Scribbling Women Or The Lady Novelist

Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life and it ought not to be.

—Robert Southey, Poet Laureate (1837)

The number of youthful novelists and of young lady novelists passes calculation...Indeed; the supply of the fiction market has fallen mainly into their hands.

—W. R. Greg (1859)

...out of every twelve novels or poems that are written, nine at least are written by ladies...They have carried off the accumulated raw material from under men’s noses.

—Wilkie Collins (1858)

And that singular anomaly, the lady novelist, I don’t think that she’d be missed—I’m sure she’d not be missed.

—W. S. Gilbert (1885)

America is now wholly given over to a d----d mob of scribbling women and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their hash....All women, as authors, are feeble and tiresome.

—Nathaniel Hawthorne

Women Writers

From 1800 to 1935 twenty percent of published writers were women, although the complaints from the men, as represented above, indicated that they felt outnumbered. For most women, writing was the only source of revenue other than needlework or tutoring, and writing often paid very well. About half of the women writers in the nineteenth century were unmarried and there were many married women who were motivated to write by their husbands’ financial failure, illness, or death. Some of them turned out as many as five three-deckers a year.

Women writers wrote political, religious, realistic, sentimental, sensational, and silver fork novels—and everything else. Some wrote romantic trash and some wrote brilliant social reform novels. Some were imitative in style and plot, and others were startlingly original. Some wrote from a New Woman perspective, some were furiously anti-suffragette. Some exhibited great learning, others were exceedingly ignorant, some highly intellectual and others stupefyingly dull. Many were boldly outspoken and daring and manly, others were cloyingly status quo. They did it all.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon 1837-1915

When Miss Braddon was four her mother left her womanizing husband and, while living in extreme poverty, managed to educate her three children on her own. At the age of 20, the future novelist went onto the stage and was able through her acting to support her family. She also wrote and sold stories and poems for magazines. In 1860 she met the publisher John Maxwell and lived with him for 14 years before the death of his wife allowed them to marry, acting as stepmother to his five children and bearing him six of her own.

In 1862, she published Lady Audley’s Secret. There were eight editions in the first year alone, and Sadleir has six editions (plus three editions of a play based on the novel) within his collection. This novel remained a sensation for over 50 years and made its author a rich woman. Famed for founding the sensational novel, she wrote over 80 novels, of which only 20 or so are in that category. She also wrote historical novels, novels of manners, supernatural novels, and religious novels, as well as many poems, plays and articles for magazines, several of which she edited.

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8 9 ‘04

Dear Sir

I much regret that I cannot comply with your request for a photograph. But, as I explained to Mr. R. de Cordova, I have never consented to the publication of my portrait and I could not make an exception without apparent discourtesy to the many editors who, from time to time, have honored me by a similar invitation. Personally, I have derived so much comfort (when travelling, with hotel acquaintance etc.) as an un-photographed person not readily “spotted” as a scribbler or forthwith compelled to discuss one’s scribbling with affable strangers, that I should be sorry now to wake and find myself pictorially famous. Equally sorry should I be to seem negligent of Mr. Harmsworth’s kindly informed wish in the matter, and I therefore beg to be excused thus lengthily. I think nowadays so much more interest is taken in people’s houses and surroundings than in the people themselves, that I really do not consider that the article will suffer loss of attractiveness by the absence of a portrait.

------------ Transcript of autograph letter signed by Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

Marie Corelli 1855-1924

The illegitimate daughter of the editor and writer Charles Mackay, she was adopted and raised by him. She assumed the name Marie Corelli when she intended to have a career in music, but when her goals switched to the written word she retained the name. She was scorned and ridiculed by the critics for her faulty grammar and her sensational indictments of socialism, agnosticism, secular education, the vices of the rich and other evils she perceived, but the public couldn’t get enough of her. Many of the twenty-eight romantic, religious, preachy novels she wrote between 1886 and 1921 were runaway best sellers. At the height of her popularity she earned as much as £10,000 per novel.

In 1886 Bentley published her first novel, A Romance of Two Worlds, inspired, claimed Corelli, by “a peculiar psychic occurrence.” It preaches the gospel of the Electric Creed which cures all illness and malady. This novel proved popular, and Marie Corelli wrote in a letter to the publisher Tuer:

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[November 12, 1888]

I will merely add that the “Romance” is selling enormously just now in the 6/.[shilling] edition of “Bentley’s Favorites”—much to that estimable publisher’s satisfaction, and that it brings me letters from unknown correspondents in all parts of the world, which I really have no time to answer—very remarkable letters too, as showing the various grades of speculative thought in different races and nations.

--------------Transcript of autograph letter signed by Marie Corelli to the publisher, Tuer.

Rhoda Broughton 1840-1920

Quick feminine perception, humour both demure and malicious, a genuine lack of moral indignation and an instinctive knowledge of the invisible antennae which human beings put out towards others of their kind, entitle her to rank as one of the exponents of a contemporary scene whose work deserves to be remembered.

—Michael Sadleir

Her first novel, Not Wisely But Too Well, was published in 1867, when she was 27. In order to get it published, she needed to expand her original concept to the full required three volumes, which accounts for the looseness of structure evident in all of her work. Her books sold very well, but she did not retain copyright; they were sold outright to her publishers.

E. Lynn Linton 1822-1898

The twelfth child of the vicar of Crosthwaite, Cumberland, Eliza Lynn Linton was self-taught, although several of her brothers were educated and some of that rubbed off. At the age of 17 she was an avowed skeptic, independent and hungry for knowledge and learning. Her father sponsored her to a trial year in London, where she read in the British Museum and produced a novel of “staggering erudition,” Azeth the Egyptian, which she published at her own expense. The reviewers were kind, and her father agreed to her remaining in London.

She worked as a journalist, a foreign correspondent, and a writer of short stories and novels. She married William James Linton, a well-known engraver, recently widowed. They parted after seven years of marriage, during which time she supported him and his seven children from his earlier marriages, but they were never divorced.

Many of her novels dealt with the problems of women, all condemning the emancipated woman and attacking higher education for women, the “New Woman.” Her novels border on the sensational but, they have serious moral and social overtones. The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland was a veiled autobiography of herself.

Mrs. Linton was a constant writer in the periodicals of her day. Between 1870 and 1871 she published at least 225 essays and stories in Saturday Review, All the Year Round, and Queen. In March of 1868 she wrote a particularly anti-feminist article for the Saturday Review, titled “The Girl of the Period.” It caused a great furor and led to a flurry of heated responses typified by this caricature which appeared less than three weeks later in The Tomahawk.

Ouida 1839-1908

The daughter of a country teacher Marie Louise de la Ramée, was known by her childhood nickname, “Ouida.” When Ouida was dying, neglected and in extreme poverty, Marie Corelli and other friends obtained a civil-list pension for the extravagant, flamboyant, glamorous, and in her day, wildly successful writer of 44 novels. She is best known today for her Under Two Flags and The Dog of Flanders.

Ouida wrote romantic adventure novels dealing with mistaken identity, bigamy, revenge, and the aristocracy which were well received by her readers, who included Bulwer-Lytton and Henry James. She lived recklessly, heedless of her copyrights. She earned nothing from her cheap reprints.

She lived in Florence from 1874 in grand style in a villa devoted to her undomesticated dogs. At the end of her career she wrote articles for journals on literary subjects, anti-vivisection, anti-woman’s suffrage, and other causes about which she felt strongly. Her novel Puck [1934] is the monologue of a dog.

Her manner of composition was well known: she wrote on gray paper in purple ink, tossing each completed page on the floor as she wrote.

Mrs. Oliphant 1828-1897

Mrs. Oliphant sold her brain, her very admirable brain, prostituted her culture and enslaved her intellectual liberty in order that she might earn her living and educate her children.

—Virginia Woolf

Writer of 98 novels, 50 or more short stories, 25 works of non-fiction, and over 300 articles published in periodicals, Mrs. Oliphant, as she always referred to herself, wrote historical, supernatural, sensational, regional, and domestic novels, and was a journalist, reviewer, editor, researcher, and biographer.

As a young widow she supported her six children, three of whom died in infancy, and several nieces and nephews and their families solely through her writing. Her publishers included Blackwood, Hurst & Blackett, Scribners, Smith, Elder & Co., and Ward & Downey. She sold serialization, collected editions, copyrights indiscriminately, not keeping track of who advanced how much for what, getting in and out of debt.

In her autobiography she says, “...I have done very well for a woman and a friendless woman with no one to make the best of me, and quite unable to do that for myself. I never could fight for a higher price or do anything but trust to the honour of those I had to deal with...I have written because it gave me pleasure, because it came natural to me, because it was like talking or breathing, besides the big fact that it was necessary for me to work for my children.”

Mrs. Humphry Ward 1851-1920

The niece of Matthew Arnold and granddaughter of Thomas Arnold, the well known headmaster of Rugby, Mrs. Ward worked with her husband, a writer for The London Times, to encourage the admission of women to Oxford. The mother of three children, she was a scholar of early Spanish church history.

In 1888 she published the bestselling novel Robert Elsmere [3293], the story of the loss of faith of its clergyman hero. It sold 200,000 copies in the United States alone, and marketing history was made in the rush to distribute it. Price wars and tie-ins were introduced: a soap company even offered a bar of soap with the purchase of a novel. It was attacked by the clergy, guaranteeing more readership, and became the subject of intense theological debates.

Continuing to write novels, she devoted much of her time to establishing a settlement house for the poor, play centers, a nursery for working women, and engaging in social and political causes. She was a woman of great influence well into the twentieth century and enjoyed popularity, wealth, and esteem.

Sept. 5, 1888

Dear Sir

I cannot refrain from sending a few lines of thanks for your warm and welcome letter about my book. To write it was a long and often a painful effort, and it is a great delight now to see that the effort was worth making, and that what stirred me to imagine has touched others to read. I am grateful for all such expressions of sympathy as yours. They brace one, and make the work of the future look more possible...

---Believe me

Yours very faithfully

Mary A. Ward

Feb. 23 ‘98

Dear Madam,

With regard to your letter I can only reply that to me the difficulty you describe is not the one I set out to describe in Robert Elsmere. You must, I think, allow the story-teller the conditions of his art, and not ask him or her for what he did not mean to give you! As for the particular problem that you dwell on it is of course one of everyday life and one which commands all our sympathies, but it does not happen to be the one which formed the subject of Robert Elsmere.

Believe me,

Yours very faithfully

Mary A. Ward

Charlotte Mary Yonge 1823-1901

Her father told her that a lady published for three reasons only: love of praise, love of money, or the wish to do good. He allowed her to write didactic fiction only and then only if she gave the money to charity. He taught her mathematics, Latin and Greek, and she had a good background in modern languages and botany. John Keble, a founder of the Oxford Movement, was her mentor and friend, and he encouraged her to write.

Her first successful novel, published in 1853, The Heir of Redclyffe [3370], a story of repentance and Christianity, which was lauded by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris, launched her literary career, during which she produced more than 150 books.

In 1851 she became the editor of the Monthly Packet and remained its editor for 39 years. In the journal she says, “...it has been said that everyone forms their own character between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, and this Magazine is meant to be in some degree a help to those who are thus forming it.” She was a conscientious, thorough, intelligent and kind editor.

...I liked the opening of your story very much but I do not think the danger of our time is so much want of toleration as indifference to faith, and therefore I cannot accept it...

Dec. 23d 1852

Sir

I am obliged to you for forwarding the cheque for £25 for the first edition of the Two Guardians. I am at present too much engaged to think of publishing anything in the Churchman’s companion, though I am obliged to you for the proposal...

[Heir of Redclyffe was published in 1853]