborated on the paper, though others have proposed Bernard Mandeville and Susannah Centlivre as possible contributors. Italia provides an especially comprehensive account of the authorship of the Female Tatler in The Rise of Literary Journalist in the Eighteenth Century: Anxious Employment (London: Routledge, 2005). See also Paul Bunyan Anderson, “The History and Authorship of Mrs. Crackenthorpe’s вЂFemale Tatler,’” Modern Philology 28 (1930–31), 354–60. 81. Manley, The Female Tatler, 96. 82. Manley, The Female Tatler, 9. 83. Manley, The Female Tatler, 1. 84. Manley, The Female Tatler, 25. 85. Manley, The Female Tatler, 25. 86. Manley, The Female Tatler, 25. 87. Manley, The Female Tatler, 25. 88. Manley, The Female Tatler, 5. 89. Manley, The Female Tatler, 5. 90. Manley, The Female Tatler, 5. 91. Manley, The Female Tatler, 5. 92. Manley, The Female Tatler, 117. 93. Manley, The Female Tatler, 82. 94. Manley, The Female Tatler, 191. A notable point of contrast to this society of ladies is Mary Astell’s vision of an exclusively female society in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694). Astell argued vociferously for the intellectual equality of men and women, claiming a hearing despite the fact that “some morose Gentlemen wou’d perhaps remit me to the Distaff or the Kitchin, or at least to the Glass and the Needle, the proper Employments as they fancy of a Woman’s Life” (Letters, 69). For Astell, it was precisely the distractions of the “Distaff or the Kitchin,” the “Tyranny of Custom, ” and the demands of heterosocial culture that had so long hindered women from pursuing their own spiritual and intellectual improvement. See Mary Astell, Letters Concerning the Love of God, ed. E. Derek Taylor and Melvyn New (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). 95. Steele, Spectator, 1.1, 5. 96. Steele, Spectator, 1.1, 5. 97. See Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance. 98. Steele, Spectator, 1.1, 4. 99. Donald J. Newman, ed., “The Spectator”: Emerging Discourses (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 26. 100 Paul Trolander and Zeynep Tenger, “Addison and the Personality of the Critic,” in Newman, The Spectator, 175–99. 189. 101. Margaret Rose, Political Satire and Reforming Vision in Eliza Haywood’s Works (Milan: Europrint, 1996), 14. 102. Eliza Haywood, The Female Spectator (London: T. Gardner, 1795), 3. 103. Haywood, The Female Spectator, 4. 104. Haywood, The Female Spectator, 5. 105. Haywood, The Female Spectator, 5. Page 192 →106. Steele, Spectator, 1.7, 8. 107. Juliette Merritt, Beyond Spectacle: Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectators (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 102. 108. Scholars disagree in their assessments of Joseph Addison’s attitude toward learned women. While some have suggested that Addison “encouraged the idea that learning should be sociable and accessible to both sexes,” Kathryn Shevelow proposes that both Addison and Steele embraced a gendered hierarchy of knowledge and regarded “the feminine вЂWorld’ as needing the intervention” of the male periodical (Eger et al., Women, 6; Shevelow, Women and Print Culture, 134). 109. Shawn Lisa Maurer goes so far as to suggest that the exclusion of women allowed for the ostensibly ideal relations among men we see in the Spectator: “The supposedly nonpartisan, apolitical stance of both the Spectator Club and the periodical itself depended upon women’s exclusion both from the club

and from the realm of politics, thus configuring women as the common enemy against whom and in the name of whom men of conflicting interests could unite” (119). See Shawn Lisa Maurer, Proposing Men: Dialectics of Gender and Class in the Eighteenth-Century English Periodical (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). My own position is that the gender politics of the Spectator are less clearly black and white, though Maurer’s study is noteworthy and impressive in its attention to the important role masculinity played in eighteenth-century periodical culture. 110. Haywood, The Female Spectator, 2. 111. Haywood, The Female Spectator, 8. 112. Haywood, The Female Spectator, 79. 113. Haywood, The Female Spectator, 79. 114. Haywood, The Female Spectator, 121. 115. Haywood, The Female Spectator, 117. 116. Certainly, it is possible that Haywood fabricated this letter in order to establish a platform for combating precisely those female stereotypes she wished to critique. Regrettably, the authorship of this letter remains unverified. Regardless of how we attribute the letter’s authorship, however, its rhetorical interest and importance is indisputable. If Haywood invented the contributor, then it stands as an extraordinary instance of the ways male and female critics leveraged gender as a way of justifying critical judgment. If the letter was written by an actual reader of the Female Spectator, the letter provided Haywood with precisely the foil she needed in order to circumscribe her authority as a female critic before the public. 117. Haywood, The Female Spectator, 259. 118. Haywood, The Female Spectator, 259. 119. Steele, Tatler, 2.85, 38. 120. Tedra Osell, “Tatling Women in the Public Sphere: Rhetorical Femininity and the English Essay Periodical,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 38.2 (2005), 283–300. 285. 121. Eliza Thompson, Retaliation; or, The Reviewers Review’d. A Satirical Poem by a Lady (London: Printed for the author, 1791), 12, i. 122. Thompson, Retaliation, 13. 123. Thompson, Retaliation, 13. 124. Thompson, Retaliation, 13. 125. Michel Foucault, “The Order of Discourse,” Untying the Text: A Poststructuralist Reader, ed. R. Young (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), 52–64. 54. Page 193 → Chapter 3 1. “The Spirit of the Age,” in vol. 4 of The Collected Works of William Hazlitt (London: J.M. Dent, 1901), 185–368. 310–11. 2. See, for instance, Andrew M. Stauffer, Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Kevin Gilmartin acknowledges this revolutionary spirit, while also noting that a counterrevolutionary impulse can be traced through a range of print media from the period. See Kevin Gilmartin, Writing against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 3. William Maginn, preface, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 19 (1826), i–xxx. xxii. 4. As Mary Poovey has demonstrated, ethical tracts representing the “proper lady” as naturally modest, diffident, and emotionally responsive also implied by their very existence “that feminine virtues needed constant cultivation” through education, supervision, and the dispensations of male gallantry. Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 15. 5. “Gallery of Literary Characters. No. XLI: Miss Landon,” Fraser’s Magazine (October 1833), 433. A similar remark emerges in the Philomathic Journal (1824-26), which in a review of C. G. Garnett’s Night Before the Bridal: A Spanish Tale (1823) treats Landon as an exception among women

writers, inspiring (but not quite managing to sustain) the reviewer’s gallantry: “We are admirers of L.E.L. and the question restored us instantly to our usual good humor: and we promised ourselves, for her sweet sake, to lay aside all unmanly fears of female writers and female reviewers, and bodily stand forward in behalf of their equality in the вЂrepublic of letters,’ to the perfect formation of which their essay and feminine grace is as needful as the bolder flight and sterner majesty of lofty man.” “Reviews,” Philomathic Journal (1825), 407–28. 419. 6. As David Higgins notes, Hazlitt’s essays on the “spirit of the age” for the New Monthly Magazine “constitute just one possible view of the cultural firmament in the mid-1820s,” omitting female writers who were “considerably better-known than some of the male authors whom he includes. Although most critics of the period would not have denied the existence ofВ вЂfemale genius’ quite so strongly, it was often argued or assumed that whatever genius women had was limited to sentimental works about love:В вЂmistress-pieces’ (also a pun on вЂmasterpiece,’ of course). MoreВ вЂliberal’ voices tended to allow female genius a greater range and women in general a greater capacity for education without, of course, necessarily suggesting that women could be active citizens in the same way as men.” David Higgins, Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine: Biography, Celebrity and Politics (London: Routledge, 2005), 68. 7. Stephen Behrendt has observed that professional reviewers from the eighteenth century on “tended to follow one or another of two distinctive tacks—outright renunciation or manipulative flattery—when they did not ignore women’s writing entirely.” Stephen Behrendt, “Remapping the Landscape: The Romantic Literary Community Revisited,” in Comparative Romanticisms: Power, Gender, Subjectivity, ed. Larry H. Peer and Diane Long Hoeveler (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1998), 11–32. 31. 8. In “A Criticism of Their Own,” Anne K. Mellor situates female critics like Joanna Baillie, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Anna Seward, and others as the purveyors of a distinctPage 194 → Romantic tradition—a “feminine Romanticism” that regarded the self as constituted through interaction within a larger familial or social community.В I depart from this approach by considering how female critics like Jameson were often interested in erasing such distinctions. See Anne K. Mellor, “A Criticism of Their Own:В Romantic Women Literary Critics,” in Questioning Romanticism, ed. John Beer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 29–48;В see also Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (London: Routledge, 1993). 9. Jon Mee, Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community, 1762 to 1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3. 10. In this respect, I concur with those scholars who have attempted to replace a focus on the solitary Romantic poet with an appreciation for romanticism’s dialogic ethos. See, for instance, Don H. Bialostosky, Wordsworth, Dialogics, and the Practice of Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Michael Steven Macovski, Dialogue and Literature: Apostrophe, Auditors, and the Collapse of Romantic Discourse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 11. Susan Wolfson, Romantic Interactions: Social Being and the Turns of Literary Action (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 1. 12. Stephen Behrendt, British Women Poets and the Romantic Writing Community (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 4. 13. Several years earlier, William Cook’s poem for the Scots Magazine made this link explicit: “What books we read, though read with critic zeal, / ’Tis Conversation stamps the п¬Ѓnal seal; / Marks what’s original, and what is known, / And adds another’s strictures to our own.” See William Cook, Conversation: a didactic poem (London: R. Edwards, 1796), 43. 14. John Lockhart, in vol. 5 of The Life of Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, 1902), 297. 15. Qtd. in Lord Henry Cockburn, The Life of Lord Jeffrey: With a Selection from his Correspondence (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1857), 124. 16. Mee, 3. 17. Oliphant, Annals, 96. 18. Lord George Gordon Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (New York: Charles B. Richardson, 1865), 70. For a more extensive discussion of Byron’s role in this debate, see Michael P. Steier, “Transgressing the Borders of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,” Studies in Romanticism 47.1

(Spring 2008), 37–52. 19. Oliphant, Annals, 96. 20. Qtd. in Samuel Smiles, A Publisher and his Friends: Memoir and Correspondence of the Late John Murray (London: John Murray, 1891), 110. In the case of Scott, the martial spirit of the reviews was made literal when he was famously killed in a duel with Jonathan Henry Christie of Blackwood’s. 21. Qtd. in Smiles, Publisher, 110. 22. James Grant, The Great Metropolis (London: Saunders and Otley, 1838), 291. 23. “Monthly Commentary—The Social Use of Magazines,” New Monthly MagazineВ 35 (Nov. 1832),В 472. 24. “Monthly Commentary,” 472. 25. “The Election of Editor for Fraser’s Magazine (cont.)” [Part 2], Fraser’s Magazine 1.6 (July 1830), 738–57. 740. 26. “The Election of Editor for Fraser’s Magazine (cont.)” [Part 3], Fraser’s Magazine 2.8 (September 1830): 238–50. 250, 242. 27. “The Election of Editor for Fraser’s Magazine. From Mr. Gurney’s short-hand Page 195 →notes, corrected by Mr. Alexander Fraser, of Thavies Inn” [Part 1], Fraser’s Magazine 1.4 (May 1830), 496–508. 496. 28. Maria Edgeworth, Letters for Literary Ladies (Harlow: B. Flower, 1805), 6. 29. Edgeworth, Letters for Literary Ladies, 7. 30. More, Strictures, 368. More was also a practitioner of the dialogue form in Village Politics (1793), though the text contributes little to our understanding of the female critic in particular. It is worth noting that, despite More’s suggestion that women were not by nature suited for critical work, her own experience and advocacy on behalf of learned women seems to contradict this claim. Still, her reluctance to align “critical spirit” with femininity illustrates her participation in a prevalent discourse at the time that deemed women to be more emotional than rational, more sentimental than critical. 31. Russell and Tuite, Romantic Sociability, 19. 32. “Regina’s Maids of Honour: List the First,” Fraser’s Magazine 13.73 (January 1834), 80–81. 80. 33. “Regina’s Maids,” 80. 34. See Peterson, Woman of Letters. 35. “Regina’s Maids,” 80. 36. “Regina’s Maids,” 80. 37. John Wilson Croker, “France,” Quarterly Review 17.33 (April 1817), 260–86. 260. Croker published several acerbic reviews of Morgan’s work in the Quarterly Review, and Fraser’s itself had published devastating critiques of her work, including the 1833 article “Lady Morgan’s Dramatic Scenes,” in which she is branded “an astonishing bore” who is “passed off as a mighty genius.” See John Wilson Croker, “Lady Morgan’s Dramatic Scenes,” Fraser’s Magazine 8.47 (November 1833), 613–20. 617. 38. Croker, “France,” 263. 39. Lady Sydney Morgan, vol. 4 of Florence Macarthy (London: Colbourn, 1819), 37. 40. Morgan, Florence Macarthy, 38. 41. Morgan, Florence Macarthy, 146. 42. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria, ed. Eileen Hunt Botting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 145. 43. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 145. If men erred in performing a false humility before the fairer sex, Wollstonecraft likewise objected to women’s practice of humbling themselves and their sex before the public. She advised Mary Hays, a regular reviewer for the Analytical Review, to avoid performing deference in her correspondence with publisher Joseph Johnson: “You must be aware, Madam, that the honour of publishing, the phrase on which you have laid a stress, is the cant of both trade and sex: for if really equality should ever take place in society the man who is employed and gives a just equivalent for the money he receives will not behave with the servile obsequiousness of a servant” (Collected Letters, 209). Wollstonecraft goes on to criticize Hays’s preface to her Letters and Essays (1793) for its “vain humility,” noting that “if you have not a tolerably good opinion of your own production, why intrude

it on the public? We have plenty of bad books already, that have just gasped for breath and died” (Collected Letters, 210). For Wollstonecraft, then, female critics who permit gallantry to authorize their literary productions run the risk of undermining the real intellectual value of their work. The most important precept of any author, “especially a woman,” is to rest on her own laurels and to pay little heed to “the crude praises Page 196 →which partial friend and polite acquaintance bestow thoughtlessly when the supplicating eye looks for them” (Collected Letters, 211). She must, in short, speak forth her ideas plainly, looking to herself rather than to “Dr. this or that” for her authority, presenting her ideas instead as open to debate and honest criticism (Collected Letters, 211).В See Mary Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). See also Mary A. Waters, “вЂThe First of a New Genus’: Mary Wollstonecraft as a Literary Critic and Mentor to Mary Hays,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 37.3 (Spring 2004), 415–34. 44. Laura Runge, “Beauty and Gallantry: A Model of Polite Conversation Revisited,” EighteenthCentury Life 25 (Winter 2001), 43–63. 51. 45. Runge, “Beauty and Gallantry,” 44, 52. 46. “If love have made some women wretched,” Wollstonecraft concludes, “how many more has the cold unmeaning intercourse of gallantry rendered vain and useless!” Anna Jameson’s special interest in Mary Wollstonecraft has been documented in Adele M. Ernstrom’s article “The Afterlife of Mary Wollstonecraft and Anna Jameson’s Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada,” Women’s Writing 4.2 (1997), 277–97. 47. Ainslie Robinson provides an illuminating reception history of Jameson’s work in “Stalking through the Literary World: Anna Jameson and the Periodical Press, 1826–1860,” Victorian Periodicals Review 33.2 (Summer 2000), 165–77. 48. For a discussion of Jameson’s approach to collective biography, see Alison Booth, “The Lessons of the Medusa: Anna Jameson and Collective Biographies of Women,” Victorian Studies 42.2 (2000), 257–88; Alison Booth, How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 49. Anna Jameson, “Letter to Lord John Russell,” in Sisters of Charity and the Communion of Labour (London: Longman, Brown Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1859), x–lii. xxiv–xxv. 50. Jameson, “Letter,” xxv. 51. Anna Jameson, Diary of an EnnuyГ©e (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1875), 164. 52. Jameson was not alone in adopting the dialogue form. Although Jameson’s work is unique in its engagement with criticism and gender, noteworthy precursors include Anna Letitia Barbauld’s “Dialogue in the Shades” (1773), Catharine Macaulay’s Letters on Education (1790), Hannah More’s Village Politics (1793), and Maria Edgeworth’s Cottage Dialogues (1811), to mention only a few. 53. Jameson, “Letter,” xxiv. 54. It is worth noting that Jameson’s career, by her own account, seems to have been motivated both by inclination and by necessity. She had assumed the instruction of her siblings when still a child, began serving as a governess at sixteen, and imparted a large portion of her literary earnings to her family, especially after her father’s death in 1842. Geraldine Macpherson, Jameson’s niece and biographer, describes how a twelve-year-old Jameson convinced her sisters to accompany her to Brussels to learn lace-making and thereby supplement her father’s income. The plan was foiled by the younger children, but forecasted more far-reaching acts of valor from the child whom Margaret Oliphant would later call an “ideal little heroine” (“Lives,” 216). In A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies (1854), Jameson herself casts this early sense of filial duty in conspicuously romantic terms: “I have a remembrance that I was always a princess-heroine in the disguise of a knight, a sort of Clorinda or Britomart,Page 197 → going about to redress the wrongs of the poor, fight giants, and kill dragons; or founding a society in some far-off solitude or desolate island, which would have rivaled that of Gonsalez, where there were to be no tears, no tasks, and no laws,—except those which I made myself, —no caged birds nor tormented kittens” (Commonplace Book, 135). When Jameson figures herself as a romantic heroine “in the disguise of a knight,” she thus points to a defining predicament of her literary career: she could only fulfill her feminine duties to home and family by engaging in what she describes as explicitly masculine acts of heroism. See Margaret Oliphant, “The Lives of Two Ladies,

” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 91.558 (April 1862), 401–23; Geraldine Macpherson and Margaret Oliphant, Memoirs of the Life of Anna Jameson (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1878); Anna Jameson, A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1855). 55. Booth, How to Make It, 177. 56. One member, Emily Faithfull, founded Victoria Press in 1860, thus expanding women’s role in the printing industry, which had traditionally excluded them on the grounds that physical labor and business cunning were beyond the capacity of most women. As Faithfull recalls in Three Visits to America (1884), she and her workers encountered fierce opposition from their male competitors: “Tricks of a most unwomanly nature were resorted to, their frames and stools were covered with ink, to destroy their dresses unawares, the letters were mixed up in their boxes.В .В .В . The men who were induced to come into the office to work the presses and teach the girls, had to assume false names to avoid detection, as the printers’ union forbade their aiding the obnoxious scheme” (Ratcliffe, 35). The assumption of pseudonyms on the part of these male sympathizers serves as an ironic counterpart to the pseudonyms assumed by so many Victorian women writers: if women were driven into anonymity by biases against female laborers, their supporters were driven into silent community with them. Despite these obstacles and owing in part to their male supporters, the Victoria Press was successful, and Faithfull was named “Printer and Publisher in Ordinary to Her Majesty” in 1862. In later years, she would found Victoria Magazine (1863–80), Work and Women (1865–76), the West London Express (1877–78), and the Women’s Printing Society. Faithfull’s ventures thus provided a successful role model for women seeking to enter the field, publishing essays in support of women’s labor, and transforming Jameson’s intimate circle into a growing network of women writers. See Eric Ratcliffe, The Caxton of Her Age: The Career and Family Background of Emily Faithfull (1835–95) (Upton: Images Publishing, 1993). 57. Anna Jameson, “Sketches from the Road,” London Magazine 3.16 (April 1821), 395–404. 395. 58. Jameson, “Sketches from the Road,” 395. 59. Judith Johnston notes that Jameson adopts a “general tone of sexual banter” in the 1826 series, which is largely eliminated in subsequent revisions of the work: “In adopting this tone for the periodical articles she constructs herself as a male essayist, a definitively knowing male, a voyeur, a вЂman of the world.’” Judith Johnston, Anna Jameson: Victorian, Feminist, Woman of Letters (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997), 23. 60. Valerie Raoul, for instance, notes that “the original non-public, non-literary nature of the вЂgenuine’ diary is the first feature which made it a form of writing considered appropriate for women” (58), while Rebecca Hogan highlights the diary’s attention to everyday, often domestic, and therefore feminized minutiae (96). Valerie Raoul, “Women and Diaries: Gender and Genre,” Mosaic 22.3 (Summer 1989), 57–65;Page 198 → Rebecca Hogan, “Engendered Autobiographies: The Diary as a Feminine Form,” Autobiography and Questions of Gender, ed. Shirley Neuman (London: F. Cass, 1991), 98–121. 61. Linda Anderson, Autobiography (London: Routledge, 2001), 32. 62. “Gallery of Literary Characters,” 433. 63. Jameson, Diary, 17. 64. Macpherson and Oliphant, Memoirs of Anna Jameson, 61. 65. Jameson, Diary, 164. 66. Jameson, Diary, 297. 67. Mary Waters has argued that Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s critical essays seek to reclaim the value and authority of sentimental language in her own poetry: “As her career progressed, her criticism begins to address as well a dilemma in which fame seemingly put her at cross purposes with a serious aesthetic project based in emotion, not because it put her at the mercy of an anonymous public, but rather because it prompted many reviewers to dismiss her sentimentality as either personally authentic but intellectually trivial or as an insincere pose for the sake of sales. Still, Landon remained committed to the artistic significance of literary appeals to reader emotion throughout her career, authoring fiction, poetry, and even criticism that promoted this aesthetic. Often responding directly to hostile critics, her criticism reveals that

many qualities that had raised critical objections—sentimental language, reliance on conventional tableaus of pathos, even repetitiveness—comprised the means for Landon to cultivate among her readers a community of shared feeling, a poetic purpose that, she argues, placed her work alongside that of the most respected Romantic-period authors.” See Mary A. Waters, “Letitia Landon’s Literary Criticism and Her Romantic Project: L.E.L.’s Poetics of Feeling and the Periodical Reviews,” Women’s Writing 18.3 (2011), 305–30. 68. Jameson, Diary, 297. 69. Jameson, A Commonplace Book, 309. 70. This would seem to reinforce Landon’s claim in her critical essay, “On the Character of Mrs. Hemans’s Writings,” that conversation is only ever performance: “In childhood, the impetus of conversation is curiosity. The child talks to ask questions. But one of its first lessons, as it advances, is that a question is an intrusion, and an answer a deceit. Ridicule parts social life like an invisible paling; and we are all of us afraid of the other. To this may be in great measure attributed the difference that exists between an author’s writings and his conversation. The one is often sad and thoughtful, while the other is lively and careless. The fact is, that the real character is shown in the first instance, and the assumed in the second.” Letitia Landon, “On the Character of Mrs. Hemans’s Writings,” New Monthly Magazine 44 (August 1835), 425–33. 426. 71. Jameson, Diary, 298. 72. Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, “Modern Painters, Quarterly Review 98.196 (March 1856), 384–433. 385. Eastlake’s experience is itself an instructive example of how female critics navigated the social life of criticism. Almost immediatelyВ followingВ the success of her travelogue A Residence on the Shores of the Baltic (1841), John Murray invited Eastlake to write for the Quarterly Review, a true distinction at a time when the “only lady” contributor had been Mary Somerville (Lochhead, 31). In 1842, Eastlake’s family moved temporarily to Edinburgh, where Murray’s friendship served as a passport into the city’s intellectual circles, which included such notable figures as Page 199 →Francis Jeffrey, the founder of the Edinburgh Review, and Blackwood’s reviewer John Wilson. By Eastlake’s account, Jeffrey’s literary club proved a welcome change for herself and her female companions: “No one can more enjoy the kind of society with which we here mix, and which, except abroad, we had always been debarred from. The charm consists, I believe, exclusively in the enjoyment of minds equally educated with our own; nor can I imagine any other result, in the event of a removal from it, than a more decided preference for no society at all to what is unprofitable” (Journals, 45). Anticipating her inevitable departure from Edinburgh, Eastlake proclaims that she would prefer solitude to being cast out of the intellectual community from which she had so long been “debarred.” Even after Murray’s death in 1843, her work for the Quarterly served as a virtual club for Eastlake. In the years to come, it would bring her into contact with countless other men and women of letters, including Thomas and Jane Carlyle, Agnes Strickland, Maria Edgeworth, William Thackeray, Arthur Hallam, Rosa Bonheur, and others.В See Marion Lochhead, Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake (London: J. Murray, 1961); Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, vol. 1 of Journals and Correspondence of Lady Eastlake (London: Spottiswoode, 1895). 73. Eastlake, “Modern Painters,” 386. 74. Eastlake, “Modern Painters,” 402. Ruskin had appended the title “A Graduate of Oxford” instead of his name to the first volume of Modern Painters. Eastlake revisited the same argument in her 1878 essay on Titian, where she again assumes the perspective of the ingenuous child: “In this dilemma each borrows the best ideas he can gather from his neighbour, who, if the truth were known, has obtained them by the same secondhand process himself. In short, the chief result is a faithful illustration of Hans Andersen’s fable of вЂThe Emperor’s Clothes’—minus the child. It is only just to add that this unanimous agreement in what Carlyle would call вЂa great sham’ has been fostered by a class of modern literature which has reduced or rather expanded, a limited and profoundly philosophical vocabulary into little better than a fashionable jargon.” Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, “Titian,” Edinburgh Review (January 1878), 55–75. 56. 75. Jameson, Diary, 297. 76. Jameson, Diary, 297. 77. Jameson, Diary, 337–38. 78. Jameson, Diary, 29.

79. Jameson, Diary, 29. 80. Jameson, Diary, 271. 81. “Diary of an EnnuyГ©e,” Monthly Review 1.4 (April 1826), 414–26. 419–20. 82. “Diary of an EnnuyГ©e,” 420. 83. Jameson, Diary, v. 84. Henry Crabbe Robinson, On Books and Their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1938), 407. 85. Thomas Carlyle, The Letters of Thomas Carlyle, 1826–1836, ed. Charles Eliot Norton (London: Macmillan, 1889), 466; John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, ed. Deborah Epstein Nord (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 342. 86. “A Guidebook to the National Gallery by Mrs. Jameson,” Gentleman’s Magazine 18 (1842), 227–42. 227. 87. Clara Thomas, Love and Work Enough: The Life of Anna Jameson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967), 51. 88. Christy Desmet, “вЂIntercepting the Dew-Drop’: Female Readers and Readings Page 200 →in Anna Jameson’s Shakespearean Criticism,” Women’s Re-visions of Shakespeare: On the Responses of Dickinson, Woolf, Rich, H.D., George Eliot, and Others, ed. Marianne Novy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 41–57. 46. 89. Laurie Kane Lew, “Cultural Anxiety in Anna Jameson’s Art Criticism,” Nineteenth Century (August 1996), 829–56. 834. 90. Anna Jameson, Memoirs of the Loves of the Poets: Biographical Sketches of Women Celebrated in Ancient and Modern Poetry (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1888), 22. 91. Jameson, Diary, 245. 92. Alexander Dick and Angela Esterhammer, eds., Spheres of Action: Speech and Performance in Romantic Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 3. 93. Michael B. Prince, Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment: Theology, Aesthetics, and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 2. 94. Runge, Gender and Language, 160. 95. Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance (New York: Facsimile Text Society, 1930), 164. 96. Reeve, The Progress of Romance, 164. 97. Reeve, The Progress of Romance, 172. 98. Reeve, The Progress of Romance, 189. 99. Reeve, The Progress of Romance, 189. 100. Reeve, The Progress of Romance, 189. 101. Reeve, The Progress of Romance, 203–4. 102. Reeve, The Progress of Romance, 204. 103. Anna Jameson, Characteristics of Women, Moral, Political, and Historical (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865), 9–10. 104. Jameson, Characteristics, 35–41. See Thomas Randolph, “In praise of Woemen in Generall,” The Poems and Amyntas of Thomas Randolph (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1917), 203–4. 105. Jameson, Characteristics, 52. 106. Jameson, Characteristics, 51. 107. Jameson, Characteristics, 29. Medon refers to Shakespeare’s Richard III (1.2), in which Richard successfully courts Lady Anne in the very presence of Henry VI’s corpse. Whereas Medon suggests that the scene might be regarded as a slander on the female sex, Alda refuses this chivalric gesture and suggests that women, like men, are not always motivated by virtue alone. 108. Jameson, Characteristics, 37–38. 109. Jameson, Characteristics, 38. 110. Jameson, Characteristics, 43. Alda refers to Lord Byron’s “The Blues: A Literary Eclogue, ” in which the poet satirizes the bluestockings. Suggestively, Byron requested that the text be published anonymously “or I shall have all the old women in London about my ears—since it sneers at the solace of their antient Spinisterstry.” George Gordon, Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, vol. 5 of The Works of Lord Byron (London: John Murray, 1901), 338.

111. Anna Jameson, The Communion of Labour, in Sisters of Charity and the Communion of Labour (London: Longman, Brown Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1859), 131. 112. Jameson, Characteristics, 12. 113. Jameson, The Communion of Labour, xxii–xxiii. 114. Jameson, “Letter,” xv. 115. Jameson, The Communion of Labour, 133. Page 201 →116. John Wilson et al., vol. 4 of The Noctes Ambrosianae of “Blackwood” (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1843), 46. 117. Wilson et al., Noctes Ambrosianae of “Blackwood”, 47–48. 118. F. D. Maurice, “The Female School of Art; Mrs. Jameson,” Macmillan’s Magazine 2.9 (July 1860), 227–352. 229. 119. The London Literary Gazette, reviewing Jameson’s volume on Shakespeare’s heroines, designated her work “the perfection of criticism.” “Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical,” London Literary Gazette 810 (28 July 1832), 470–71. 470. 120. Bessie Rayner Parkes, “A Review of the Last Six Years,” English Woman’s Journal (February 1864), 215–22. 218. 121. Jameson, “Letter,” xxvi. 122. Maurice, “Female School of Art,” 234. 123. Maurice, “Female School of Art,” 234. Chapter 4 1. “George Eliot’s Life,” Saturday Review 59.1528 (1885), 181–82. 182. 2. Even Margaret Oliphant, herself a successful critic for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, depicted Eliot as a charmed genius, inhabiting a “mental greenhouse” where she remained generously protected from the trials of professional life by her loyal “caretaker and worshipper” (Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant 50, 51). 3. Dallas Liddle, for instance, has convincingly argued that Eliot’s reviews cast a critical eye on her own position as a reviewer. See The Dynamics of Genre: Journalism and the Practice of Literature in MidVictorian Britain (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009). 4. George Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), 2: 50. 5. Eliot, Letters, 3: 148. 6. James D. Benson provides an illuminating analysis of Eliot’s investment in “sympathetic criticism,” considering her public and private reactions to reviews of her work. Even Benson, whose work on Eliot’s critical instinct is quite astute, claims that her failure to leave a straightforward critical treatise is understandable: “She was a novelist,” Benson explains, “not a critic” (440). See James D. Benson, “вЂSympathetic’ Criticism: George Eliot’s Response to Contemporary Reviewing,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 29.4 (March 1975), 428–40. 7. See especially Suzanne Graver, George Eliot and Community: A Study in Social Theory and Fictional Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Pauline Nestor, Female Friendships and Communities: Charlotte BrontГ«, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). 8. Liddle’s work is especially striking for its adaptation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism. He notes that “Victorian writers of the 1850s participated in their diverse world of books in ways analogous to those Chaucer’s pilgrims used to negotiate and promote their own positions within their diverse discourse community, choosing language and genre forms to express, modify, and contend for competing visions of social reality and human nature” (8). By treating the periodical as a vibrant center of dialogic activity, Liddle’s argument dovetails with my own interest in treating critical organs as spaces of social interaction and transformation. Page 202 →9. “Westminster Review,” Monthly Literary Advertiser 224 (10 December 1823), 94. 10. “Westminster Review,” 94. 11. John Stuart Mill, “Bentham,” Westminster Review 31 (1838), 467–506. 473.

12. Mill, “Bentham,” 474. 13. George L. Nesbitt, Benthamite Reviewing: The First Twelve Years of the “Westminster Review”, 1824–36 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), 26. 14. Mill, Autobiography (New York: Penguin, 1989), 164. 15. Mill, “Bentham,” 482. 16. Mill, “Bentham,” 480. 17. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (New York: Penguin, 1974), 76. 18. Mill, On Liberty, 109. 19. Mill, Autobiography, 164. 20. According to Mark Turner, Mill did not believe in “authoritative knowledge or discourse, only competing knowledges and discourses,” an idea derived chiefly from the writings of Auguste Comte (277). Comte’s theory of positivism naturally informed Eliot’s outlook on progress as well, though she ultimately took issue with his conservative approach to gender. See Mark Turner, “Defining Discourses: The Westminster Review, Fortnightly Review, and Comte’s Positivism,” Victorian Periodicals Review 33.3 (Fall 2000), 273–82. 21. Herbert Spencer, Social Statics (New York: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 1995), 391–92. 22. Spencer, Social Statics, 396. 23. George Eliot, “Prospectus of The Westminster Review Under the Direction of New Editors,” Westminster Review 57 (January 1852), 3–6. 2. 24. Eliot, “Prospectus,” 3. 25. William Cullen Bryant, vol. 2 of The Life and Works of William Cullen Bryant (New York: D. Appleton, 1883), 66. 26. Laurel Brake observes: “The anomaly of her situation upon arrival in 1851 as a woman journalist may be gauged by observing that no other woman editor existed at the time in the UK” (“Time’s Turbulence,” 251). As Kathryn Ledbetter, Margaret Beetham, and others have pointed out, women did serve as editors for women’s magazines, but very few were involved in editing the major critical reviews. See Laurel Brake, “The Westminster and Gender at Mid-century,” Victorian Periodicals Review 33.3 (Fall 2000), 247–72; Kathryn Ledbetter, British Victorian Women’s Periodicals: Beauty, Civilization, and Poetry (New York: Palgrave, 2009). 27. Eliot, “Prospectus,” 3. 28. Eliot, Letters, 2: 49. 29. George Eliot, “The Progress of Intellect,” Westminster Review 54 (1851), 177–85. 179. 30. Eliot, Letters, 8: 69. 31. Eliot, Letters, 8: 69. 32. George Eliot, “The Future of German Philosophy,” Leader 279 (18 July 1855), 723–24. 33. Eliot, Letters, 8: 44. 34. Eliot, Letters, 8: 44. 35. Margaret Beetham, “Toward a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre,” in Investigating Victorian Journalism, ed. Laurel Brake, Aled Jones, and Lionel Madden (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 19–32. 25. Page 203 →36. Eliot, Letters, 2: 49. 37. Eliot, Letters, 8: 40–41. 38. Arnold, “Function,” 40. 39. Eliot, Letters, 8: 51. 40. Nancy Paxton proposes that the letter divulges “George Eliot’s prickly self-consciousness about her lack of conventional good looks as well as her mockery of Spencer’s fastidiousness” with respect to female beauty (19). See Nancy L. Paxton, George Eliot and Herbert Spencer: Feminism, Evolutionism, and the Reconstruction of Gender (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 41. G. Robert Stange, “The Voices of the Essayist,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 35.3 (December 1980), 312–30. 317. 42. Alexis Easley, “Authorship, Gender and Identity: George Eliot in the 1850s,” Women’s Writing 3.2 (1996), 145–60. 150. 43. Qtd. in Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 161.

44. Haight, George Eliot, 337; Kathryn Hughes, George Eliot: The Last Victorian (New York: Cooper Square Press, 1998), 253. For further consideration of George Eliot’s ostracism from such communities, see Haight, 333–62 and Hughes, 252–54. 45. Charles Eliot Norton, Letters of Charles Eliot Norton (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 316. 46. The princess, then in the process of divorcing her husband, was living with Franz Liszt. Her controversial liaison with the famous composer thus bears certain striking similarities to Eliot’s relationship with Lewes, a married man who would never legally separate from his wife. See Hughes, George Eliot, 156–57. 47. George Eliot, The Journals of George Eliot, ed. Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 21–22. 48. Eliot, Letters, 2: 173. 49. See Anthony Trollope, Framley Parsonage (New York: Penguin, 1984). 50. George Eliot, “Woman in France: Madame de SablГ©,” Westminster Review 62 (1854), 448–73. 448. 51. Eliot, “Woman in France,” 453. 52. Eliot, “Woman in France,” 452. 53. Harriet Guest, “Bluestocking Feminism,” Reconsidering the Bluestockings, ed. Nicole Pohl and Betty A. Schellenberg (San Marino: Huntington Library, 2003), 64. 54. Eliot, “Woman in France,” 452. 55. See Graver, George Eliot and Community, 174. 56. Eliot, “Woman in France,” 453. 57. Eliot, “Woman in France,” 452. 58. Eliot, Letters, 2: 84. 59. Eliot, Journals, 245. 60. Eliot, Journals, 245. 61. Eliot’s remarks on this subject closely resemble those of G. H. Lewes. In 1852, Lewes had written an essay for the Westminster Review, “The Lady Novelists,” which was for many years misattributed to Eliot. In the essay, Lewes argues that the very different social experiences of men and women result in their producing different kinds of writing. “Make what distinction you please in the social world,” Lewes writes, “it still remains true that men and women have different organizations, consequently different experiences. To know life you must have both sides depicted” (10). G. H. Lewes, “The Lady Novelists,” Essays and Reviews of George Eliot (Boston: Aldine, 1887), 7–24. Page 204 →62. Eliot, “Woman in France,” 453. 63. For an insightful discussion of the relationship between essentialism and constructionism, see Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989). 64. George Eliot, Middlemarch (New York: Norton, 1977), 4. 65. One 1859 review, for instance, suggested that the bluestockings so perfectly anticipated the culture of nineteenth-century criticism that “one lady was a sort of Madame Athenaeum, another a Madame Literary Gazette, another a Madame Saturday Review, and so on.” “The Position of Women in France,” Saturday Review 3.28 (June 1860), 92–99. 98. 66. Eliot, “Woman in France,” 453. 67. See Jean Baptiste MoliГЁre, Les PrГ©cieuses Ridicules, in The Plays of MoliГЁre in French and English, ed. A. R. Waller (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1907). 68. Indeed, Eliot had originally titled the volume “Characters and Characteristics or Impressions of Theophrastus Such,” thus paying open tribute to La BruyГЁre’s CaractГЁres. Eliot, Letters, 8: 110–11. 69. Eliot, “Woman in France,” 465. 70. Eliot, “Woman in France,” 469. 71. Eliot, “Woman in France,” 469. 72. Eliot, “Woman in France,” 469. 73. Eliot, “Woman in France,” 472. 75. Eliot, “Woman in France,” 470. 75. Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, and Dena Goodman, introduction, Going Public: Women and Publishing in

Early Modern France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 1–12. 3. 76. Eliot, “Woman in France,” 455. 77. As J. Russell Perkin notes, the title of Eliot’s first fictional work, Scenes of Clerical Life, also recalls her career at the Westminster: “It is interesting to note the artistic metaphor of вЂsketches,’ which is also implied in the title вЂScenes.’ The metaphor occurs in the titles of several other wellknown works, and it suggests a rather more impressionistic type of writing than that of the typical novel of the time, which tended to pose as a вЂHistory,’ вЂLife,’ or вЂMemoir.’ .В .В . Eliot’s title and conception of her first work of fiction thus suggest its affinities with Thackerayan realism, and further suggest that it is to be conceived of as a journalistic exploration of clerical life by an educated and urbane writer.” J. Russell Perkin, A Reception-History of George Eliot’s Fiction (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989), 37. 78. Eliot, Letters, 2: 445. 79. Roland Anderson contextualizes this narrative intervention in illuminating detail by attending especially to the correspondence between Blackwood and Eliot in “George Eliot Provoked: John Blackwood and Chapter Seventeen of Adam Bede,” Modern Philology 71 (August 1973), 46. 80. George Eliot, Adam Bede (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 175–76. 7. 81. George Levine, Cambridge Companion to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 7. 82. Eliot, Letters, 4: 24, 25. 83. Eliot, Letters, 3: 148. 84. George Eliot, “Notes on Form in Art,” Essays, ed. Thomas Pinney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 433. Page 205 →85. Eliot, Letters, 4: 62. 86. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to speak of the secret lives of the Medusa for, as Cixous notes, one can never speak of “a typical woman.В .В .В . you can’t talk about a female sexuality, uniform, homogeneous, classifiable into codes” (320). Alison Booth capitalizes on the connection between the Medusa myth and female collectivity in How to Make It. 87. Eliot, Middlemarch, 479. 88. Eliot, Middlemarch, 65. 89. Eliot, Middlemarch, 478–79. 90. Eliot, Middlemarch, 222. 91. Eliot, Middlemarch, 360. 92. Eliot, Middlemarch, 200. 93. Eliot, Middlemarch, 418. 94. Eliot, Middlemarch, 79. 95. Eliot, Middlemarch, 80. 96. Eliot, Middlemarch, 206. 97. Eliot, Middlemarch, 64. 98. David Kurnick has explored Dorothea’s critical detachment in some detail, though focusing on “novelistic desire as the genre’s point of access to the kind of objectivity that permits and encourages systemic critique” rather than on female critical consciousness as such (585). See “An Erotics of Detachment: Middlemarch and Novel-Reading as Critical Practice,” English Literary History 74.3 (Fall 2007), 583–608. 99. Eliot, Middlemarch, 478. 100. Eliot, Middlemarch, 838. 101. See Graver, George Eliot and Community. 102. Eliot, Middlemarch, 95. 103. Eliot, “Silly Novels,” 246, 247. For a very fine treatment of Eliot’s response to women’s fiction, see Susan Rowland Tush, George Eliot and the Conventions of Popular Women’s Fiction: A Serious Literary Response to the “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 104. Eliot, Letters, 8: 51. 105. In some respects, Eliot very nearly agrees with Carlyle’s diagnosis of the republic of letters as an

anarchic world in need of a more autocratic power to curb its excesses. See Carlyle’s discussion in “The Hero as Man of Letters,” in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 106. Eliot, “Silly Novels,” 251. 107. Mill, “Bentham,” 65. 108. Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance, 121. 109. Eliot, “Silly Novels,” 253. 110. Eliot, “Silly Novels,” 253. 111. Eliot, “Silly Novels,” 254. 112. Margaret Oliphant, The Literary History of England in the End of the Eighteenth and Beginning of the Nineteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1882), 68. 113. Eliot, Letters, 2: 509. 114. Eliot, Letters, 2: 509. 115. Eliot, Letters, 8: 512–13. 116. Eliot, Letters, 2: 13. 117. Eliot, Letters 4: 58. 118. Oscar Browning, Life of George Eliot (London: Walter Scott, 1892), 184. Page 206 →119. George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, ed. Nancy Henry (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 1994), 32. 120. Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 6. 121. Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 6. 122. Nancy Henry, introduction in Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, vii–xxxvii. xviii. 123. Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 141. 124. Eliot, Impressions, 141. 125. Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 142. 126. Eliot, “Woman in France,” 455. 127. Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 122. 128. Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 123, 122. 129. Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 126. 130. Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 125. 131. Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 125. 132. Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 143. 133. Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 143. 134. Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 143. 135. Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 150. 136. Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 143. 137. Eliot, Letters, 3: 376; Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 7. 138. Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 7. 139. Eliot, Letters, 8: 51. 140. Ina Taylor, A Woman of Contradictions: The Life of George Eliot (New York: Morrow, 1989), 186. 141 Sidney Colvin, Memories and Notes of Persons and Places, 1852–1912 (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1921), 90–91. 142. Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 222. 143. See Kathleen McCormack, George Eliot in Society: Travels Abroad and Sundays at the Priory (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013). 144. McCormack, George Eliot in Society, 23. 145. McCormack, George Eliot in Society, 2. 146. Eliot, Letters, 2: 379. 147. George Eliot to William Blackwood, 16 May 1872, Papers of William Blackwood and Sons, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. 148. Eliot, Letters, 8: 437. 149. Amanda Anderson, Way We Argue Now, 2.

Chapter 5 1. Alice Meynell, “April Reviews,” Literary World (22 April 1898), 372. 2. The instability of sex and gender at the fin de siГЁcle has been treated in a number of noteworthy volumes, including Elaine Showalter’s Sexual Anarchy. Importantly, Showalter observes that even the intensely masculine culture of clubs and associations “could not really separate the messy вЂooze of androgyny’ from the вЂclarity of gender.’” For men and women alike, even apparently normative associations inhabited a “fragile borderline” where sexual categories might be contested and even transcended (Showalter, 13). 3. Eliot, “Woman in France,” 448. Page 207 →4. M. F. Billington, “Leading Lady Journalists,” Pearson’s Magazine 2.7 (July 1896), 101–11. 101. 5. Edith Simcox, “The Capacity of Women,” Nineteenth Century 22 (September 1887), 391–402. 395. 6. See Angela Woolacott, To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism, and Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press), 2001. 7. Mary H. Krout, A Looker-On in London (New York: BF Stevens, 1899), 82. 8. The Seventh Annual Report of the Society of Women Journalists (London: Women’s Printing Society, 1901), 46. 9. Eva Anstruther, “Ladies Clubs.” Nineteenth Century 45 (April 1899), 508–611. 606. 10. For an illuminating collection of essays documenting the rise of the female journalist at the end of the century, see F. Elizabeth Gray, ed., Women in Journalism at the Fin de SiГЁcle: Making a Name for Herself (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Lee Anne Bache’s article, “Making More Than a Name: Eliza Lynn Linton and the Commodification of the Woman Journalist at the Fin de SiГЁcle” is striking for its attempt to reexamine Linton’s troubled reputation in light of market pressures. As Bache observes, “Attending to, rather than dismissing, the structuring opposition of Linton’s melodramatic self-presentation—the opposition between reticence and self-revelation, between the author’s private self and the public’s knowledge of her authorial persona—allows us critical insight into concerns endemic for women journalists at the fin de siГЁcle” (21–22). See Lee Anne Bache, in Gray, 21–36. 11. See Molly Youngkin, Feminist Realism at the Fin de SiГЁcle: The Influence of the Late-Victorian Woman’s Press on the Development of the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007). 12. Amy Levy, “Women and Club Life,” Woman’s World 1 (1888), 364–67. 364. 13. J. D. Andrews, “The New Woman,” Papers of the Manchester Literary Club (Manchester: 1895), 182–92. 182. 14. Andrews, “The New Woman,” 182. 15. Andrews, “The New Woman,” 183. 16. Andrews, “The New Woman,” 183. 17. Qtd. in Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Robin Lauterbach Sheets, and William Veeder, vol. 1 of The Woman Question: Defining Voices, 1837–1883 (New York: Garland, 1983), 118. 18. “Donna Quixote,” Punch, or the London Charivari 106 (28 April 1894), 195. 19. Mona Caird, “A Defence of the So-Called Wild Women,” Nineteenth Century (May 1892), 811–29. 819. 20. The caption draws directly on Cervantes’s original text, which reads: “A world of disorderly notions, picked out of his books, crowded into his imagination; and now his head was full of nothing but enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, complaints, amours, torments, and abundance of stuff and impossibilities.” Miguel de Cervantes, The History of The Ingenious Gentleman, Don Quixote of La Mancha (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1822), 18. 21. Andrews, “The New Woman,” 183. 22. Henry Chavasse Pye, Counsel to a mother, a continuation of “Advice to a mother” (London: J. and A. Churchill, 1872), 191. 23. Cairns Collection of American Women Writers, vol. 1 of The Woman’s Book (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1894), 2.

24. Charles Harper, Revolted Woman: Past, Present, and to Come (London: E. Mathews, 1894), 27. Page 208 →25. As Linda Hughes has observed, club membership was a defining quality of the New Woman. Her discussion of the “Literary Ladies,” a dining club founded in 1889, is a valuable contribution to the history of intellectual sociability at the fin de siГЁcle. See “A Club of Their Own: The вЂLiterary Ladies,’ Women Writers, and Fin-de-SiГЁcle Authorship,” Victorian Literature and Culture 35 (2007), 233–60. 26. Henrietta Stannard, “The Writer’s Club,” The World’s Congress of Representative Women, ed. May Wright Sewall (Rand, McNally, 1894), 810–15. 811. 27. David Doughan, Women, Clubs and Associations in Britain (London: Routledge, 2006), 42. 28. Frances H. Low, Press Work for Women: A Textbook for the Young Woman Journalist (London: L.U. Gill, 1904), 23. 29. W. T. Stead, “Young Women in Journalism,” Review of Reviews 6 (1892–93), 451–52. 451. 30. Stead, “Young Women in Journalism,” 452. 31. An astute account of W. T. Stead’s career, including his work on behalf of women’s rights, can be found in W. T. Stead: Newspaper Revolutionary, ed. Laurel Brake, Ed King, Roger Luckhurst, and James Mussell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 32. Enoch Arnold Bennett, Journalism for Women: A Practical Guide (London: Bodley Head, 1898), 9. 33. Bennett, Journalism for Women, 12. 34. Bennett, Journalism for Women, 12. 35. James Hepburn documents the limits of Bennett’s progressive gender politics in Arnold Bennett (Oxon: Routledge, 2013). 36. Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de SiГЁcle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 9. See also Ann L. Ardis, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990). 37. George Somes Layard, Mrs. Lynn Linton: Her Life, Letters, and Opinions (London: Methuen, 1901), 5. 38. Nancy Fix Anderson, Woman against Women in Victorian England: A Life of Eliza Lynn Linton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 90. 39. Justin McCarthy, Reminiscences (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1899), 275, 272. 40. “A Contrast,” Bentley’s Miscellany 24 (1848), 249–55. 249. 41. Such an appraisal of Linton’s “paradoxical and at times downright perverse habits of mind” is to be found in “Eliza Lynn Linton and вЂThe Girl of the Period,’” in Helsinger, Sheets, and Veeder, The Woman Question, 103–31. 42. “The Girl of the Period. Written in a Club Library,” Tomahawk (4 April 1868), 136. 43. “The Reviewer of the Period,” Tinsley’s Magazine 2 (July 1868), 617–22. 622. 44. “Reviewer of the Period,” 617. 45. “Reviewer of the Period,” 618. 46. George Paston, “A Censor of Modern Womanhood,” Fortnightly Review 70.417 (1 September 1901), 505–19. 510. 47. Paston, “Censor of Modern Womanhood,” 510. 48. Valerie Sanders, Eve’s Renegades: Victorian Anti-feminist Women Novelists (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 62. Page 209 →49. See Layard and Herbert van Thal, Eliza Lynn Linton: The Girl of the Period (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1979). 50. See also Deborah T. Meem, “Eliza Lynn Linton and the Rise of Lesbian Consciousness,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 7.4 (April 1997), 537–60. 51. See Andrea L. Broomfield, “Much More Than an Antifeminist: Eliza Lynn Linton’s Contribution to the Rise of Victorian Popular Journalism,” Victorian Literature and Culture (2001), 267–83. 52. Evelleen Richards, “Darwinian Science and Women Intellectuals,” Victorian Science in Context, ed. Bernard Lightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 119–42. 125. 53. Eliza Lynn Linton, “Emancipated Woman,” Ourselves: Essays on Women (London: Chatto and Windus, 1884), 40–60. 40–41. 54. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 373.

55. Herbert Spencer, vol. 1 of Principles of Sociology (New York: D. Appleton, 1884), 608. 56. Eliza Lynn Linton, “Our Past and Future,” Ourselves: Essays on Women (London: Chatto and Windus, 1884), 239–57. 239. 57. Linton, “Our Past and Future,” 249. 58. David Duncan, Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer (London: Methuen, 1908), 405. 59. Evelleen Richards, “Huxley and Woman’s Place in Science: The вЂWoman Question’ and the Control of Victorian Anthropology,” History, Humanity, and Evolution, ed. James R. Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 253–84. 274. 60. Eliza Linton to T. H. Huxley, 11 November 1868, Imperial College Archives, London. 61. Eliza Linton to T. H. Huxley, 11 November 1868, Imperial College Archives, London. 62. Eliza Lynn Linton, “The Shrieking Sisterhood,” vol. 2 of The Girl of the Period and Other Social Essays (London: R. Bentley and Son, 1883), 64–71. 64. 63. Eliza Lynn Linton, Sowing the Wind, 3 vols. (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1867), 1: 120. 64. Linton, Sowing the Wind, 1: 106. 65. After Oliphant’s oldest brotherВ declared bankruptcy in 1868, she was left to support her nephew and remaining two sons on her literary earnings. Interestingly, Oliphant’s role as breadwinner served for many years to undermine the quality of her work, earning her the reputation ofВ a mercenary writer who was willing to produce whatever the publisher demanded.В Leslie Stephen remarks: “She resigned her chance at such fame because she wished to send her sons to Eton” (Stephen, 45). Following in her father’s footsteps, Virginia Woolf offered a more trenchant critique of Oliphant’s career. InВ Three GuineasВ (1939), Woolf announces that “Mrs. Oliphant sold her brain, her very admirable brain, prostituted her culture and enslaved her intellectual liberty in order that she might earn her living and educate her children” (91–92).В Although Oliphant’sВ Autobiography provides ample evidence that her work was undertaken for financial remuneration, she maintains that this was not her only motivation: “I have written because it gave me pleasure, because it came natural to me, because it was like talking or breathing, besides the big fact that it was necessaryPage 210 → for me to work for my children. That, however, was not the first motive, so that when I laugh inquiries off and say that it is my trade, I do it only by way of eluding the question which I have neither time nor wish to enter into” (Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant, 48). See Leslie Stephen,В Hours in a Library (London: Putnam, 1904); Virginia Woolf,В Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1966).В For a comprehensive survey of both Stephen’s and Woolf’s responses to Oliphant, see chapter 4 of Emily Blair, Virginia Woolf and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002). 66. Eliza Lynn Linton, “Plain Girls,” Modern Women and What is Said of Them (London: J.S. Redfield, 1868), 148–56. 156. 67. Linton, “Plain Girls,” 156. 68. Linton, Sowing the Wind, 1:26. 69. Eliza Lynn Linton, The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland (New York: Garland, 1976), 67. Christopher Kirkland is interesting in its own right as a fictional autobiography in which Linton conspicuously records some of her professional experiences as those of a male writer. 70. Eliza Lynn Linton, “Affronted Womanhood,” in vol. 1 of The Girl of the Period and other Social Essays (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1883), 79–87. 85. 71. Linton, “Affronted Womanhood,” 83. 72. Linton, Sowing the Wind, 1: 30. 73. Linton, Sowing the Wind, 1: 101. 74. Linton, Sowing the Wind, 1: 194, 2: 21. 75. Linton, Sowing the Wind, 2: 21. 76. Linton, Sowing the Wind, 1: 103, 2: 95, 27. 77. Linton, Sowing the Wind, 2: 86. 78. Linton, Sowing the Wind, 2: 86. 79. Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 128. 80. Linton, Sowing the Wind, 2: 27. 81. Linton, Sowing the Wind, 2: 29–30. 82. Linton, Sowing the Wind, 2: 27.

83. Paston, “Censor of Modern Womanhood,” 513. 84. Jane Ellen Frith Panton, Leaves from a Life (New York: Brentano’s, 1908), 136–37. 85. Panton, Leaves from a Life, 136. 86. Eliza Lynn Linton, “Ourselves,” Broadway 1 (September 1869), 31–37. 32. 87. Linton, “Ourselves,” 32. 88. Linton, Sowing the Wind, 2: 121. 89. Eliza Lynn Linton, “Woman and Her Critics,” in Modern Women, 253–61. 253–54. 90. Linton, “Woman and Her Critics,” 256. 91. “Current Literature,” Current Opinion (August 1888), 110. 92. Elizabeth Robins Pennell, “My Glimpse of the Pre-Raphaelites,” Magazine of Art 11.1 (1919), 3–6. 4; “Nietzsche and the Latest Philosophy,” Living Age 276 (1913), 34–41. 37. 93. “Nietzsche,” 38. 94. For more on the use of male pseudonyms by women writers, see Catherine A. Judd, “Male Pseudonyms and Female Authority in Victorian England,” in Literature in the Marketplace: NineteenthCentury British Publishing and Reading Practices, Page 211 →ed. John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 250–68. 95. Vernon Lee, Vernon’s Lee’s Letters, with a Preface by Her Executor, Irene Cooper Willis (London: Privately Printed, 1937), 59. 96. “Vernon Lee’s Baldwin,” Spectator 58 (1 May 1886), 573–74. 573. 97. An excellent account of gender politics and anonymous authorship in the nineteenth century can be found in Alexis Easley, First-Person Anonymous: Women Writers and Victorian Print Media, 1830–1870 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 98. Lee, Vernon Lee’s Letters, 49. 99. Nicole Fluhr, “Empathy and Identity in Vernon Lee’s Hauntings,” Victorian Studies 48.2 (Winter 2006), 287–94. 287. See also Hilary Fraser, “Interstitial Identities: Vernon Lee and the Spaces In-Between,” in Marketing the Author: Authorial Personae, Narrative Selves, and SelfFashioning, 1880–1930, ed. Mary Demoor (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), 124–27; Shafquat Towheed has likewise highlighted Lee’s “disdain for the artificially demarcated boundaries of fact and fiction, and of history and the novel, promoting a hybridized mode of thinking that is impressionistic, comparative, and intellectually adventurous.” Shafquat Towheed, “Determining вЂFluctuating Opinions’: Vernon Lee, Popular Fiction, and Theories of Reading.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 60.2 (2005), 199–236. 219. 100. Vineta Colby, Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), xii. 101. Colby, Vernon Lee, 6. 102. Qtd. in Peter Gunn, introduction to The Romantic Inventions of Vernon Lee, ed. Gregory Horace (New York: Grove Press, 1954), 77. 103. See Vernon Lee, “Sulla necessitГ della coltura estetica in Italia,” La rivista (November 1875), 434–41. 104. Colby, Vernon Lee, 49. 105. As Vineta Colby has observed, James allegedly broke off all contact with Lee after detecting disparaging allusions to his brother, novelist Henry James, in her story “Lady Tal” (1894). For her own part, Lee continued to pay homage to James in her work, though she took him to task for his “Will to Believe”—the idea that human beings can justifiably have faith in religion without having recourse to empirical evidence. 106. William James, vol. 1 of The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), 294. 107. James, The Principles of Psychology, 294. 108. Vernon Lee, “The Nature of Literature II,” Contemporary Review 86 (1 November 1904), 646–61. 651. 109. James, The Principles of Psychology, 316. 110. Lee, “Nature of Literature,” 652. 111. Lee anticipates here twentieth-century theories of reading, including Tzvetan Todorov’s understanding of reading as a constructive act. See Tzvetan Todorov, Genres in Discourse (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1990). 112. Vernon Lee, “Emerson, Transcendentalist and Utilitarian,” Contemporary Review 67 (March 1895), 345–60. 345. 113. Jill R. Ehnenn offers an insightful reading of Vernon Lee’s work with Anstruther-Thomson in Women’s Literary Collaboration, Queerness, and Late-Victorian Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). 114. Vernon Lee, Baldwin (New York: Ayer, 1972), 3. Page 212 →115. Lee, Baldwin, 3. 116. Lee, Baldwin, 4. 117. Lee, Baldwin, 4–5. 118. Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1873), 209; Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 341–408. 366. 119. Lee, Baldwin, 329. 120. Lee, Baldwin, 329–30. 121. Jodie Dean, Solidarity of Strangers: Feminism after Identity Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press 1996), 3. 122. Dean, Solidarity of Strangers, 3. 123. Vernon Lee, “The Deterioration of Soul,” Fortnightly Review 65 (June 1896), 928–43. 936. 124. Lee, “The Deterioration of Soul,” 931. 125. Bob Gallagher and Alexander Wilson, “Sex and the Politics of Identity: An Interview with Michel Foucault,” Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning. ed. Mark Thompson (Maple Shade, NJ: Lethe Press, 1995), 25–35. 25. 126. Vernon Lee, “The Economic Dependence of Women,” North American Review 175.548 (July 1902), 71–90. 71. 127. Lee, “Economic Dependence of Women,” 72. 128. See also Linda Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism versus Post-structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory,” Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. Mary Eagleton (Malden: Blackwell, 1996), 378–81. See especially Christa Zorn, Vernon Lee: Aesthetics, History, and the Victorian Female Intellectual (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003), 90–110. 129. Sally Robinson, Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-Representation in Contemporary Women’s Fiction (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991), 1. 130. Lee, “Economic Dependence of Women,” 80. 131. Lee, “Economic Dependence of Women,” 81. 132. Lee, “Economic Dependence of Women,” 81. 133. For more on the evolution of Gilman’s approach to the question of sex, see Judith A. Allen, The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Sexualities, Histories, Progressivism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 134. Vernon Lee, Althea (London: Osgood, McIlvaine, 1894), x. 135. Lee, Althea, x. 136. Lee, Althea, xvii. 137. See especially Zorn, Vernon Lee, 90–110. 138. Zorn, Vernon Lee, 94. 139. Zorn, Vernon Lee, 91. 140. Lee, Althea, 145. 141. Arnold, “Function,” 37. 142. Arnold, “Function,” 37. 143. Lee, Althea, 149; “Emerson as a Teacher of Latter-Day Tendencies,” Gospels of Anarchy (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1908), 41–70. 48. 144. Lee, Althea, 112. 145. Lee, Althea, 12–13. 146. Qtd. in Colby, Vernon Lee, 173. 147. Lee, Althea, 131. 148. Lee, Althea, 131.

Page 213 →149. Vineta Colby notes, for instance, that Lee was thought to be “so self-absorbed that her conversation (as Coleridge’s was once described) was “one-versation” (Vernon Lee, 133). 150. Lee, Althea, ix. 151. Lee, Althea, 152–53, 7. 152. Lee, Althea, 119. 153. Lee, Althea, 111. 154. Lee, Althea, 14. 155. Lee, Althea, 110. 156. Lee, Althea, xviii. 157. Lee, Vernon Lee’s Letters, 46. 158. John Addington Symonds, vol. 2 of Letters, ed. Herbert M. Schueller and Robert L. Peters (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967–69), 898. 159. Qtd. in Colby, Vernon Lee, 137. 160. Lee, “Deterioration of Soul,” 99. 161. Lee, Althea, 283. 162. Lee, Althea, 283. 163. Lee, Althea, 282. 164. Niveditha Menon, “Feminist Methodology in Practice: Collecting Data on Domestic Violence in India,” Handbook of Feminist Family Studies, ed. Sally A. Lloyd, April L. Few, and Katherine R. Allen (London: Sage, 2009), 249–63. 250. 165. Vernon Lee’s interest in an impressionistic aesthetic is almost universally acknowledged by scholars of her fiction. Hilary Fraser describes Lee herself as being in between identities, a fact that set her at a distance from any single culture and allowed her to approach questions of aesthetic value from many different perspectives. Christa Zorn suggests that Lee may have been a forerunner to deconstructive criticism, and Shafquat Towheed describes her writing as “hybridized mode of thinking that is impressionistic, comparative, and intellectually adventurous” (219). See especially Hilary Fraser, “Women and the Ends of Art History: Vision and Corporeality in Nineteenth-Century Critical Discourse, Victorian Studies (Autumn 1998–99), 77–96. 166. Leslie McCall, “The Complexity of Intersectionality,” Signs 30.2 (2005), 1771–800. 1773. 167. One might draw a fruitful comparison between Lee’s model of the Victorian sibyl and John Holloway’s “Victorian sage,” a figure who speaks as one apart from society and yet draws upon well-established rhetorical conventions. See John Holloway, The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument (London: Macmillan, 1953). 168. Heraclitus of Epheseus, The Fragments of the Work of Heraclitus of Ephesus on Nature, trans. G. T. W. Patrick (Baltimore: N. Murray, 1889), 86. 169. “Sibylla, or вЂSibyls and Prophets,’” Collection of Vernon Lee Materials, 1927–1933, Colby College Special Collections, Waterville, Maine. 170. Susan Stanford Friedman, “The Futures of Feminist Criticism: A Diary,” PMLA 121.5 (November 1996), 1704–10. 1706. 171. Lee, Althea, 302. Epilogue 1. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1929), 8. 2. Woolf, Room of One’s Own, 9. Page 214 →3. Woolf, Room of One’s Own, 102. 4. Hortense J. Spillers, “Afterword: Cross-Currents, Discontinuities: Black Women’s Fiction,” in Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, ed. Hortense J. Spillers and Marjorie Pryse (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 249–61. 250. 5. Hilary Rose, Love, Power, and Knowledge: Toward a Feminist Transformation of the Sciences (Cambridge: John Wiley and Sons, 1996), 56. 6. Ellen C. Mayock and Dominica Radulescu, introduction, Feminist Activism in Academia: Essays on

Personal, Political, and Professional Change (Jefferson: McFarland, 2010), 1–10. 6. 7. Susan Jackson, “Ivory Towers and Guardians of the Word: Language and Discourse in the Academy, ” Exclusions in Feminist Thought: Challenging the Boundaries of Womanhood, ed. Mary Brewer (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2002), 28–45. 31. 8. Parkes, “A Review,” 218. 9. See Jane Gallop, Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Theory (New York: Routledge, 1992). 10. Sandra Gilbert, “What Do Feminist Critics Want?” The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 29–45. 42. 11. It is precisely this move toward isolationism that motivated Vernon Lee’s critique of critics like Ralph Waldo Emerson or John Ruskin, whom she charges with pursuing knowledge “without any attempt to work it out, to shed the light of one opinion upon the neighboring opinion, to obtain a continuity of solid, illuminated ground.” Vernon Lee, “Influence of Emerson,” Literary Digest 10.24 (13 April 1895), 12–13. 12. 12. Nancy Hartstock, “Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women?” Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990), 163. 13. Susan Gubar, Rooms of Our Own (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 5. 14. Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader: Second Series (London: Hogarth, 1965), 163. 15. Woolf, Room of One’s Own, 115. 16. Seyla Benhabib, “From Identity Politics to Social Feminism: A Plea for the Nineties,” Radical Democracy: Identity, Citizenship, and the State, ed. David Trend (New York: Routledge, 1996), 27–41. 29. 17. Benhabib, “Identity Politics,” 30. 18. Benhabib, “Identity Politics,” 29. 19. bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston: South End Press, 1989), 51. 20. “Association,” Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed., 20 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 21. Woolf, Room of One’s Own, 36. 22. Arnold Bennett, “Queen of the High-Brows,” Evening Standard (28 November 1929), 9. 23. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1966), 85. 24. Woolf, Three Guineas, 102. 25. Woolf, Three Guineas, 105. 26. Woolf, Three Guineas, 106. 27. Woolf, Three Guineas, 106. 28. Arnold, “Function,” 30. Page 215 →29. Woolf, Three Guineas, 113. 30. Woolf, Three Guineas, 113. 31. As Anna Snaith notes, the public response to Three Guineas challenged the notion of Woolf “as a writer divorced from the public sphere, writing for and about a cosy cГґterie” (219). Anna Snaith, “Virginia Woolf and Reading Communities: Respondents to Three Guineas,” Virginia Woolf and Communities, ed. Jeannette McVicker and Laura Davis (New York: Pace University Press, 1999), 219–26. 32. For a comprehensive discussion of Woolf’s relationship with Bloomsbury and other intellectual circles, see Jeanette McVicker and Laura Davis, eds., Virginia Woolf and Communities: Selected Papers from the Eighth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf (New York: Pace University Press, 1999); Jane Marcus, ed., Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury: A Centenary Celebration (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). 33. Nigel Nicolson, “Bloomsbury: The Myth and the Reality,” in Marcus, Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury, 7–22. 15. 34. Juliet Dusinberre has carefully documented how Bloomsbury provided Woolf with an alternative to the more constrained intellectual life of her home in Kensington. See Virginia Woolf’s Renaissance: Woman Reader or Common Reader? (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997). By contrast, Jesse Wolff has described the sexual and secular politics of the Bloomsbury group as profoundly ambivalent and often embattled, suggesting that such ambivalence help to fuel the aesthetic innovations of its members. See Jesse

Wolff, Bloomsbury, Modernism, and the Reinvention of Intimacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 35. Amanda Anderson, Way We Argue Now, 14. 36. Woolf, Room of One’s Own, 24. 37. Anna Jameson herself asks, “May there not exist in the depths or heights of philosophy and art truths yet to be revealed, as there are stars in heaven whose light has not yet reached the naked eye? And why should not criticism have its telescope for truth as well as its microscope for error? . . . For Nature, the infinite, sits within her tabernacle not made by human hands, and Genius and Love are the cherubim, to whom it is permitted to look into her unveiled eyes and reflect their light; Art is the priestess of her divine mysteries, and Criticism, the door-keeper of her temple, should be Janus-headed, looking forward as well as backward.” Anna Jameson, Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1834), 76.

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Index academy. See university Addison, Joseph, 38, 44, 45, 49, 192n108. See also Tatler Allardyce, Alexander, 16 Andrews, J.D., 129–30, 131, 139 Anonymity, 9, 29, 38, 70–71, 96, 100–101, 137, 149, 151, 157, 178, 197n56 Anstruther-Thomson, Clementina, 155 antisocial behavior, 4, 19, 54–55, 107, 128, 133–34, 137–40, 148, 165–67, 173–75, 189n53, 214n11 Arnold, Matthew, 5, 99, 161, 178 Athenaeum, 69, 107, 204n65 Babbage, Charles, 136 Bennett, Arnold, 134–35, 145, 176 Bentham, Jeremy, 4, 19, 93–95, 108, 111 Bentley’s Miscellany, 137, 140 Bickerstaff, Isaac, 38–39, 41–43, 45, 51, 53, 190n56. See also Tatler Birrell, Augustine, 8 Blackwood, John, 15, 107–108, 118. See also Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine Blackwood, William, 11, 15–16, 124. See also Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1, 8, 10–12, 14, 15–16, 58, 59, 61, 65, 71, 87–88, 194n20. See also Blackwood, John; Blackwood, William; tavern sages Blessington, Lady (Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington), 8, 65, 80 Bloomsbury group, 179, 215n34 bluestockings, 36, 63, 81, 87, 89, 185n7, 204n65. See also salons Bodichon, Barbara, 71, 170 Bourdieu, Pierre, 3, 12 Bray, Charles, 91, 108, 136 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 152 Browning, Robert, 152 Burney, Fanny, 23–24

Byron, Lord (George Gordon), 8, 59–60, 80, 86, 200n110 Caird, Mona, 130–1 Carlyle, Thomas, 78, 101, 136, 199n72, 205n105 Chapman, John, 91, 95, 96–97, 102 Cixous, HГ©lГЁne, 110, 205n86 clubs, 4, 25–26 critiques of, 26–27, 34–35, 39–41, 45–46 exclusion of women, 32–37, 46, 188n49, 188n50, 192n109 Page 236 →clubs (continued) female clubs, 19, 23–24, 35–36, 188n51, 189n53, 189n54, 191m94, 208n25 (see also female community) fictional, 8–10, 18, 23–24, 28–30, 35–36, 183n28, 186m20, 186–7n25. (see also periodical club) heterosocial, 46–47, 52–53, 77, 132 (see also salons) masculine ethos of, 8, 15, 13–14, 18, 24–25, 32–41, 48–50 public sphere and, 25–36 (see also coffeehouses; Habermas, JГјrgen; public sphere) coffeehouses, 4, 8, 18, 24–26, 170 critiques of, 26–27, 31–32, 34–35, 40–41, 45–46, 48, 53–54, 102, 186n20 female participation in, 32–33, 50–55, 186n21, 188n50, 189n53 (see also female community; Distaff, Jenny; Crackenthorpe, Mrs. Phoebe) masculine ethos of, 8, 18, 24–25, 32–39 origins of the periodical in, 27–30 rival public sphere, 26–30, 32–33 See also clubs; periodical club Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 80 Colburn, Henry, 72, 73 Combe, George, 98, 99 Contemporary Review, 154, 183n28 Conversation: gender and, 33–35, 39–41, 68, 76–77, 80–87, 188n51 limitations of, 102, 120, 198n70, 213n149 as literary motif, 8, 28–29, 57–59, 80–87, 194n13

salon culture and, 103–7 (see also dialogue; salon) Crackenthorpe, Mrs. Phoebe, 45–47, 53, 126–27. See also Female Tatler; Manley, Delarivier criticism: amateur, 73–76 definition and scope of, 5, 16–17, 21, 99, 167–68, 184–85n52, 215n37 dialogism and, 10, 19, 27, 29, 30, 39, 58, 70, 80, 88, 102, 201n8, 202n20 (see also conversation; dialogue) feminist, 4, 5, 20–22, 166–68, 169–80 (see also feminism; women writers) combative spirit of, 56–61, 79–80, 194n15 Marxist, 5 postcolonial, 5 poststructuralist, 20–21, 170, 172–73 subjective, 73–76, 150, 153–67. See also dialogue; periodical; select authors Croker, John Wilson, 67–68, 195n37 Cross, John, 91 Cumberland, Princess Olivia, 62–62 Darwin, Charles, 141 Davies, Emily, 170 dialogue, 4, 8, 18–19, 28, 30, 34, 56–58, 80 195n30, 196n52. See also conversation; criticism; Jameson, Anna; Reeve, Clara. diary, 71–73, 77–78, 197n60 Dickens, Charles, 136 Distaff, Jenny, 37–44, 48, 52, 51–53, 83, 123, 126. See also Tatler; Bickerstaff, Isaac Dryden, John, 5, 14 Eastlake, Lady Elizabeth (née Rigby), 75–76, 198–99n72, 199n54 Edgeworth, Maria, 62–63, 196n52, 199n72 Edinburgh Review, 56, 59–60, 65, 79, 93, 98, 198–99n72 Eliot, George, 14, 19, 22, 150, 173, 201n6, 200n2, 202n20, 203n40, 203n61, 205n105 Adam Bede, 92, 107–9, 118 criticism of the novel, 107–8, 115–17, 118, 120, 121

criticophobia, 91–92, 111, 120, 123 editor of the Westminster Review, 92, 93, 96–100, 101, 102, 105, 115, 121–22, 202n26, 204n77 Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 92, 105, 118–23, 125 Middlemarch, 105, 110–15, 116, 118, 205n98 Page 237 →“Notes on Form in Art,” 108 salon culture and, 102–10, 176 Scenes of Clerical Life, 91, 107, 204n77 scientific discourse and, 19, 96–97, 99–100, 108–9, 110, 114–15 119, 122 “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” 22, 89–90, 115–17, 120, 121 social circle, 101–2, 123–24 “Woman in France,” 102–7, 109, 118, 120, 123 women’s movement and, 124–25, 175 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 154, 214n11 English Woman’s Journal, 31, 69, 71, 88, 124–25 Examiner, 8, 58 Faithfull, Emily, 71, 197n56 female community, 47 dysfunctional, 4–5, 23–24, 31–32, 35–36, 189n53, 189–90n54 fictional, 23–24, 35–36, 46–47, 49–54, 177–79, 189n53, 189–90n54 professional organizations, 19, 128–129, 135, 178 (see also specific organizations) See also bluestockings; Female Spectator; Langham Place Group; Regina’s Maids of Honour; salons Female Spectator, 48–53, 71. See also Haywood, Eliza Female Tatler, 37, 45–47, 53, 190–91n80. See also Crackenthorpe, Mrs. Phoebe feminism classification, 19–21, 127–36, 139, 141–50, 157–59, 173–75, 206n2 contemporary issues, 4, 20–22, 135–36, 166–68, 170–80 essentialism, 104–5, 168, 204n63 intersectionality, 19–20, 21, 166–67 postfeminism, 166

See also women; women writers Fielding, Sarah, 35–36 Foucault, Michel, 54, 157 France, Anatole, 152 Fraserians, 8, 14, 58, 80, 64, 65, 80, 183n28 Fraser’s Magazine, 1, 8, 57, 59, 60–67, 61–63, 65–67, 68, 195n37. See also Fraserians; Regina’s Maids of Honour Fraser, Hugh, 60 gallantry, 64–69, 76–77, 83–87, 117, 145, 193n4, 193n5, 195–96n43 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 157–59 Grant, James, 60 Greeley, Horace, 96 Gruppe, Otto Friedrich, 97–98 Habermas, Jürgen, 21, 26, 27, 30, 32–33, 44, 103. See also public sphere Hall, Maria, 65, 66 Haywood, Eliza, 18, 50, 173, 192n116. See also Female Spectator Hazlitt, William, 8, 18, 56–57, 60, 65, 193n6. See also Round Table Hogg, James, 12, 61, 87 Holland, Elizabeth Vassall Fox, Lady, 61–62 Horner, Frances, 98 Hume, David, 33–34 Hunt, Leigh, 8 Huxley, Aldous, 152 Huxley, Thomas, 140–41, 143 Irigaray, Luce, 171–72 James, Henry, 152, 211n105 James, William, 4, 153–54 Jameson, Anna, 14, 19, 92, 127, 144, 159, 173, 178, 193–94n8, 196n46, 196n52, 196–97n54, 197n56, 197n59, 215n37 amateurism and, 73–76

Characteristics of Women, Moral, Political, and Historical (Shakespeare’s Heroines), 79, 83–87, 123, 200n107 Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies, 74, 196–97n54 critical dialogue and, 19, 57–58, 66, 69–70, 71, 83–87 (see also dialogue) critical responses to, 78–79, 87–88 Diary of an EnnuyГ©e, 71–78, 84 female community and, 70–71, 175 Guidebook to the National Gallery, 78 Page 238 →Jameson, Anna (continued) “Letter to the Right Honourable Lord John Russell,” 69–70 Memoirs of Celebrated Female Sovereigns, 70 Memoirs of the Loves of the Poets, 70, 79 on periodical literature, 69–70, 79–80, 89–90. See also Langham Place Group Jeffrey, Francis, 59–60, 65, 98, 198–9n72. See also Edinburgh Review Johnson, Samuel, 35, 63, 130 Judy, 130 La Bruyere, Jean de, 103, 105 La Rochefoucauld, FranГ§ois de, 103, 105–6 Lamb, Charles, 169 Landon, Letitia Elizabeth (L.E.L.), 57, 65, 66, 193n5, 198n67, 198n70 Landor, Walter Savage, 8, 80, 136 Langham Place Group, 71, 170, 197n56 Lee, Vernon, 14, 150, 173, 175, 178 Althea, 159–66, 168 antisocial behavior, 19, 128, 165, 166–67, 214n11 Baldwin, 155–57, 164 boundary crossing, 151–53, 156–57, 160–61, 166–67, 170, 213n165 critical detachment, 161–63, 166 critical responses to, 151, 165, 213n149

pseudonym, 151, 157 Sibylla, 167 “social self,” 153–55, 160–61 Woman Question, 157–59 Levy, Amy, 129 Lewes, George Henry, 91, 101, 117, 123, 124, 203n61 Linton, Eliza Lynn, 14, 19–20, 152, 153, 173 “Affronted Womanhood,” 145–46 Amymone, 137 antifeminist views, 19, 128, 137–43, 157–58, 165, 207n10 Christopher Kirkland, 210n69 critical responses to, 137–40, 148–49 “Girl of the Period, The,” 137, 149 “Ourselves,” 149–50 “Plain Girls,” 144 professional background, 136–37 “Shrieking Sisterhood, The,” 137, 143 Sowing the Wind, 144–49, 151 Lockhart, John, 12, 59, 61, 87. See also tavern sages London Magazine, 59, 71 London Review, 1 Low, Frances, 133 Mackay, Robert, 96, 97 Maclise, Daniel, 8, 63–66 Macmillan’s Magazine, 89 Maginn, William, 56–7, 60, 63 Manley, Delarivier, 18, 190–91n80. See also Crackenthorpe, Phoebe; Female Tatler Martineau, Harriet, 65, 96, 116 Martineau, James, 97, 99

Maurice, F.D., 88–90 Meynell, Alice, 126 Mill, John Stuart, 4, 19, 92, 94–96, 97, 102, 111 Mitford, Mary Russell, 65 Moncrieff, William Glen, 97 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 24 More, Hannah, 20, 63, 195n30, 196n52 Morgan, Lady Sydney (nГ©e Owenson), 61–62, 65–68, 195n37 Murray, John, 60, 198–99n72 New Monthly Magazine, 56, 59, 60–61, 65, 69, 193n6 Nordau, Max, 157 Norton, Caroline, 65 “Old Saloon,” 10–12, 15–16, 176. See also Oliphant, Margaret Oliphant, Margaret, 10–12, 15–16, 60, 72, 117, 144, 196–97n54, 201n2, 209–10n65. See also Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine; “Old Saloon” Ouida (Maria Louise RamГ©), 152 Owen, Robert, 136 Parkes, Bessie Rayner, 31, 69, 71, 88, 124–25, 172 Pascal, Blaise, 103 Page 239 →Pater, Walter, 156 periodical culture: coffeehouse culture and, 27–35 (see also coffeehouses; periodical club) collectivity and, 3, 6, 8, 10, 13, 18, 25, 28–30, 37, 50, 54–55, 60–61, 71, 103, 106, 129, 178, 201n8 (see also periodical club) critical responses to, 44–46, 69–70, 91–92, 99–100, 106–7 female contributors, 6, 65, 106, 127, 129, 130–32, 135–36 treatment of women, 1–2, 6, 25, 38–39, 65–67 (see also under women) See also specific authors; specific titles periodical club, 10, 13, 16, 18, 22, 24–32, 35–36, 38, 44, 47, 49–54, 62, 60, 63–64, 190–91n80, 192n109. See also Spectator; Tatler Plato, 163–64

Porter, Jane, 65 pseudonyms. See anonymity public sphere, 25–33, 40, 44, 64, 102, 103, 215n31. See also under clubs; coffeehouses; Habermas, Jürgen Punch, 130, 131 Quarterly Review, 59, 60, 65, 67, 79, 93, 198–99n72 Rambouillet, Catherine de Vivonne, marquise de, 104 Randolph, Thomas, 84–85 Rambler, 31 Reeve, Clara, 80–83, 85 Regina’s Maids of Honour, 65–67, 72, 83. See also Fraser’s Magazine Richardson, William, 85 Robinson, Mary, 152 Robinson, Henry Crabbe, 78 Round Table, 8, 58. See also Hazlitt, William Ruskin, John, 75–76, 78, 199n54, 214n11 Sablé, Madeleine de Souvré, marquise de, 102, 105–106, 122 salons, 4, 16, 19, 23, 26, 62, 76–7, 92, 100–109, 115–16, 119, 122, 123–24, 136, 152, 176. See also bluestockings Saturday Review, 91, 137, 149–50 Sayn-Wittgenstein, Princess Caroline, 101–102 Schlegel, Friedrich, 85 Scott, John, 60 Serres, Olivia (née Wilmot). See Cumberland, Princess Olivia Shakespeare, William, 70, 79, 82–83, 85–86, 201n219 Simcox, Edith, 128 Simmel, Georg, 19 sociability, See clubs; coffeehouses; conversation; dialogue; female community; periodical club Society of Authors, 129 Society of Women Journalists, 128–29, 178 Solmar, Henriette, 104

Spectator,The, 8, 13, 18, 30, 31, 34, 39, 48–52, 106, 151, 189–90n54, 192n109. See also Steele, Richard Spencer, Herbert, 4, 19, 92, 94, 95–96, 97, 99–100, 101, 102, 108–9, 110, 114, 115, 119, 122, 136, 141–42, 203n40 Stead, W.T., 133–35, 145, 208n31 Steele, Richard, 33, 38–41, 43, 44–45, 49, 53, 192n108. See also Spectator; Tatler Symonds, John Addington, 152, 165 Tatler, The, 8, 14, 18, 27, 31, 37–45, 49, 52–53, 106, 190n56. See also Addison, John; Steele, Richard tavern sages, 8, 9, 10–12, 14–16, 58, 61, 65, 80, 87–88. See also Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine; Hogg, James; Lockhart, John Thackeray, William Makepeace, 136, 204n77 Tinsley’s Magazine, 132–33, 138,–39 Tomahawk, The, 137–9 Trollope, Anthony, 102, 132 university, 62 169, 170–73, 175, 177, 180 Page 240 →Victoria Press, 182n17, 197n56 Ward, Mary, 165 Westminster Review, 90, 92, 93–100, 101–7, 110 115, 118, 121–22, 204n77 Wilde, Oscar, 156 Wilson, John (“Chistopher North”), 12, 87–88, 199n72. See also tavern sages Wollstonecraft, Mary, 68–69, 76–77, 173, 175, 195–96n43, 196n46 Woman’s Book, 132 women: advanced woman, 61–62, 130–31, 136–43, 149, 151 domestic angel, 134, 144, 151 “girl of the period,” 127, 130, 137, 138–39, 142, 149 learned woman, 1, 4–5, 24, 41–42, 61–63, 67, 84–85, 190n56, 192n108, 193n6 masculine woman, 19, 57, 127, 131–35, 146–48, 151, 163 New Woman, 127, 135, 208n25 proper lady, 24, 57, 73, 78, 80–81, 127, 193n4 women’s movement, 71, 135, 182–83n17.

See also feminism; select authors; women writers Women and Work, 129 women writers: attacks on, 1–2, 23–24, 57, 61–63, 67, 87, 92, 115–17, 120–21, 129–34, 137–39, 163, 167 and the canon, 1–2, 6–7, 55 classification of, 20–1, 88–90, 122, 179. (see also under feminism) female critic in fiction, 23–24, 110–116, 144–49, 151, 159–66, 168 (see also Distaff, Jenny; Crackenthorpe, Phoebe; specific works) limited opportunities, 15, 25, 128–29, 135 professionalization, 3, 6–8, 19, 21, 22, 65–66, 117, 126–36, 143–49, 176–77 solitary authoress, 57–58, 70–74, 178 (see also under Jameson, Anna) See also select authors; women Women’s Advocate, 129 Women’s Penny Paper, 129 Woman’s Signal, 129 Women’s Suffrage Journal, 129 Women’s Union Journal, 129 Woolf, Virginia, 170 A Room of One’s Own, 169, 173, 176–77 Three Guineas, 177–79, 209–10n65, 215n31 See also Bloomsbury Writer’s Club, 128