Description
Book SynopsisTheir Fair Share identifies and contextualises many previously unknown critical writings by a selection of well-known turn-of-the-century women. It reveals the networks behind an influential journal like the Athenaeum and presents a more shaded assessment of its position in the field of cultural production, in the period 1870-1920. The Athenaeum (1828-1921) has often been presented as a monolithic institution offering its readers a fairly conservative, male oriented appreciation of a wide variety of contemporary publications. On the basis of archival and biographical material this book presents an entirely new analysis of the reviewing policy of this weekly from 1870, when it came into the hands of the politician Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, up to and including 1919-1920 when John Middleton Murry became its editor. Dilke, and his editor Norman MacColl, are here revealed to have been committed feminists who enlisted some of the most influential women of their time as critics for their journal. The book looks more specifically at the contributions by, a.o., Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Emilia Dilke, Jane Harrison and Augusta Webster.
Trade Review'Their Fair Share offers an absorbing account of a phenomenon barely glimpsed in prior scholarship on Victorian literature, criticism, and periodicals: women's rise as reviewers in a premier journal and their practice as critics. Demoor's study is all the better because she resists easy generalizations in favor of the unsettling paradoxes her research has disclosed.' English Studies 'The role of the Victorian woman writer as reviewer is an area that has been largely overlooked and seriously underestimated, and is now the subject of Demoor's landmark text, Their Fair Share. Reading the book engenders the same kind of excitement that greeted the pioneering work of Dale Spender, Kate Flint and Elaine Showalter; it is a fascinating, eminently readable work, which deserves widespread attention...a joy to read.' Women's Writing 'Their Fair Share in its detail and thoughtul analysis is an impressive achievement, an essential book for scholars of this period - whether in literature, history , or gender studies... Her knowledge of the field is excellent, as is her assessment of other research which adds to hers. Overall, this book is a scholarly find.' English Literature in Transition Translated from the French: 'Dealing with a little explored subject, Their Fair Share is a serious and erudite book which belongs to several specialist subjects: cultural history, history of periodicals, the theory of reception, gender studies.' Etudes Anglaises
Table of ContentsContents: Introduction; The woman of letters in transition, 1870-1910; The Athenaeum: a new team, a new policy; Feminist critics and the Athenaeum; Reviewing fiction; Poets as critics; The Athenaeum: gender, criticism and the anticipation of modernism?; Selected bibliography; Index.
