MUCH MORE THAN AN ANTIFEMINIST: ELIZA LYNN LINTON’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE RISE OF VICTORIAN POPULAR JOURNALISM

Abstract

IT IS DIFFICULT TO DISCUSS the Victorian women’s rights movement and the antifeminist backlash which ensued without mentioning Eliza Lynn Linton’s contribution. Known primarily as the author of the notorious Saturday Review essay, “The Girl of the Period” (1868), Linton was and has been viewed primarily as an essayist who verbally lashed middle-class, progressive women. As late as the 1880s and 1890s, she maintained an active role in the woman-question debate, publishing her “Wild Women” essays, writing a New Woman novel, The New Woman in Haste and At Leisure, and reissuing her Girl of the Period (G.O.P) essays in volume form. Linton scholars have been particularly intrigued by the discrepancies between Linton’s emancipated lifestyle and the restricted one she advocated for other women. How could the first salaried woman journalist in England maintain such a hostile attitude towards her professionally inclined cohorts? More significantly, how could a woman who wrote one of the most radical, protofeminist novels of her time, Realities (1851), suddenly shift to promoting women’s subjection? Various, compelling answers have been offered to such questions. Vineta Colby, in The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century, and Elizabeth Helsinger, Robin Sheets, and William Veeder in The Woman Question. Society and Literature in Britain and America, 1837–1883 contend that the contradictions between Linton’s lifestyle and her antifeminist essays mirror Victorian England’s own contradictory attitudes regarding gender relations.¹