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BOOK REVIEW

Ann R. Hawkins and Maura Ives (eds.), Women Writers and the Artifacts of Celebrity in the Long Nineteenth Century. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2012, 280 pp., ISBN 978-0-7546-6702-5, hardcover, $99.95

Reviewed by Donna Parsons.

Living in the age of Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter where authors have the opportunity to post even the most mundane activity for on-line consumption, we forget that nineteenth-century women writers—as literary producers—faced many of the same questions regarding how to circulate, control and even manipulate their image and literary output in the public arena. The collection of essays edited by Ann R. Hawkins and Maura Ives provides a captivating study on the ways in which women writers, their family, publishers, journalists, historians, and even contemporary rivals were able to utilise diverse artifacts to promote their work and identity as an author, create a brand, and celebrate or even marginalise literary achievements and personal integrity. As the essays in this collection demonstrate, markers of celebrity ran the gamut of objects from memoirs, biographies, and interviews to portraiture, illustrations, calendars and even monograms. In her study on Alice Meynell, Linda H. Peterson poignantly notes that “it mattered not only what a poet wrote, but also how she presented herself in the public. Literary success required talent and genius, but also a keen sense of the marketplace” (181). Peterson’s assessment of Meynell and the female poet’s professional quandary is equally applicable to all of the writers surveyed in this collection. How did an individual and specifically a woman engage with her audience and keep their attention? How did she, her family, or even absolute strangers promote her creativity whilst at the same time emphasising her virtue and reputation as a lady? How were women and men able to cast their personal and professional lives as well as their works in a particular light even if the hue was slightly jaded? Were readers sophisticated enough to see through these prisms? The essays in this collection answer these questions as they survey literary output and levels of celebrity of a variety of British, American and Canadian women writers, ranging from those who remain anonymous to this day to famous names including George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, Christina Rossetti, Marie Corelli, Ellen Price Wood, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Alice Meynell, and Pauline Johnson.

Although the twelve essays are arranged in chronological order, several motifs are interwoven throughout the collection that links the essays together by more than just genre or a moment in time. One such motif deals with the idea of legacy. Katie Halsey and Jennifer Phegley explore the manner in which male family members have the ability to shape the public perception of a female author, her novels, and her work in the publishing industry after her death. In “ ‘Faultless Herself, As Nearly as Human Nature Can Be:’ The Construction of Jane Austen’s Public Image, 1817-1917,” Katie Halsey covers familiar territory in Austen research. She traces the publication history of Henry Austen’s “Biographical Notice of the Author” and James Edward Austen-Leigh’s memoir and demonstrates how the family’s downplaying of Austen’s literary merit and interest in the reception of her novels affected subsequent authors’ opinions of her work and character. While Elizabeth Barrett Browning “felt undermined and betrayed” (43) by Austen’s supposed lack of ambition, Mary Russell Mitford thought she was “an excellent role model” (45). Halsey argues that deeper insight into how early readers of Austen understood her life and the times in which the novels were set are gained by reading the marginalia written in first edition copies by those original readers.

The issue of legacy also comes into play when a son tries to establish himself as a reputable author and does so by distancing himself and his work from his more famous and successful mother. In “Motherhood, Authorship, and Rivalry: Sons’ Memoirs of the Lives of Ellen Price Wood and Mary Elizabeth Braddon” Jennifer Phegley analyses the lengths Charles Wood and W.B. Maxwell went to downplay their mothers’ literary accomplishments by depicting themselves in “more virile, modern, and professional roles” (189). In each son’s respective memoirs, the focus is on Wood and Braddon as mothers and wives rather than as working women and writers. Phegley notes that both sons had intimate knowledge of their mother’s working habits and skills with dealing with a myriad of issues regarding publication, yet provided scant details about their mothers’ careers. This is shocking given the insights they could have revealed, such as Ellen Price Wood’s behind the scenes steering of the Argosy (192).

The most intriguing essays in this collection examine how women authors were innovative in promoting their work and identity. Visual media such as portraiture and photographs; creating a distinct brand with book design; a signature or a monogram; when these artifacts appear in an author’s career; and how they were used to promote her work, analysis of these reveals important information about a particular stage of a woman writer’s celebrity and how she used artifacts to ascend further, to re-launch her career, or otherwise influence the reception of her work. In “The Portrait, the Beauty, and the Book: Celebrity and the Countess of Blessington,” Ann R. Hawkins explores how Lady Blessington’s reputation and celebrity was built on Thomas Lawrence’s famous portrait of her, which then led to her editorship of several books on the subject of beauty. The important question Hawkins raises concerns the role Lawrence’s portrait had in balancing or negating questions regarding Blessington’s personal life. Hawkins shows that the various ways in which the public interacted with Blessington’s portrait influenced their decision to purchase her works and how the relationship between author and reader came under intense scrutiny when her rivals publicised the “scandalous history” (52) of her personal life.

In “Commodifying the Self: Portraits of the Artist in the Novels of Marie Corelli,” Lizzie White focuses on the elusive Marie Corelli who limited her interaction with the press and who preferred to give journalists “a large reproduction of her signature” (205) rather than a photograph. Without visual documentation how did readers form a connection to the author? White argues that they and the critics had to engage in close readings of Corelli’s novels in order to learn more about her. She traces the history of biographers and critics who connected Corelli’s attributes to her heroines, as well as arguments which explore how using a heroine as an alter ego allowed Corelli to create more distance between her public and private persona. White presents an intriguing study of Corelli’s self-promotion and the tight control she held over her image and life story and its dissemination to the public. Indeed Corelli was the first to include “an elaborate monogram of [her] initials embossed in gold” on the front covers of Barabbas and The Sorrows of Satan. (207) Just as Corelli’s innovative use of text made her novels stand “out as distinctive” (207), so too could “[a] reader or buyer […] recognise a Meynell book by its cover” (176). In “Presenting Alice Meynell: The Book, the Photograph, and the Calendar,” Linda H. Peterson examines how the signifying artifacts changed as Meynell’s career progressed, and as she sought to align herself with “fin-de-siècle aestheticism” (169). Peterson notes that as Meynell’s reputation gained in stature, she moved from using her signature on the title page and utilising a unique cover design to the inclusion of photographs. She also notes that Meynell reached a wider audience when her portrait appeared in the 1897 “Modern Poets” calendar. Peterson argues that Meynell’s appearance in the month of February had nothing to do with it being the shortest month in the year or one that is connected to Valentine’s Day, but rather to her stature as a poet in that her photograph is placed in between January’s Swinburne and March’s William Morris (185).

The Birthday Book was the nineteenth century equivalent of today’s daily planner. Featuring photographs of a single writer and short excerpts from their works, it represented another way in which to integrate visual media with text. In “ ‘The Summit of an Author’s Fame:’ Victorian Women Writers and the Birthday Book,” Maura Ives critiques the manner in which excerpts from novels and poems printed in a Birthday Book could misconstrue readers’ interpretation of a character, a scene, or the means by which motifs were interwoven throughout a long narrative. Ives explains George Eliot’s concern with what she believed was the inappropriate snipping of novels and verse, and the selling of the Birthday Book as a crude commodity (104). Ives focuses extensively on the Rossetti Birthday Book where she explains that Christina Rossetti’s book was compiled after her death by her family who was more focused on her reputation and role as a dutiful daughter and sister than her stature as “one of the century’s most eminent woman poets” (109).

By the turn of the century, the female writer was ubiquitous, and the idea of a young woman pursuing a career as a journalist or creative writer was becoming less threatening to the public. In “Women Writers and Celebrity News at the Fin de Siècle,” Alexis Easley reminds us that women “were increasingly the subject of articles and profiles” (133). Surveying interviews and accompanying photographs of female authors in 1890s periodicals such as the World, the Queen, the Sketch, and the Strand, Easley examines how their “domestic arrangements, sexual identities, and professional opportunities” were impacted by an interview. What is most fascinating is the focus and formulaic nature of the articles. In her discussion of the profiles on Charlotte Robinson and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, she notes that while the interviewer describes the interior design and furnishings of each room in which an author writes, there is always an allusion to some scandalous aspect of the interviewee’s life: whether to Robinson’s life with her partner Emily Faithfull (136-37) or to Braddon’s “sexual past” (138).

In contrast, Helen C. Black was more charitable in her portrayal of the celebrity author. In “ ‘A Characteristic Product of the Present Era:’ Gender and Celebrity in Helen C. Black’s Notable Women Authors of the Day (1893)” Troy J. Bassett documents Black’s work as a journalist and author and then examines how Black used the celebrity interview in her journalism and in Notable Women Authors of the Day to convey the idea that women can be both women and authors. Bassett notes that while Black’s interviews are formulaic she also foregrounds domesticity as a means to “present the author as non-threatening” (156). Holding the interview in the author’s home allowed Black to show her readers that they had much in common with the author in profile. Black broke away from this formula when she interviewed her friends Sarah Grand and Marie Corelli. Her line of questioning changed as Black engaged with each author’s “sometimes controversial views” (164) as a means of showing “her essential womanliness” (164), while Black subtly explained the need for educational opportunities and equality in marriage.

Women Writers and the Artifacts of Celebrity in the Long Nineteenth Century paints a dazzling kaleidoscope of the manner in which artifacts were used to reveal more details about the nature of celebrity culture and how various objects were utilised as a means to celebrate or marginalise women’s artistic achievements. At the same time, the essays demonstrate the diverse ways in which material culture was manipulated to present a particular image or to conceal specific details about a writer’s life. Most intriguingly this collection highlights the vast array of artifacts scholars can examine to determine when an author’s celebrity was on the ascent, at its height, even the moment when it began to wane. It provides a foundation for further research into the dialogue between celebrity, artifacts, and literary achievement.

Donna S. Parsons is a lecturer in Honors and Music at the University of Iowa. She is the 2013 recipient of the Outstanding Honors Teaching Award. Her essays on popular culture have appeared in the Des Moines Register and the North American British Music Studies Association Newsletter. Her research project examines the musical resonances heard in Michael Field's works.