THE BRITISH LIBRARY READING ROOM – THE CENTRE OF THE WEB

Until the Married Women’s Property Act came into force in 1882, a woman had very little control over her financial and professional destiny. The closest most women had to a space in which to write without the demands of society infringing on them was the Reading Room of the British Museum.

The Reading Room was at the spiritual as well as geographical heart of Bloomsbury. Free to use, it was conceived as a democratic space – nobody was excluded. And, crucially, this meant women, too. The ornate rotunda of the British Museum became a refuge for many of London’s foremost women writers: Eleanor Marx, Edith Nesbit, Olive Schreiner and many others all worked in it. Still, this access was not without obstacles: women needed to secure a recommendation from a person occupying an eminent position – almost certainly a man. Another stipulation, that of “respectability”, further served to narrow the criteria for admission. Within the library, women were expected to keep to a “Women Only” section, and, if they chose to ignore this, often found themselves subjected to male disapproval.  

DIFFICULTY OF GETTING PUBLISHED FOR WOMEN

In a male-dominated industry, women faced greater difficulties than men. Almost all positions of power – those of editors, reviewers, publishers – were occupied by men. Women lacked the networks available to their male peers.

One course of action was for women to hide behind gender-neutral names, such as C. L. Pirkis, or E. Nesbit. Another strategy was disguising themselves behind male-sounding pseudonyms (as did George Eliot, or the Brontë sisters who used the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell). A more complex case is Christina Rossetti, who wrote under a female pseudonym, Ellen Alleyne, which projected a different, more acceptable kind of femininity.

Women’s participation and visibility on the literary scene improved steadily throughout the nineteenth century. Towards the fin de siècle, within a span of just twenty years (1871–1891), the number of women listing themselves as authors on the census increased from 255 to 660.

DOES A WOMAN WRITER NEED THE VALIDATION OF A HUSBAND?

While marriage was still seen as the most desirable fate for a woman, increasingly women began to question how their relationships with men served them, and frequently came to the conclusion that they were better off on their own.

For women, marriage meant the end of their careers, and the loss of control over their income and property. C. L. Pirkis, in her novel The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective (1894), created a character who declined to conform to gender stereotypes: Loveday remained unmarried and fulfilled in her career of catching criminals.

Christina Rossetti never married – in fact, she turned down three proposals. In her poem “No, Thank You, John” (1862) the narrator boldly asserts a woman’s right to exist outside of marriage: ‘I’d rather answer “No” to fifty Johns // Than answer “Yes” to you’.

EMERGING FROM THE SHADOWS

Female writers tended to be eclipsed by their male contemporaries, and were often better known through their association with them. Fanny Trollope, for example, wrote thirty-five novels and several works of non-fiction, but instead, is chiefly remembered as the mother of the novelist Anthony Trollope. Christina Rossetti has long been overshadowed by her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Her work challenges women’s passive role, as an artist’s model or a poet’s muse, where a woman is silenced, objectified, and reduced to being the receptacle of a male artist’s fantasy.

A JOB SUITABLE FOR A WOMAN?

In the nineteenth century, the proportion of women among writers was higher than it had ever been before. In accordance with the predominant idea that a woman’s sphere was the home, women’s writing was expected to play out on a smaller canvas than that of men. At the same time, however, domestic themes held little prestige compared with the wider social and political concerns that were seen as the preserve of male writers. Over the course of the nineteenth century, women began to liberate themselves from the expectation they should confine themselves to types of writing considered “feminine”, such as children’s literature, or poetry.

Access to education, as well as the difficulties of realising their potential in a fundamentally unequal society, had sharpened women’s eyes to the contradictions in which they were caught. These were reflected in themes such as women’s insanity, or those of women’s relegation to the margins of society. Women, in their writing, aligned themselves with reform causes: women’s suffrage, but also abolitionism, as well as questions of social exclusion.

At the same time, there was a flourishing of genres such as popular gothic or sensational novels, which gave their female authors unprecedented power in the marketplace.