Constructing Women Readers and Writers: Introduction

Summary

WHEN AURORA LEIGH, the eponymous poet-protagonist of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's (1806–61) epic ‘novel in verse,’ discovers that ‘In England, no one lives by verse that lives,’ she moves beyond the rarefied sphere of poetry to secure a regular income by writing for the periodical press (1993: 3.307). Like many Victorian poets, Aurora writes for ‘cyclopedias, magazines, / And weekly papers’ (3.310), undertaking what she considers to be inferior hack work that appeals to the taste of ‘light readers’ (3.319). For Aurora, poetry, as a cerebral and pure form of art, should not be tainted by the vulgar dictates of the commercial marketplace. While Barrett Browning would have acquiesced with the spirit of the value-laden dichotomy that Aurora identifies between writing for art and writing for the market, she nevertheless balanced her own sense of poetry's elevated artistic value against a pragmatic understanding of the cultural and economic significance of periodicals for the careers of literary authors. Her first publicly published poems appeared in the New Monthly Magazine (1814–84) in 1821, and she continued to place poetry intermittently in periodicals and newspapers in Britain and America throughout her career in spite of her deep reservations about the press as a suitable medium for poets. Moreover, as her letters reveal, Barrett Browning was also an avid reader of newspapers and periodicals, including press reviews of her own works, which she analysed forensically. In this sense, even when she refused press commissions, her poetic work was nevertheless still bound up with the cultural economy of the periodical industry, which had a shaping influence on the literary reception and sales of books.

As this example illustrates, active participation with the press was an instrumental facet of the literary labour of Victorian authors. This was especially the case for women, who regularly looked to the ever-expanding periodical press for opportunities to attract a reading audience for their work. For many of the period's foremost women writers, including poets like Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti (1830–94) and novelists such as Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–65) and George Eliot (1819–80), it was in the pages of newspapers and magazines that their literary works were debuted to the public.