Eliza Lynn Linton 1822 – 1898
Journalist, writer.
10 February 1822 – 14 July 1898
A tribute by Sarah Bilston
Eliza Lynn Linton was not only the first woman to earn a living as a journalist in England, she was one of the first to set families arguing across the breakfast table. ‘The Girl of the Period’ was a fiery, provocative essay published in the Saturday Review in 1868: in it, the author claimed the era’s young women were, in behaviour and appearance, a national disgrace. Hotly debated for months if not years, ‘The Girl of the Period’ spawned the Victorian version of a meme. ‘Of the Period’ was soon tagged onto everything from parasols to waltzes; cows, horses, even ships were named after Linton’s bold-faced anti-heroine.[1]
Eliza Lynn was born in Crosthwaite in 1822 into a clergyman’s family; one of twelve, she lost her mother at five months. Her childhood was not particularly happy, and she later suggested her father was a lazy, inattentive parent who used corporal punishment in place of care. Conflict blazed especially hot between them in Eliza’s later teens, and she turned increasingly to writing as solace, self-expression, and to explore religious doubts. Several of her poems were accepted for publication in the early 1840s: in the aftermath the Reverend Lynn, perhaps looking to free himself of his troublesome child, allowed her to take the unorthodox step of moving to London to work at the British Museum on a book. Eliza lived for a number of years as a boarder at 35 Montague Place, in the parish of St. George’s, Bloomsbury. The area offered refuge and opportunity alike, setting Linton on the path to a flourishing career as writer, journalist, and iconoclast.
Eliza later described, in fine detail, life as a newly-arrived single writer in Montague Place in the middle of the nineteenth century. Yet she chose, interestingly, a male narrator for her memoir, which would be published in 1885 as The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland. This allowed her to write frankly about a life that hardly conformed to prevailing social norms: quite apart from her independence, her pursuit of a career, Eliza was almost certainly a lesbian. As Christopher, she described describe loves, feelings, and passions that few women at the time would have felt comfortable expressing openly, in print. Yet notably she did not go to great lengths to conceal her real identity, writing of people, places, times, and events that had verifiably happened to her. She even admitted, when asked directly, that the text was her life-story. Linton both screened herself, then, and made available a narrative of unorthodox sexuality to those who chose to tweak the curtain aside.[2]
The boarding house in which Eliza lived in real life was, the 1851 census reveals, run by a fifty-year-old a woman named Esther Brown. Eleven people occupied the property, including two male clerks. Miss Brown appears in the Autobiography lightly disguised as ‘Miss Smith,’ ‘a dear, good woman with a magnificent contralto voice, formidable eyebrows, a decided beard and moustache, and hands as large and strong as a man’s’; ‘the most of a mother to me of any woman I have known.’[3] Life in the busy boarding house, under the aegis of Miss Brown/Smith, was abuzz with gossip and emotional drama, about:
The tremendous love-affairs which budded and blossomed, but never set into the permanent fruit of matrimony; the friendships which began, continued, and then suddenly one day went pouf! in the smoke of a blazing quarrel; the fights of the old ladies for the footstools, the favourite easy-chair, the best place by the fire, and the stratagems and wiles put in force for victory and prior possession – how odd it all was! And what extraordinary people came and went like shadows, or stayed as if they were coeval with the foundations of the house, and as little to be moved as these![4]
One of the young clerks is dismissed as ‘dissipated,’ with ‘no intellect for higher work’; he brought a ‘fine carved mahogany bookcase, which he stocked with novels, all in showy bindings, uncut and never read.’ Another creepily asked unmarried girls ‘whether he should put on his thick trousers or his thinner’ ones each day.[5] Boarding house life was no utopia, in other words, but Linton presents the range of human types passing through the property as fascinating, with Miss Smith on hand to help navigate it all. Licensed to live as she chose, on her own schedule, in pursuit of her own interests, with an experienced older woman to guide her, Montague Place became, as Eliza put it in the Autobiography, ‘my first field of personal freedom.’[6]
Further support was on offer, meanwhile, in the British Museum itself, which stands in the text as a locus of community and an intoxicating intellectual resource. Linton describes life as a reader at the mid-point of the nineteenth century in ways many will still recognize – the rhythms of arrival and departure, desks piled high with books, the growing familiarity of one’s fellow readers, relationships with librarians and attendants. One of the latter takes the narrator beneath his wing, inviting them to lunch on Sundays in Stoke Newington. A young woman at the boarding house, meanwhile, studying also at the Museum, became ‘my special friend,’ ’one of the vanguard of the independent women; but she did her life’s work without blare or bluster, or help from the outside.’[7] In this lively and relatively diverse community young Eliza evidently found purpose, connection, and solace, as well as an implacable determination to resist any and all efforts on her father’s part to get her to return home.
The book that resulted from Eliza’s studies in Egyptian history and culture in the British Museum was Azeth, the Egyptian (1846);a second Egypt-themed novel earned a positive review from Walter Savage Landor. That same year, she began to draw a regular salary from the Morning Chronicle, becoming ‘the first woman journalist in England to draw a fixed salary,’ Deborah Meem explains.[8] Landor would become a close friend and quasi-father, introducing her to yet more of the luminaries of the day and Eliza’s writing circle would soon include Charles Dickens, Marian Evans (George Eliot) and George Lewes. Her career was fractured for a time by an unfortunate, ill-assorted marriage in 1858 to William Linton, a widower and engraver; the couple separated in 1864. Later fiction, such as The Rebel of the Family (1880), explored the challenges for women who feel they do not ‘fit’ in later-Victorian England. The novel also incorporates, remarkably, a same-sex couple; the magnetic Bell Blount explicitly refers to her partner Connie as ‘little wife.’ As Meem explains:
Eliza Lynn Linton’s creation of Bell Blount represents a milestone in the literary representation – and the popular understanding – of lesbianism during the last third of the nineteenth century. While Linton cannot name – no one could in 1880 – what Bell is, there can be no mistaking the nature of her desire.[9]
Linton’s complicated career and life resist easy definition. As ‘Christopher,’ as an independent woman and professional journalist, she boldly refused common social norms and expectations. Yet the essays that would make her name and reputation – ‘The Girl of the Period’ and later articles on the era’s supposed ‘Wild Women’ – are intensely critical, hyperbolic accounts of women who do just that. Many women and activists were understandably outraged by her attacks and saw hypocrisy at work. Scholars in our own era continue to debate how we are to understand Linton: as plagued by deep self-hatred, perhaps? As battling to deflect attention from her own unorthodox life and loves? As a thorough-going misogynist? As conflicted about how to balance personal desires with larger social needs?[10] At the very least, it seems clear that Eliza Lynn Linton was an astute reader of the kinds of topics likely to, as we say today, ‘go viral,’ fully grasping how to curate content to generate publicity and attention. Life in Bloomsbury was a crucial first step in her journey to escape the constraints of the life and identity into which she was born and reinvent herself as a writer, professional, and early media influencer.
Sarah Bilston is Chair of the English Department and Professor of English Literature at Trinity College, Hartford (CT). She’s the author of The Awkward Age in Women’s Popular Fiction, 1850–1900: Girls and the Transition to Womanhood (Oxford University Press, 2004) and The Promise of the Suburbs: A Victorian History in Literature and Culture (Yale University Press, 2019). She has published articles on Victorian literature and culture in a number of scholarly journals and has also published two novels with HarperCollins. Sarah is currently completing a manuscript on the networks of nineteenth-century plant-hunting, The Hunt for the Lost Orchid, for Harvard University Press, and building a website that explores the richness and surprising diversity of a late-Victorian suburb, www.promiseofthesuburbs.com.
[1] Kristine Moruzi, ‘Fast and Fashionable: The Girls in The Girl of the Period Miscellany,’ Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies 14 (2009): https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/229438294.pdf
[2] When fellow author Rhoda Broughton wrote to Linton to inquire ‘where fiction ended and reality began,’ Linton explained that while some characters were ‘partly true, partly evolved,’ most ‘are real persons.’ See George Somes Layard, Eliza Lynn Linton: Her Life, Letters and Opinions (London: Methuen, 1901), 246, 247.
Layard, Linton’s biographer, accepts that Christopher was Eliza and struggles to cope with the implications. He works rather desperately to describe the passion Christopher/Eliza expresses for one woman as a school-girl crush — otherwise ‘wrong causations of necessity suggest themselves . . . The incident must as far as possible be cleared of its unnatural atmosphere,’ he continues; ‘It is sufficiently bizarre’ (Layard 41).
[3] Eliza Lynn Linton, The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland (London: Richard Bentley, 1885), Vol I, 257.
[4] Christopher Kirkland I. 250-2.
[5] Christopher Kirkland I. 253.
[6] Christopher Kirkland I. 257.
[7] Christopher Kirkland I. 253. This is one of many moments in the text where the artifice of ‘Christopher’ strains to breaking point. A friendship between a man and a single young woman could hardly develop, in the 1840s, in the uncomplicated terms the text suggests.
[8] Deborah Meem, ed., The Rebel of the Family (Ontario: Broadview, 2002), 17.
[9] Meem 13.
[10] I explore readings of Linton in ‘Conflict and Ambiguity in Victorian Women’s Writing: Eliza Lynn Linton and the Possibilities of Agnosticism,’ Tulsa Studies in Women’s Writing 23 (2004): 283-310. For more recent analysis see Nathalie Saudo-Welby, ‘Queering Christopher Kirkland (1885): Eliza Lynn Linton’s ‘Autobiography-in-Drag,’’ E-rea 16 (2019): https://doi.org/10.4000/erea.7606
MINI BIOGRAPHY
Education
No formal education. However, self-educated. Taught herself different languages.
Some Key Achievements and Interests
1822 Moved to London determined to pursue a career as a writer. Used the resources of the British Museum for research.
1848 Joined the staff of the Morning Chronicle earning a good regular salary, considered to be the first woman in England to be a salaried journalist. Left 1851.
1851 Following the success of novels published in 1847 and 1848, published Realities, a pro-feminist novel attacking Victorian respectability. This was condemned by reviewers and halted her work on further novels. Instead, she focused on writing for periodicals such as Household Words.
From 1860s wrote prolifically meeting with both success and criticism.
1866 Joined the staff of the Monthly Review.
1860s and 1870s Contributed articles to Saturday Review which provoked fellow women. Having previously defended women fighting for their rights, she started to criticise these same women. An essays for the Saturday Review in 1868, The Girl of the Period, attacked ‘the New Woman’ and provoked outrage among many.
1896 First woman to be elected to the Society of Authors and first woman to serve on the Society’s committee
Issues
Her mother died when she was very young and she had a strained relationship with her father.
Left home to become independent and had to support herself financially.
Had an unsuccessful marriage to man with whom she shared no interests and for whose seven young children she supported for a time through her writing. He eventually moved from their London base first to the Lake District then the United States.
While fighting for women in journalism and holding radical feminist views when young, later many of her articles both celebrated women in traditional roles and attacked those who she had once supported. This alienated her from many feminists.
Some novels met with success, others less. The anti-feminist stance she strengthened as she got older and propounded in her writing sullied her reputation.
Herself independent and atheistic many find it difficult to reconcile Linton’s views with her later conservatism.
Connection to Bloomsbury
Wrote and read in the British Museum.
Lived in the area.
Women networks
Beatrice Harraden among other writers.
Writing
Including articles and serialised novels in All Year Round, Belgravia, the Cornhill, Household Words, Literary Gazette, National Review, the New Review, Temple Bar, The Queen, The Saturday Review,
1847 Azeth, the Egyptian, a historical novel.
1848 Amymone: A Romance in the Days of Pericles, a novel appealing for women’s rights.
1851 Realities, a novel attacking Victorian respectability.
1865 Grasp your Nettle, a novel.
1866 Lizzie Lorton of Greyrigg.
1867 Sowing the Wind.
1868 Controversila essay for the Saturday Review; The Girl of the Period.
1870 The Shrieking Sisterhood published in Saturday Review attacked radical women who fought for the right to vote.
1872 The True History of Joshua Davidson, Christian and Communist, a novel criticising the Church of England which, h owever, became a best seller.
1875 The Atonement of Leam Dundas, novel.
1880 The Rebel of the Family serialised in Temple Bar before published as a volume.
1883 ‘The Girl of the Period’ and other Social Essays from the Saturday Review published in two volumes.
1885 The Autiobiography of Christoper Kirkland, a fictionalised autobiography, herself portrayed as a man.
1888 Article The Philosophy of Marriage published in Universal Review
1899 My Literary Life published posthumously edited by Beatrice Harraden
Further Reading