Abstract
In 1883, the Bentley firm published A Struggle for Fame, the autobiographical novel by Irish-born Charlotte Riddell (née Cowan, 1832–1906). The three-decker work features vivid pen-portraits of Newby, Tinsley, Bentley and other publishers, and details a young Irish woman’s struggles for success in mid-century literary London, against contemporary views that ‘Irish stories are quite gone out’.1 More than once, its acerbic narrator diagnoses astutely the forces constraining women‘s literary fame:
It was hard upon Glenarva that no human being ever believed she was the right person in the right place. Not when she was plodding amongst the London publishers—not when she was making a little money—not when she had gained a great reputation—not when the time came no one could deny she had achieved more than nine hundred and ninetynine women out of a thousand ever do achieve—no, not even then did any friend, or relation, or stranger realize it was really Glenarva who had won success, and not some quite independent power associated with her in an unaccountable and uncanny sort of alliance.2
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Notes
Charlotte Riddell, A Struggle for Fame (1883; Dublin: Tramp Press, 2014), p. 48.
See Margaret Kelleher, ‘Charlotte Riddell’s A Struggle for Fame: The Field of Women’s Literary Production,’ Colby Quarterly, 36.2 (2000), pp. 116–31.
Parts of this chapter are drawn from research conducted for my chapter on Irish fiction and drama, 1830 to 1890, in the Cambridge History of Irish Literature, eds. by Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 449–99, and my contribution on Irish women’s writings, 1845 to 1890, to the Field Day of Anthology of Irish Writing: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions, vol. 5, eds. Angela Bourke et al., (Cork: Field Day Publications, 2002), pp. 924–75.
Maria Edgeworth to Michael Pakenham Edgeworth, 19 February 1834; reproduced in Frances Edgeworth, A Memoir of Maria Edgeworth, 3 vols. (Privately printed, 1867), vol. 3, pp. 87–8.
Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson), The Book of the Boudoir, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1829), vol. 1, p. vii.
Rolf and Magda Loeber’s A Guide to Irish Fiction, 1650–1900 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006) provides an invaluable bibliographical resource; for an electronic edition, see http://www.lgif.ie.
See Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (1986; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), pp. 212–13.
See David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Dublin: Lilliput, 1993), pp. 125–62
Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London: Verso, 1995), pp. 145–225.
Ina Ferris, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 131.
See Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 17.
Maureen Keane, Mrs S. C. Hall: A Literary Biography (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1997), pp. 4–5.
Anna Maria Hall, The Whiteboy, 2 vols. (1845; reprinted New York, NY: Garland Press, 1979), vol. 2, p. 8.
Charlotte Tonna, The Rockites (London: Nisbet, 1829), pp. 1–2.
See the biography of Asenath Nicholson by Maureen O’Rourke Murphy, Compassionate Stranger (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2015).
See Margaret Kelleher, The Feminization of Famine: Expressions of the Inexpressible? (Cork and Durham, NC: Cork University Press and Duke University Press, 1997), Chap. 2.
Margaret Brew, The Chronicles of Castle Cloyne, 3 vols. (1884; reprinted New York, NY: Garland Press, 1979), vol. 1, p. viii.
A selection of famine accounts from Irish and British fiction (1847–1920), is provided in Recollecting Hunger: An Anthology, ed. by Marguérite Corporaal, Christopher Cusack and Lindsay Janssen (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2012).
Marjorie Howes, ‘Discipline, Sentiment and the Irish-American Public: Mary Ann Sadlier’s Popular Fiction’, Éire-Ireland, 40, 1 and 2 (2005), pp. 140–69, p.169. A listing of Sadlier’s work is provided in Loebers’s Guide to Irish Fiction, pp. 1155–63.20. Irish Monthly, 14 (1886), p. 201.
See Eliza Keary, Memoir of Annie Keary (London: Macmillan, 1882).
Charles Read and T. P. O’Connor, eds., The Cabinet of Irish Literature, 4 vols. (London and Glasgow: Blackie, 1879–80), vol. 4, p. 296.
Robert Lee Woolf, introduction to new edition of May Laffan (Hartley), Flitters, Tatters and the Counsellor and Other Sketches (1881; New York, NY: Garland Press, 1989), p. vii.
Brigitte Anton, ‘Women of The Nation’, History Ireland 1.3 (Autumn 1993), pp. 34–7.
These and other biographical details are drawn from Anne Ulry Colman’s invaluable Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Irish Women Poets (Galway: Kenny’s Bookshop, 1996).
Exceptions include Antoinette Quinn’s section on women and literary nationalism, 1845–1916, in Field Day Anthology, vol. 5, pp. 895–923, and Matthew Campbell’s discussion of the Nation female poets in The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, vol. 1, pp. 518–21.
Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 104.
Alison Booth, How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 3.
Elizabeth Owens Blackburne (Casey), Illustrious Irishwomen: being memoirs of some of the most noted Irishwomen from the earliest ages to the present century, 2 vols. (London: Tinsley, 1877), vol. 2, p. 92.
See Helen Black, Notable Women Authors of the Day (Glasgow: Bryce, 1893), p. 113.
Rosa Mulholland, ‘Wanted an Irish Novelist’, Irish Monthly, 19 (July 1891), pp. 369–70.
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Kelleher, M. (2018). Representing Ireland. In: Hartley, L. (eds) The History of British Women’s Writing, 1830–1880. History of British Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58465-6_6
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