Drawing from letters, contracts, and other archival material, Linda Peterson details the careers of various women authors from the Victorian period. Some adopted the practices of their male counterparts and wrote for periodicals before producing a best-seller; others began in literary partnerships with their husbands and pursued independent careers later in life; and yet others wrote from obscure parsonages or isolated villages, hoping an acclaimed novel might spark a meteoric rise to fame. Peterson considers these women authors’ successes and failures–the critical esteem that led to financial rewards and lasting reputations, as well as the initial successes undermined by publishing trends and pressures.

“For the case studies, I have chosen six women of letters whose careers reveal new possibilities for the professional woman author and whose commentaries on their literary lives reveal the obstacles they faced and the strategies by which they succeeded (partially, if not wholly). All professionally innovative, these women took different approaches to authorship — approaches determined in part by their historical moment, in part thrust upon them by the demands of the marketplace, in part adopted as expressions of highly personal values and contingencies. The case studies do not, as one of my readers noted, ’round up the usual suspects’ (though canonical figures appear frequently in this book); rather, I have focused on women whose literary innovations and public self-constructions are pivotal in the history of authorship. I alternate women whose lives were marked by professional success and literary esteem with lesser-known writers, famous in their day, uncanonical now, but nonetheless representative of important models of nineteenth-century authorship” (Peterson, 6).

Call Number: 820.9 P485B