Women and Literary Celebrity in the Nineteenth Century

Brenda R. Weber is Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Adjunct Associate Professor of English, Cultural Studies, Communication and Culture, and American Studies at Indiana University, USA.

• Contents: Introduction: a right to call herself famous; Reconstructing Charlotte: the making of a celebrated 'female genius'; 'A sort of monster': Fanny Fern, fame's appetite and the construction of the multivalent famous female author; 'Great genius breaks all bonds': Margaret Oliphant and the female literary greats; Correcting the record, creating a new one: Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes and Eliza Potter's A Hair-dresser's Experience in High Life; The text as child: gender/sex and metaphors of maternity at the fin de siècle; Conclusion: doing her level best to play the man's game: literary hermaphrodites and the exceptional woman; Afterword: in search of the cult of Charlotte; Works cited; Index.

'Nuanced, insightful, and richly detailed, Brenda Weber's study of women's literary celebrity in the nineteenth century offers provocative readings of texts by Elizabeth Gaskell, Fanny Fern, Margaret Oliphant and Elizabeth Keckley, among others. Deftly revealing how Victorian women writers on both sides of the Atlantic navigated the treacherous waters of public life, Weber's writing is both witty and erudite, and her book sheds new light on the uneasy intersection of fame and Victorian femininity.' Suzanne Raitt, College of William & Mary '... provide[s] valuable insight into overlooked influences on nineteenth-century women’s writing, and the literary manoeuvres that these influences produce.' Times Literary Supplement ’The more secure Brontë and Austen and Alcott (among others) appear restored to their original contexts by this team of scholars. The timely and the timeless converge. Future harvesters of a swath of Anglophone women writers, some of them dazzling celebrities, will be able to glean from these books.’ Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies ’Weber’s is an outstanding study. It is very well researched, with a wealth of new information and detail and also highly readable.’ Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 'Weber’s expansive list of authors and texts contributes to a growing body of knowledge in nineteenth century studies which collapses the dichotomies of white/black, public/private, British/American and recreates a culture in which the circulation of famous women writers, their books, and their characters was much more dynamic than the gendered codes of fame allowed.' Wilkie Collins Journal 'Insightful and cogent ... Weber persuasively demonstrates how these Victorian writers' transatlantic cultural work transformed "the representation of famous women as 'unsexed'" into "the counter-representation of famous women [writers] as the epitome of womanhood".' Wordsworth Circle