Women Writers and the Artifacts of Celebrity in the Long Nineteenth Century

by Ann R. Hawkins (Editor), Maura Ives (Editor)

In 1788, the Catalogue of Five Hundred Celebrated Authors of Great Britain, Now Living forecast a form of authorship that rested on biographical revelation and media saturation as well as literary achievement. This collection traces the unique experiences of women writers within a celebrity culture that was intimately connected to the expansion of print technology and of visual and material culture in the nineteenth century. The contributors examine a wide range of artifacts, including prefaces, portraits, frontispieces, birthday books, calendars and gossip columns, to consider the nature of women's celebrity and the forces that created it. How did authors like Jane Austen, the Countess of Blessington, Louisa May Alcott, Alice Meynell, and Marie Corelli negotiate the increasing demands for public revelation of the private self? How did gender shape the posthumous participation of women writers such as Jane Austen, Ellen Wood, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Christina Rossetti in celebrity culture? These and other important questions related to the treatment of women in celebrity genres and media, and the strategies women writers used to control their public images, are taken up in this suggestive exploration of how nineteenth and early twentieth century women writers achieved popular, critical, and commercial success.

296 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2012

Reviews

[Lorraine]

This collection of essays is so good. Not a dud among them. Included are several articles about Marie Corelli, one about Alice Meynell, and another about Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Mrs. Henry Wood. All the articles are about 19th-century women writers and how they cultivated or eschewed celebrity (or how their descendants made choices about their legacies after their deaths). Lots of really good stuff about print and visual artifacts of celebrity (for example, the birthday book or the use of signatures and photos/portraits on the frontispieces of novels). Apparently most scholarship about celebrity culture has defined it as a phenomenon that begins in the early 20th century with the advent of movies, which is nuts to any Victorianist LOL, so a lot of space is devoted to showing that the antecedents of modern celebrity culture start much earlier than media studies often allows. I think this collection is easy to read, interesting, and accessible beyond the scholar. Highly recommended.