Women Novelists Re-Presented for Victoria's Jubilee

When  Hurst & Blackett  of London commissioned living women novelists to write "appreciations" about dead women novelists who had published during the sixty years of  Queen Victoria 's reign, they knew the authors' names on the title page would attract attention, and the book was well received in 1897. But today, few readers recognize these names, even that of the famed novelist and critic  Margaret Oliphant . Have non-specialists read any novels by the contributors to this collection? What can we learn from a closer look at this early example of what we now call feminist literary criticism?

If we look at the contents, are we in a little more familiar territory?

 The   Bron  tës ,  George Elio t,  Elizabeth Gaskell .

But  Mrs. Crowe ?

Who indeed was  Edna Lyall , and did she often  publish  with  Hurst & Blackett ?

A modern book jacket advertises works by today-forgotten novelists, mostly women, in a list from the publisher of  Women Novelists of Queen Victoria's Reign . Let's call it WNQVR (win-quiver).

Here is more puzzling assortment and perhaps more clue as to the designs of this book.

 Dinah Craik , like  Caroline Norton  and some on the first page of Contents including  Charlotte Yonge , is regaining attention in this century after a notable Victorian career.

The book does not apparently have an editor.

Anonymously, the Publishers explain: to get in the book you had to be dead. And your publishing career needed to begin after 1837, when the teenage  queen  was crowned.

Much more could be said about the list of those left out of this collection of essays by nine living novelists about seventeen immortal mortals. That same year,  Oliphant  died.

 Henry Blackett and Daniel William Stow Hurst  entered publishing after taking over the business of  Henry   Colburn , an esteemed publisher, in 1853. In the 1895 London Post Office Directory, they are sited at 13 Great Marlborough Street, approximately at the blue pin in the map below. The men died in 1870 and 1871; the business was taken over by Blackett’s sons.

Publishers mapped above (scroll to see more to the East) include some, such as Blackwood, that published contributors (Oliphant) and subjects (George Eliot). Publishers such as Longman, Green; Cassells; and Ward, Lock are identifiable as publishers of collective biographies in CBW. The printers noted in WNQVR, Ballantyne, Hanson & Co, 14 Tavistock St. Covent Garden WC, published a volume comparable to WNQVR, Helen C. Black’s Notable Women Authors of the Day, 1893.

WNQVR: A patriotic, souvenir sort of production near the end of a century of remarkable achievement by women in the realm of novels. We began to wonder what "Victoria's Reign" meant for selecting novelists, besides the chronology of their lives and careers. Did it mean English? Were they always in England, or born in England?

As seen above, most of the biographical subjects were born in England, with the exception of  Julia Kavanagh  (Tipperary, Ireland). The majority of the contributors were also born in England, although the author who contributed to WNQVR under the pen name  Mrs. Alexander  was born Annie French in Dublin, and contributor  Mrs. Oliphant  was born Margaret Wilson Oliphant in Wallyford, Scotland. Within England, the subjects' birthplaces form a small group in London and a larger chain from  Mrs. Henry Wood  (born Ellen Price in Worcester) north to the  Brontës   in   Thornton . The contributors' birthplaces tend to visually surround these groupings, suggesting a natal peripherality for contributors such as  Edna Lyall  (Brighton) and  Mrs. Marshall  (Norfolk) and early access to literary communities outside England for contributors such as Annie French and Mrs. Oliphant.

Despite the proximity of their birthplaces in England, Ireland, and Scotland, the writers who were subjects of or contributors to WNQVR had important experiences traveling beyond these locations. The following map selects one significant location from each figure's life that is not the birth place or death place. These locations show some overlaps and convergences among different writers' travels, often separated by time.

Follow this map by the tile images with dates on the left of the map: a selection of an experience abroad for contributors and subjects of WNQVR.

As noted earlier,  Hurst and Blackett  specifically requested that the chapters evaluate the works of novelists who had died by the time WNQVR was  published . Thus in the  fifth  chapter, contributor  Charlotte M. Yonge  depicted and evaluated the careers of  Lady Georgiana Fullerton  (d. 1885), Mrs. Stretton (d. 1878) and  Anne Manning  (d. 1879) (not in order of date of death), indicating some missing information on both their lives and their publications. The map of death locations seems to cluster the figures as tightly as the map of birthplaces, representing eight figures in southern England,  three  ( all   Brontës ) in northern England, and one ( Caroline Clive ) in western England. Notable exceptions to this tighter geographic cluster include  Julia Kavanagh , who died in Nice, and  A.L.O.E. (Charlotte Maria Tucker , whose pen name is an acronym for A Lady of England), who died in Amritsar.

WNQVR's first publication ( London: Hurst & Blackett , 1897) connected numerous geographical locations beyond those shown in the maps above. Hurst & Blackett wrote to the various contributors to request and coordinate their portrayals of each biographical subject, condensing the contributions into physical volumes published in London and able to be transported to any location. This transportability across space and time facilitated the late twentieth-century reprints of WNQVR in Pennsylvania --  Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Library , 1969;  Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Library , 1974;  Norwood, PA: Norwood , 1977.

Hurst & Blackett had and continued important publishing relationships with WNQVR contributors.

Beyond memorializing the individual novelists in the biographies, the contributors to WNQVR interpreted their task as shaping the literary landscape for all nineteenth-century Anglophone women authors, including themselves. To this end, they included extensive literary criticism in their chapters, and to some extent mingled this literary criticism with criticism of each author's lives. The contributors' letters reveal significant differences of opinion and strong sympathies among various authors:

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