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

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.

Contents: Preface; Introduction: women writers and the artifacts of celebrity, Maura Ives; Celebrity and anonymity in the Monthly Review's notices of 19th-century novels, Stephanie Eckroth; 'Faultless herself, as nearly as human nature can be': the construction of Jane Austen's public image, 1817-1917, Katie Halsey; The portrait, the beauty, and the book: celebrity and the Countess of Blessington, Ann R. Hawkins; 'A place among its more successful sisters': Louisa May Alcott's wayward Moods, Catherine S. Blackwell; 'The summit of an author's fame': Victorian women writers and the Birthday Book, Maura Ives; 'Almost idolatrous love': Caroline Dall, Sarah Knowles Bolton, Mary C. Crawford and the case of Elizabeth Whitman, Jennifer Harris; Women writers and celebrity news at the fin de siècle, Alexis Easley; '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; Presenting Alice Meynell: the book, the photograph, and the calendar, Linda H. Peterson; Motherhood, authorship, and rivalry: sons' memoirs of the lives of Ellen Price Wood and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Jennifer Phegley; Commodifying the self: portraits of the artist in the novels of Marie Corelli, Lizzie White; Pauline Johnson and celebrity in Canada: 'the most unique fixture in the literary world of today', Carole Gerson; Works cited; Index.