New Media and the Rise of the Popular Woman Writer, 1832–1860: (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture)

Explores the link between revolutionary change in the Victorian world of print and women's entry into the field of mass-market publishing This book highlights the integral relationship between the rise of the popular woman writer and the expansion and diversification of newspaper, book and periodical print media during a period of revolutionary change, 18321860. It includes discussion of canonical women writers such as Felicia Hemans, Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot, as well as lesser-known figures such as Eliza Cook and Frances Brown. It also examines the ways women readers actively responded to a robust popular print culture by creating scrapbooks and engaging in forms of celebrity worship. Easley analyses the ways Victorian women's participation in popular print culture anticipates our own engagement with new media in the twenty-first century.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Chapter 1: Felicia Hemans and the Birth of the Mass-Market Woman PoetChapter 2: Eliza Cook, New Media InnovatorChapter 3: George Eliot, the Brontës and the Market for PoetryChapter 4: Women Writers and Chambers’s Edinburgh JournalChapter 5: Frances Brown and the ‘Modern’ Market for PrintChapter 6: Scrapbooks and Women’s Reading Practices CodaBibliographyIndex

About the Author :
Alexis Easley is Professor of English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. She is the author of First-Person Anonymous: Women Writers and Victorian Print Media, 1830–70 (2004) and Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship, 1850–1914 (2011). She has also co-edited four books, most recently Women, Periodicals, and Print Culture in Britain, 1830s–1900s, with Clare Gill and Beth Rodgers (2019). Her most recent book publication is New Media and the Rise of the Popular Woman Writer, 1832–60 (2021). This project was a 2019 recipient of the Linda H. Peterson Prize awarded by the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. She is currently at work on a biography of Eliza Cook.

Review :
There is much to admire in Easley’s well-researched study: there are moments of quiet revelation that might be showier in the work of other scholars. In this well-illustrated, well-documented study of nineteenth-century print culture, Alexis Easley demonstrates how popular publications created celebrity for women editors and authors, and shows how scrapbooking fads worked as an extension of new media opportunities for the expression of women’s values and sentiments.