‘In her own métier ’: the Quarterly review of Jane Eyre
2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 18; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09612020903282266
ISSN1747-583X
Autores Tópico(s)Historical and Scientific Studies
ResumoAbstract In England in 1848, the culture of secrecy that protected the identity of reviewers for major periodicals, such as the Quarterly Review, collided with a culture of anonymity that protected the reputation of women writers. This article discusses Elizabeth Rigby’s anonymous Quarterly review of Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte Brontë under the male pseudonym of Currer Bell, and examines the critical impact of that encounter between 1848 and 1896. Notes [1] Elizabeth Rigby was the second woman to write for the Quarterly: Mary Somerville had contributed an essay on ‘Astronomy—the Comet’ for the Quarterly, 35 (Dec. 1835), pp. 195–233. [2] Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake reviewed three of her own works; ‘Treasures of Art in Great Britain’, Quarterly Review, 94 (March 1854), pp. 467–508; ‘Christian Art’, Quarterly Review, 116 (July 1864), pp. 143–176; and ‘Samuel Coleridge and the Romantic School’, Quarterly Review, 165 (July 1887), pp. 60–96. [3] [Elizabeth Rigby], Vanity Fair and Jane Eyre, Quarterly Review, 84 (Dec. 1848), pp. 153–185, p. 175 [4] For discussions of open secrecy see Joanne Shattock (1989) Politics and Reviewers: The Edinburgh and Quarterly in the early Victorian age (Leicester: Leicester University Press) and John Mullan (2008) Anonymity: a secret history of English literature (London: Faber & Faber). [5] Shattock, Politics and Reviewers, p. 15. [6] Sara Coleridge (1873) Memoirs and Letters, edited by her daughter [Edith Coleridge], 2 vols (London: Henry S. King & Co.), p. 223. [7] Alexis Easley (2004) First‐Person Anonymous: women writers and Victorian print media, 1830–1870 (Aldershot: Ashgate). [8] John Murray and John Gibson Lockhart had a number of pet names for Elizabeth Rigby, including ‘Queen Elizabeth’ or ‘Queen Bess’, ‘Lofty Lucy’, and ‘Miss Estonia’. [9] ‘Account of Marion Murray’ [unpublished manuscript] quotes John Murray’s letter of March 1847 to Marion Murray née Smith on page 12. By permission of the Trustees, National Library of Scotland. [10] Letter from Marion Smith to John Murray, 12 March 1847. By permission of the Trustees, National Library of Scotland. [11] Charles Eastlake Smith (Ed.) (1895) Journals and Correspondence of Lady Eastlake, 2 vols (London: John Murray), vol. 1, pp. 204–205. [12] She had lived in Heidelberg between 1827 and 1830 and spent two years in Russia, 1838–40, leading to the publication in 1841 of A Residence on the Shores of the Baltic (London: John Murray). [13] [Rigby], ‘Vanity Fair and Jane Eyre’, p. 160. [14] Ibid., p. 175. [15] Ibid., pp. 175–176. [16] Letter to Hannah Brightwen (Private Collection). See my (2009) Letters of Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press). [17] Ibid., p. 214. [18] Smith (Ed.), Journals and Correspondence of Lady Eastlake, vol. 2, p. 165. [19] Quoted in Clement K. Shorter (1896) Charlotte Brontë and Her Circle (London: Hodder & Stoughton), p. 190. [20] [Rigby], ‘Vanity Fair and Jane Eyre’, p. 176. [21] J. A. V. Chapple & Arthur Pollard (Eds) (1966) The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 404 and 418. The first letter is dated 19 August 1856 and the second is 2 October 1856. In the event only Lady Scott was named in the first edition of Mrs Gaskell’s Life and she sued for libel, forcing Mrs Gaskell to make a public retraction. See Jenny Uglow (1993) Elizabeth Gaskell: a habit of stories (London: Faber & Faber), pp. 426–427. William Wright reported that George Smith ‘declares without hesitation or doubt that he had always known that Lady Eastlake was the author of the Quarterly article, and that he had declined to meet her at dinner on account of it’. William Wright (1893) The Brontës in Ireland; or Facts Stranger than Fiction (London: Hodder & Stoughton), p. 308. [22] Elizabeth Gaskell (1997) The Life of Charlotte Brontë (London: Penguin; first published 1857), pp. 281–282. [23] Letter from Paris dated 10 June 1857. GCPP Parkes 2/10. The Mistress and Fellows, Girton College, Cambridge. Bessie Parkes, later Madame Belloc, rationalised her view of Lady Eastlake in later life, recalling: ‘Lady Eastlake possessed a stalwart intellect, with no softening haze about it. She disliked the literature of passion, even on the nobler levels of Jane Eyre, and had a firm grip of the morals of Christianity; holding orthodox opinions, which always seemed to me to have been sincerely reasoned out in some past mental epoch, without penetrating the fibre of her mind’. Bessie Rayner Belloc (1897) A Passing World (London: Ward & Downey), p. 11. [24] William Wright, The Track of the Reviewer—A True Story of Revenge Connected with the First Publication of Jane Eyre, McClures Magazine, 1 (July 1893), pp. 174–180, p. 179. [25] Respectively: ‘Books for Children’, Quarterly Review, 71 (Dec. 1842), pp. 54–83; ‘Evangelical Novels’, ‘The Lady of the Manor’, Quarterly Review, 72 (May 1843), pp. 25–53; ‘Biographies of German Ladies’, Quarterly Review, 73 (Dec. 1843), pp. 142–187; ‘Children’s books’, Quarterly Review, 74 (June 1844), pp. 1–26; ‘Lady Travellers’, Quarterly Review, 76 (June 1845), pp. 98–136; and ‘Planche’s History of Costume’, Quarterly Review, 79 (March 1847), pp. 372–399. [26] Sheldon, Letters of Elizabeth Rigby, p. 93. [27] Smith (Ed.), Journals and Correspondence of Lady Eastlake, vol. 1, p. 51. [28] Ibid., p. 222.The Times felt that this letter from Lockhart ‘would have been better omitted; there are phrases in it which will give offence to Charlotte Brontë’s surviving friends’ (The Times, Wed. 4 December 1895). [29] Mary F. Outram (1932) Margaret Outram 1778–1863: mother of the Bayard of India (London: John Murray), pp. 324–325. [30] Harriet Martineau hoped that the pair would marry in 1844 to spare any third party: ‘She & Lockhart will match exactly; and the whole world will be saved from the peril of marrying either of them’. See Kenneth Fielding & Ian Campbell (2002) ‘New Letters of Harriet Martineau to Jane Carlyle, 1842–44’, Women’s Writing, 9(3), pp. 379–393, p. 389. [31] ‘You once I remember said that the review was written by a lady—Miss Rigby. Are you sure of this? Give no hint of my intention of discoursing a little with the Quarterly. It would look too important to speak of it beforehand. All plans are best conceived and executed without noise’. Letter to W. S. Williams, 16 August 1849, quoted in Shorter, Charlotte Brontë and Her Circle, pp. 346–347. [32] In Shirley Mrs Pryor tells Caroline Helstone of her employer Mrs Hardman’s strictures about governesses: ‘The lady of the house told me coolly I was the victim of “wounded vanity.” She hinted, that if I did not make an effort to quell my “ungodly discontent,” to cease “murmuring against God’s appointment,” and to cultivate the profound humility befitting my station, my mind would very likely “go to pieces” on the rock that wrecked most of my sisterhood—morbid self‐esteem; and that I should die an inmate of a lunatic asylum’. [33] Richard J. Dunn (Ed.) (2000) Jane Eyre. Charlotte Brontë (New York: W. W. Norton), pp. 456–457. [34] Ibid., p. 457. [35] Mary Poovey (1988) Uneven Developments: the ideological work of gender in mid–Victorian England (London: Virago), pp. 132–133. [36] Ibid., p. 134. [37] Sheldon, Letters of Elizabeth Rigby, p. 375. [38] Anne de Wahl ran a succession of schools for girls, first in Norwich, then in St John’s Wood and at least one further school in Godalming. [39] [Rigby], ‘Vanity Fair and Jane Eyre’, p. 178. [40] Ibid., p. 180. [41] Anne De Wahl (1847) Practical Hints on the Moral, Mental and Physical Training of Girls at School (London: John W. Parker). [42] See Augustine Birrell (1887) Life of Charlotte Brontë (London: Walter Scott), p. 113. Chapter 30 is entitled ‘Who Wrote the Review: A Working Hypothesis’. [43] A. C. Swinburne (1877) A Note on Charlotte Brontë (London: Chatto & Windus), pp. 88–90. [44] Wright, The Brontës in Ireland, ran to three editions in its first year of publication but it was regarded as wildly inaccurate. J. Ramsden was ‘literally stunned and bewildered’ by Dr Wright’s book. See J. Ramsden, (1897) The Brontë Homeland: Or Misrepresentations Rectified (London: The Roxburghe Press), p. 163. Angus Mackay was ‘convinced that his volume is unreliable almost from cover to cover’. See Angus M. Mackay (1897) The Brontës: Fact and Fiction (London: Service & Paton), p. viii. [45] Coleridge, Memoirs and Letters, vol. 1, p. 223. [46] [Nicoll, William Robertson], The Quarterly Criticism on ‘Jane Eyre’. Who Wrote It?, The Bookman, II(12) (Sept. 1892), p. 176. [47] A second letter sought confirmation for the story that Charlotte Brontë’s irate uncle Hugh Brontë had called, as a consequence of the review, at John Murray’s premises in Albemarle Street to beat the reviewer with a club that he had fashioned himself from the root of a tree. [48] Letter from William Wright to Murray dated 22 March 1892. By permission of the Trustees, National Library of Scotland. The letter is docketed ‘answered 23. iii 92 Lockhart was Ed cannot give name of writer’. [49] She died on 2 October and the book was published on 3 November. [50] Wright, The Brontës in Ireland, p. 308. [51] Ibid., p. 306. [52] Marion Lochhead (1954) John Gibson Lockhart (London: John Murray), p. 182. [53] Wright, The Brontës in Ireland, p. 308. [54] [Augustine Birrell] [signed A.B.], A Literary Causerie: Lady Eastlake, The Speaker (14 Dec. 1895), p. 648. [55] Ibid. The reference to Charlotte Brontë’s ‘slender frame’ is possibly a pointed remark: Mrs Gaskell had referred to her as the little lady. Lady Eastlake meanwhile was very tall and in later life inclined to stoutness. [56] Andrew Lang, ‘A Literary Problem’, Daily News, 3 March 1891, pp. 4–5. [57] Letter from Andew Lang to John Murray, 25 Dec. 1895. Trustees of the National Library of Scotland. [58] Andrew Lang (1897) Life and Letters of John Gibson Lockhart, 2 vols (London: John C. Nimmo), vol. 2, p. 307. [59] Lang, Life and Letters of John Gibson Lockhart, vol. 2, p. 258. [60] Shorter, Charlotte Brontë and Her Circle, p. 348. [61] Smith (Ed.), Journals and Correspondence of Lady Eastlake, vol. 1, pp. 222–223. [62] Rigby complained, ‘the editor plagued me by omitting a very edifying comment’ from her article on Cologne Cathedral in 1846 ‘on the inconsistency of Protestants in contributing in any way to a Roman Catholic edifice. I hate the Germans for doing so, but if a temple were raised to Dagon, German Lutherans would contribute’. Smith (Ed.), Journals and Correspondence of Lady Eastlake, vol. 1, p. 208. [63] Sheldon, Letters of Elizabeth Rigby, p. 96. [64] Henry Crabb Robinson (1938) Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers, 3 vols, ed. Edith J. Morley (London: J. M. Dent & Sons), vol. 1, p. 367. [65] Fielding & Campbell, Women’s Writing, p. 389. [66] Andrew Lang (1896) At the Sign of the Ship, Longman’s Magazine, 27 (Nov. 1895–April 1896, February 1896), pp. 423–432, pp. 428–429. [67] Lang, Life and Letters of John Gibson Lockhart, vol. 2, p. 310. [68] [Augustine Birrell] ‘Mr. Lang and Lady Eastlake’, The Speaker (8 February 1896), supplement, p. 165.
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