Notable or Invisible? Reassessing Women Writers of the 1890s

Pope discusses Helen C. Black’s Notable Women Authors of the Day (1893), a collection of interviews with twenty-six then best-selling writers, most of whom even dedicated Victorianists would struggle to identify today. The chapter addresses three key questions. Firstly, why did Black choose these particular women, excluding many who are arguably more notable to us in the twenty-first century? Secondly, is there a good reason why we no longer read these novelists or have we concluded they are not worth our attention? And finally, how do we decide which authors to recover? Pope contends that by privileging some authors over others, we are simply creating mini-canons that hinder a more ambitious recovery project. Focusing on three of the notable women—John Strange Winter, Florence Marryat, and Eliza Lynn Linton—Pope argues that Black’s insistence on foregrounding the domestic and marginalizing the professional has led to charges of ephemerality or triviality from modern critics, thereby propelling these authors to obscurity. Rather than preserving them as notable, Black rendered them invisible. This chapter proposes that by reevaluating such forgotten writers, we can develop a more complex and ultimately rewarding map of nineteenth-century literature.