EER
Eliza Lynn Linton
Fiona Snailham
Edward Everett Root Publishers Co. Ltd.
About this book
This concise new book, the first on Lynn Linton since 1987, considers the author’s oeuvre as a whole, placing its subject in new contexts and positioning Lynn Linton as a producer of popular texts designed to intervene in the key debates of her time.
Revealing its subject to be an astute manipulator of the literary marketplace, this book establishes Lynn Linton as a key participant in the nineteenth-century knowledge economy and argues for the restoration of a reputation that, as one of the first women members to the Council to the Society of Authors, she once enjoyed.
In the course of a career that spanned over half a decade, Eliza Lynn Linton (neé Elizabeth Lynn, 1822-98) wrote for multiple periodicals, penned numerous novels, several short-story collections and a series of non-fiction texts.
Her life spanned enormous changes in European society and culture, from the spread of the Comtean positivism and the spread of altruism to the Paris Commune and Irish Home Rule; from the popularity of Byronism and Bulwer Lytton to Paterian aestheticism, Zola and Tolstoy; from imperial expansion to the women's rights movements, the extension of the franchise and changes in sexual regulation.
In the bicentenary of her birth, this study re-visits and re-evaluates a range of overlooked texts, demonstrating how Lynn Linton used her pen to contribute to the debates surrounding these changes.
Remembered by many for her controversial journalism, Lynn Linton is often caricatured as the purveyor of scandalously anti-feminist views. With critical focus directed on articles such as ‘The Girl of the Period’ (1869), ‘The Shrieking Sisterhood’ (1870), and the ‘Wild Women’ series (1891-2), scholarly discussions have centred around a tiny proportion of Lynn Linton’s writing and distorted our perception of the active role she played in nineteenth-century literary culture. This new book offers a broad and a detailed analysis.
About the author
Dr Fiona Snailham was most recently the holder of the Vice-Chancellor’s Research Scholarship at the University of Greenwich. She has written for the journals Women’s History and Women’s Writing, and for the Victorian Popular Fiction journal. She is also a contributor to The Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Victorian Women’s Writing, and to A Companion To Victorian Popular Fiction, edited by K.A. Morrison for McFarland (2018).