Linda H. Peterson. Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-0-691-14017-9. Price: U.S. $35.00/£24.95

Echoing the title of Rachel Brownstein’s 1982 book Becoming a Heroine: Reading About Women in Novels, Linda Peterson’s Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market tells the story of how nineteenth-century women writers became and conceived themselves as being professionals. Peterson’s book implicitly deconstructs the premises of a work like Brownstein’s by exposing the contours of the myths that have made nineteenth-century women writers like Charlotte Brontë such compelling figures. Instead of re-inscribing these myths, Peterson explores the tension between “the models of authorship that writers project . . . and the material conditions in which women writers produced their work” (9-10). Peterson fills each chapter with details, reviews and descriptions of the writers’ works; biographical writings; and periodical essays. This material provides a densely researched background that allows readers to see how Victorian authors, both male and female, were consciously working through the problems involved in conceiving of writing as a professional activity. Peterson’s great gift lies in her ability to enter into the consciousness of others. She lays bare the configurations of the myths with which Victorian writers grappled without imposing an alternative mythology of her own. In contrast, Mary Howitt and her daughter viewed their professional work as coming out of the private domestic arena. Working together with her husband to produce Howitt’s Journal, Mary Howitt made sure that her daughter was trained in illustration as well as writing so that the two women could work together. Anna Mary Howitt carried this model over to her work as a painter, as she became involved with a group of women artists and activists who became known as the Ladies of Langham Place. Eventually writing a novel about that group, The Sisters in Art (1852), Anna Mary, like her mother, consciously posited a collaborative model of professionalism as an alternative to the individualist model that made Martineau successful. The middle chapters of Becoming a Woman of Letters deal with the middle decades of the nineteenth century when, as G. H. Lewes argued in his 1847 essay “The Condition of Authors in England, Germany, and France,” “literature has become a profession” (qtd. in Peterson 34). But, while male writers wrote openly about the money professional writers could make, such a position was difficult for women to assume. Peterson shows that Elizabeth Gaskell dealt with the tense relationship between women and professionalism at mid-century through a “parallel currents” (131) model of authorship in which the woman writer is imagined to have both a powerful investment in the domestic sphere where she is a dutiful daughter and wife, and in the creative sphere where her genius is conceived as god-given and ungendered. In discussing Gaskell’s biography, Peterson shows how, as she does also with Percy Lubbock’s biography of Alice Meynell, in creating the myth that surrounds the woman author, biographers carefully suppress certain letters and emphasize others. Gaskell excludes most of the letters that show Brontë’s interest in professional interchanges that dealt with her writing. Such elisions allowed Gaskell to create a model of literary professionalism that “was important in the history of women’s authorship for its apparent accessibility, its imitable pattern for young women writers” (149). But Peterson also shows the Victorians questioning the viability of such models when she turns to Charlotte Riddell, a lesser-known woman writer who experienced in her life and explored in her fictions the difficulties of following the pattern that Gaskell lays out in The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) in the practical world of mid-Victorian letters. The Riddell chapter marks a turning point in Becoming a …