Their Fair Share

Marysa Demoor, is a senior full professor of English literature and Culture at Ghent University.

• Contents: 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.

'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