The Outlandish Jane: Austen and Female Identity in Victorian Female Periodicals

Th tl nd h J n : t n nd F l d nt t nV t r n n z n

Marina Cano-López

Victorian Periodicals Review, Volume 47, Number 2, Summer 2014,pp. 255-273 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/vpr.2014.0025

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The Outlandish Jane: Austen and Female Identity in Victorian

Women’s Magazines

MARINA CANO-LÓPEZ

Women’s periodicals of the late Victorian era have received little scholarly attention.1 Yet as Kay Boardman and other feminist critics have shown, these magazines provide valuable insight into late Victorian domestic ide-ology.2 In this essay, I investigate the role of women’s periodicals in the construction of domesticity and female selfhood by examining their rep-resentations of Jane Austen. From the 1870s to the 1890s, Austen was defined as a model of ideal femininity: Katie Halsey notes that over the course of the nineteenth century, Austen became a model of the respect-able woman writer—and by extension, the model Victorian woman. In journals and reviews, literary women were frequently compared (or com-pared themselves) to Austen. Mary Russell Mitford, Harriet Martineau, and Charlotte Brontë were all haunted by the ghost of Jane Austen and tried to define themselves in relation to this paradigm.3 Austen was also held up as a model for middle-class women in popular periodicals at the end of the nineteenth century.

In this essay, I will explore representations of Jane Austen in three popular women’s magazines: The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine (1852–79), a middle-class monthly edited by Samuel Beeton; the Girl’s Own Paper (1880–1956), a weekly published by the Religious Tract Society; and the Women’s Penny Paper (1888–90), a feminist newspaper edited by Helena Temple.4 Each periodical adjusts, reiterates, and departs from contemporary biographical narratives created by the Austen family. Even though these three publications had different goals and target audi-ences, they depicted Austen in similar, if contradictory, ways—as simulta-neously worldly and domestic, professional and unambitious. I interpret these negotiations as symptomatic of the tensions between conservative

©2014 The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

Victorian Periodicals Review 47:2 Summer 2014256

and progressive definitions of female identity posited in Victorian women’s magazines in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

Periodical representations of Jane Austen in late Victorian women’s peri-odicals were inevitably influenced by James Edward Austen-Leigh’s Mem-oir (1870). Austen-Leigh published this account of his aunt’s life based on his early recollections and the testimonies of other family members. The book was an immediate success, and a second edition was published in 1871. In his Memoir, Austen-Leigh creates a saccharine version of his aunt as a model of perfect domesticity whose “sweetness of temper never failed” and whose “life had been passed in the performance of home duties, and the cultivation of domestic affections.”5 This characterization was soon echoed in the Times: “There was about her [Austen] nothing restless or vehement; her chief trait was that domesticity which secured her happi-ness and content.”6 This ideology of domesticity, Boardman reminds us, was a central part of middle-class Victorian life: women were expected to regulate the household while men braved the world of commerce and pro-vided for the family. Thus, as Boardman puts it, domesticity “helped form a cohesive identity, [as] the family represented a secure productive and reproductive unit.”7 It is of course ironic that Jane Austen, who never mar-ried and therefore did not fulfil this “reproductive” function, was held as a symbol of the domestic ideal. Correspondingly, representations of Austen in Victorian women’s periodicals are uneven—both sanctioning and under-mining the idea of the domestic woman.

Austen-Leigh’s Memoir also establishes a foundation for inaccura-cies about Austen that circulated in women’s periodicals from the 1870s onward. Austen-Leigh’s sources were limited: he did not have access to some of the Austen letters or the personal memoirs of some family mem-bers.8 In addition, Austen’s relatives did not always tell the truth; they did not mention, for instance, Austen’s mentally disabled brother or the story of her aunt’s imprisonment for shoplifting.9 Of course, writers and critics at the end of the nineteenth century would have been unaware of such omissions and misinterpretations given that Austen-Leigh’s Memoir was one of the few available sources of information on Austen’s life. The book could be endorsed, sidelined, or questioned, but it could not be ignored.

The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine

The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine was one of the most popular women’s periodicals of the Victorian era, boasting a circulation of 60,000 by 1860. It offered suggestions on cooking, sewing, and fashion as well as articles and literary reviews.10 As Margaret Beetham has shown, Samuel Beeton’s assumption was that women were a homogenous group of domes-

257Marina Cano-López

tic readers, although he occasionally declared a commitment to women’s rights, probably due to the influence of his wife and co-editor Isabella Beeton. For instance, the magazine sometimes printed pieces advocating divorce reform and married women’s property rights, and even after Isa-bella’s death it supported John Stuart Mill’s arguments in favour of wom-en’s suffrage.11 The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine thus provided a contradictory definition of womanhood: by focusing on household man-agement, it defined women according to their domestic cares, yet at the same time it implied that good domestic management was not “natural” but rather something that could be learned. Although it reiterated tradi-tional notions of domestic femininity, the magazine encouraged readers to participate in public discourse by writing essays and letters to the press.12

This contradictory definition of femininity is shown in an 1878 essay on Jane Austen printed in the magazine. This essay was part of the unsigned series “Celebrated Authoresses and Their Works” published every month between January 1878 and June 1880.13 Jane Austen’s was the third pro-file of twenty-six, which confirms her centrality in late nineteenth-century definitions of womanhood.14 Unlike many periodical profiles, the English-woman’s Domestic Magazine provides a literary rather than a gossipy biography of Austen.15 The article opens with a history of Austen’s criti-cal reception, including accolades from Archbishop Whately, Sir Walter Scott, Samuel Coleridge, Robert Southey, and G. H. Lewes.16 After a brief account of Austen’s family history, the article reviews her early writings and in doing so, goes against the trend established by Austen-Leigh’s Memoir—which had diminished the importance of Austen’s juvenilia, a collection of mock-serious writings, claiming that “it would be as unfair to expose this preliminary process to the world, as it would be to display all that goes on behind the curtain of the theatre before it is drawn up.”17 In contrast, the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine praises Austen’s juvenilia for its “propensity to good-humoured satire” and then examines Pride and Preju-dice, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion .18

Not only does the article depict Austen as a professional author whose subtle texts warrant careful examination, but it also analyses the novels through a progressive lens. Austen-Leigh had tried to downplay his aunt’s sense of humour, depicting her as a saintly, retiring spinster who never ridiculed her neighbours. She “never abused them or quizzed them,” he remarks, for she “was as far as possible from being censorious or satiri-cal.”19 In contrast, the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine emphasizes the biting quality of her texts: first noting that Austen wrote her early pieces “half-playfully, half-satirically” and then remarking that her “keen insight into the ridiculous was too strong ever to have been kept down.”20 It is possible that the author of this article had read Margaret Oliphant’s


essay on Austen published in 1870, which likewise drew attention to the cynicism and satiric laughter that Austen-Leigh was so eager to suppress.21 Like Oliphant’s essay, the article in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Maga-zine delineates an alternative model of femininity by focusing on Austen as a satirical writer, an image which contradicted the stereotype of Aunt Jane as an “Angel in the House.”

The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine also focuses on Austen’s range of experience. After listing the various “entertainments” she enjoyed at her native Steventon (games of lottery, dances, and visits), the magazine celebrates Austen’s enjoyment of Bath, where she moved with her family at the age of twenty-five and “kept her eyes and ears wide open, went a good deal into society, danced at the assemblies, and assisted at the pump-room promenades.”22 Such an account countered the late Victorian conservative tradition that depicted Austen’s life as secluded and empty of circumstance. In 1870, for example, the Saturday Review notes that “if her life was uni-form, so also the circle of her experience was narrow. She lived in an age when the world was convulsed, but for all that we learn from her novels France or Napoleon might have never existed.”23 Rather than depicting Austen as being oblivious to her socio-political surroundings, the English-woman’s Domestic Magazine observes that she was well acquainted with sea voyages and prize money through her sailor brothers and “always felt herself at home among ships and sailors.”24 The article undercuts the con-straining models of femininity put forth by Austen-Leigh and the Saturday Review by granting Austen a traditionally male interest in ships and sail-ors—and by extension, the world’s “deeper problems.”

However progressive the article first seems, there is an unexpected change of tone on the last page. Just before the review of Persuasion, Aus-ten’s final complete novel, the narration is interrupted by passages from the Memoir that contradict the article’s apparently progressive interpre-tation of Austen’s life and work. Interestingly, these passages are incor-porated verbatim with no quotation marks or acknowledgement, which, more relaxed nineteenth-century notions of plagiarism notwithstanding, suggests the extent to which these views had been culturally assimilated—as if this were not Austen-Leigh’s Jane Austen but the actual Jane Austen seen objectively. While Austen’s caustic wit had been celebrated two pages earlier, now the article notes, “She never seems to have shown any satire in her personal relations with others. None of her acquaintance ever accused her of having ‘put them into a book.’”25 Austen suddenly metamorphoses into the perfect domestic woman that Austen-Leigh had taken great pains to construct: a woman who maintained a “sweetness of disposition” and “thought more of others than of herself.”26 The reader is now informed that Austen was celebrated for the beauty of her satin stitch, her “especial


forte,” and in short, was a “womanly woman.”27 It is only towards the end of the essay that the reviewer remembers to follow “canonical” views, constructing Austen as eminently domestic. Thus, in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, Austen emerges as one of the fields where battles over female identity—liberal and conservative, professional and domestic—were fought in the 1880s.

The Girl’s Own Paper

The Girl’s Own Paper also participated in the battle over women’s identity through its portrait of Jane Austen. The last decades of the nineteenth cen-tury saw a proliferation in the number of periodicals directed to children and young adults. While in 1824 only five titles were specifically directed at young people, by 1900 the number had increased to 160.28 It was in the 1880s and 1890s that girls were specifically targeted by magazines—a move that was part of the expansion of the market for cheap magazines aimed at niche audiences. Indeed, the expansion of the periodical mar-ketplace enabled women’s and girls’ periodicals to stress different aspects of femininity.29 The Girl’s Own Paper was probably the most successful girls’ periodical of the period with sales quickly outstripping those of its companion title, the Boy’s Own Paper (figure 1). Soon after its launch, the Girl’s Own Paper achieved a circulation of 250,000 and was among the top twenty titles in the Victorian ladies’ reading room at public libraries.30 Published by the Religious Tract Society, both the Girl’s Own Paper and the Boy’s Own Paper were conservative in their definition of gender roles. As Deborah Gorham notes, the fiction published in both periodicals incul-cated sex role differentiation, presenting boys with stories of sport and adventure and girls with stories focused on domesticity and moral lessons. This corresponded with a widening of perceived sex differences between boys and girls in the last decades of the century.31

During this period, the Girl’s Own Paper maintained a moderate line in its definition of girlhood. In its inaugural number, editor Charles Peters declared that the magazine would be a “Counsellor, Playmate, Guardian, Instructor, Companion, and Friend” to young female readers that would “help to train them in the moral and domestic virtues, preparing them for the responsibilities of womanhood, and for a heavenly home.”32 The Girl’s Own Paper warned young women that the world of womanhood awaiting them was one ruled by domestic cares. The first issue consisted of domestic sections such as “My Work Basket,” “How Little Girls Arranged Their Sitting-room,” and “Home Accomplishments: How to Sing a Song.”33 This sense of conservative femininity is mirrored in Harriet L. Childe-Pember-ton’s essay on Jane Austen, which appeared in the March 11, 1882 issue of


Figure 1. List of contents, inaugural issue, Girl’s Own Paper, January 3, 1880.


the magazine. Significantly, the essay is juxtaposed with advice on how to cook the best bread and butter pudding and a message to a female corre-spondent encouraging her to take some toys to the Children’s Convalescent Hospital.34 Childe-Pemberton’s Austen is likewise “essentially domestic in her affections and pursuits,” enjoying a “placid temper” and the “most genuine womanliness.”35 Such a characterization echoes Austen-Leigh’s celebration of his aunt’s “performance of home duties, and the cultiva-tion of domestic affections.”36 The construction of Austen as a “genuine woman” also resonates with the “womanly woman” put forth in the Eng-lishwoman’s Domestic Magazine.37

Childe-Pemberton offers no estimation of Austen’s craft as a writer; instead, she reiterates the misconception that Austen led a secluded life and lacked literary ambition. In one instance, she claims that Austen was “in her pursuits, entirely free from the restlessness of ambition, writing merely for her own amusement and in her humility unconscious of the place she was worthy to take.”38 Childe-Pemberton further contends that Austen’s family life demonstrates “what a woman may achieve for poster-ity—almost unconsciously as it were—without the wish, perhaps without the power, to court publicity.”39 She reinforces this idea in a subsequent paragraph arguing that Austen “seems to have written solely for her own amusement, and with no thought of future fame; indeed, at no time of her life does she appear to have been fully conscious of her great literary mer-its.”40 And finally, she notes that during her last illness Austen “continued to write, which was to her less of a labour than of an amusement.”41 Here again there are strong echoes of Austen-Leigh’s Memoir, which claimed that Jane “wrote for her own amusement” as “lowly did she esteem her own claims.”42 Thus, like Austen-Leigh, Childe-Pemberton insists that Aus-ten was unconscious of her own literary merits and lacked ambition; she had no thought of posterity and simply wrote for her own amusement—a notion that is reiterated at least four times in the essay. Female writing needed to be excused, justified, and domesticated. Writing is defined in the Girl’s Own Paper as another domestic activity in a woman’s daily routine, not a serious professional pursuit in the traditionally male public arena.

There is also an obvious class-consciousness in the Girl’s Own Paper, for if Austen wrote with any thought of profit, she would likewise violate the Victorian ideal of leisured middle-class femininity. So her presumed seclusion in a country parsonage is a precondition for her writing, which in turn becomes a mere form of family entertainment. Childe-Pemberton exaggerates this geographical isolation to the point of biographical inac-curacy, claiming that Austen “never, so far as I can gather, visited London, or any town larger than Bath, Southampton, or Winchester; the society she frequented was chiefly that of her own relations and her country neigh-


bours.”43 Yet Austen did visit London several times, as noted in Austen-Leigh’s Memoir.44 The point here is not Childe-Pemberton’s flaws as a biographer but the reason behind her miswriting of history and biogra-phy. She goes to great lengths to redefine Austen as emphatically domes-tic—alluding, for instance, to Austen’s confined existence five times in the essay.45 If Austen was to be presented as a model for young girls to imitate, her “feminine” domestic virtues must eclipse her literary achievements.

Yet curiously Childe-Pemberton remarks that Austen enjoyed the boys’ games of spillikins and cup-and-ball.46 This comment probably would have been more at home among the tales of sport in the Boy’s Own Paper. The game of cup-and-ball is physically demanding, requiring vigour and mus-cular strength rarely (if ever) associated with Austen. Thus, the inclusion of this detail is somehow out of keeping with the exaggeratedly placid tone of the rest of the essay. Like Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen trespasses onto the traditionally masculine domain of sports and physical exercise, an activity hardly encouraged for late Victorian girls. Biologist Thomas Huxley held that girls, being not so “well balanced” as boys, should be “debarred from the sports and physical exercises which are justly thought absolutely necessary for the full development of the vigour of the more favoured sex.”47 Her selection of this passage from the Memoir is thus at odds with the strategy she deploys in the rest of the essay.

Childe-Pemberton’s essay is best situated within the contradictory impulses of the Girl’s Own Paper as a whole. As Terry Doughty has noted, the conservative tone of the periodical is balanced by a progressive attitude catering to the “New Girl’s desire for guidance on how to negotiate the changing social status and identity of women.”48 For example, the second number includes an article celebrating the achievements of Miss Christine Ladd, a graduate from Vassar College whose mathematical talents won her a scholarship at John Hopkins University. Another essay in this issue, “The Man of Our Choice,” advises that, although marriage is highly desir-able, “women must not be taught that in wedlock lies their only or chiefest source of happiness. . . . The truth is, that a maiden in marrying sacrifices much; she gives up her independence.”49 Childe-Pemberton’s essay further hints at this idea of female independence in its depiction of Eliza Comt-esse de Feuillide, Austen’s older cousin. Childe-Pemberton briefly records Eliza’s adventurous life: born in India and educated in France, Eliza fled the country at the advent of the French Revolution, shortly before her husband was guillotined. She speculates that as an “intimate” friend, Eliza must have told the Austen family about the “horrors of republicanism and the atrocities of the Reign of Terror,” startling them “with French phrases and French fashions.”50 This French connection, with all of its cultural connotations of loose morality, liberalism, and frivolity, sits uneasily with the periodical’s more conservative content.


The portrait of Austen in the Girl’s Own Paper, like that in the English-woman’s Domestic Magazine, is uneven. Exaggeratedly domestic, modest, and secluded, Austen emerges as the “womanly” ideal held up as a mirror to young readers. Yet the novelist’s engagement in sport and indiscreet friendships destabilises an otherwise homogenous portrait, pointing to the analogous instability of definitions of female identity in the 1880s. Doughty sees the contradictions inscribed in the Girl’s Own Paper as potentially lib-erating: the Girl’s Own Paper and other contemporary girls’ periodicals constructed the “New Girl” as a modern reader. This category was notably fluid, for the limits of “girlhood” were fluctuating at a time when women were more likely to marry later in life (twenty-five in the early twentieth century) or not at all. Periodicals needed to cater to this new audience as the “New Girl” transformed into the “New Woman.”51

The Women’s Penny Paper

The new opportunities open to women by the end of the century were reflected in a number of radical feminist publications. The Women’s Penny Paper, described by Doughan and Sanchez as the “most rigorous feminist paper of its time,” focused on promoting women’s suffrage and new social freedoms.52 It was apparently quite successful, as can be judged by the frequent notice it received in the Daily News, Pall Mall Gazette, Leeds Mercury, Evening Standard, and other publications.53 It boasted a female production team, making the magazine the “only Paper Conducted, Writ-ten, Printed and Published by Women.”54 In its inaugural issue, editor Helena Temple (pseudonym for Henrietta Müller) describes the paper as “progressive,” distinguishing it from other women’s periodicals, which she believed too “conservative in spirit.”55 Temple further notes that the maga-zine would present the “ideas of the day in their freshest and newest form,” “reflect the thoughts of the best women upon all the subjects that occupy their minds,” “tell of the work of the noblest women,” and “represent the lives of the truest and the sweetest.”56

For Temple, one of these “noblest” and “truest” of women was Jane Austen, whose portrait in the Women’s Penny Paper reflects broader changes in perceptions of Austen at the fin de siècle. By the 1890s, it was generally accepted that Austen’s work was worthy of serious study: George Saintsbury wrote his celebrated critical introduction to Pride and Prejudice in 1894, and the deaths of family members who had known Austen led to a relaxation in family politics.57 On February 22 and March 1, 1890, the Women’s Penny Paper published Mrs. Elizabeth Mantell’s compari-son of Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë. The article focuses primarily on Austen, briefly referencing Brontë’s correspondence with G. H. Lewes.58


Mantell most likely did not consider Brontë as good a platform as Austen to negotiate the contradictions of late nineteenth-century female identity: Brontë, with her “pages of fire,” was too “pre-engrossed with the worship of deep passion.”59 Mantell focuses on Austen’s literary production rather than her biography. Unlike the articles on Austen in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine and the Girl’s Own Paper, Mantell’s essay does not give an account of Austen’s life based on Austen-Leigh’s Memoir; instead, it analyses the subtleties of Austen’s style, the merits of her characters, and the “flavour” of her humour, which Austen-Leigh and the English-woman’s Domestic Magazine had found rather dubious.60 She examines, for instance, the tragic potential of Austen’s heroine Marianne Dashwood, the appeal of her heroes, and the shame felt by Jane and Elizabeth Bennet after Lydia’s elopement in Pride and Prejudice.61 What is modern about this essay is not so much Mantell’s thoughts about Austen’s realism, which are nothing out of the ordinary, but her intense engagement with Austen’s literary output and her emphasis on Austen’s status as a committed and skilful writer.62

However, even a feminist publication like the Women’s Penny Paper contains shades of more conservative ideology. Austen is defined as a writer who “inculcates Ladyhood”—suggesting an antiquated model of feminin-ity out of step with modern conceptions of the “woman” reader. The next sentence patronisingly describes Austen’s works as “these wonderful little dramas,” implying that her writing is unassuming and unambitious. Man-tell then reiterates the idea that “she was not wholly conscious of her own rare power, but wrote, in that age of blessed ignorance of morbid self study, with as pure an impulse as that by which the birds sing.”63 This sentence suggests that women’s ignorance is a blessing and any awareness of their own abilities would be “morbid,” for it would almost be synonymous with vanity. In contrast, the ideal woman, like Austen, should be “pure” and act in accordance with nature, like the “singing birds.”64 Such representations undercut the paper’s mission to support the struggle for women’s rights.

This contradictory depiction of Austen and womanhood is reinforced by neighbouring articles in the magazine. The first half of Mantell’s essay, published on February 22, 1890, appears opposite a news article titled “The Rational Dress Society Meeting,” which reports the testimonies of those presiding at the event. Their shared opinion is that women should put corsets and petticoats behind them, for as a physician notes at the meet-ing, corsets are an “abomination” and harm women’s breathing capacity.65 Women, the male doctor continues, “should always wear a dress that is free and easy, allowing them full powers of movement.”66 By reporting this testimony, the Women’s Penny Paper indirectly encourages women’s socio-cultural liberation, which will come about through their physical lib-


eration. The inevitable association between Jane Austen and this sort of activism, as both articles sit opposite each other, favours a progressive re-interpretation of the novelist and her works. Read in relation to the other contents of the newspaper, Austen’s writing seems to advance a similar sort of argument about female emancipation. Yet there is a certain dissonance produced by a male doctor prescribing what women should and should not wear. Adding to this ambiguity, later in the report a Miss Tournier defends the disappearance of the corset on the grounds that it will make women better mothers, thereby appealing to traditional family values. Wearing a corset, a woman “has often seen the whole enjoyment of children spoilt during a walk by the trifle of the mother’s dress becoming muddy, a fact sufficient to ruin the temper for the rest of the day, and then naturally the children’s happiness was spoilt.”67 For Miss Tournier, female identity seems defined by motherhood, as in her speech “the woman,” her main addressee, becomes “the mother.”

The material found elsewhere in this issue of the Women’s Penny Paper seems even more heterogeneous. Three pages later, a defence of women’s trade unions and a call for female inventors is juxtaposed with an adver-tisement for “Improved Ventilated Refrigerators” (figure 2). This adver-tisement confirms women’s roles as homemakers, who would be interested in the advantages of J. Walton Holmes’s modern refrigerators, described as “Perpetual, Self-Acting, and Portable . . . a provokingly simple adaptation of immutable and unfailing natural law.”68 The advertisement indirectly alludes to the notion of naturalness in women, suggesting that just as the refrigerator operates according to “natural law,” woman’s “natural” place is in the home. This in turn echoes the article on rational dress, which argues that children’s happiness would be “naturally” spoilt by their moth-er’s displeasure. Yet there is nothing natural about this modern machine, which artificially keeps food “as cold as ice under the burning sun,” just as there is nothing natural in constructions of female selfhood—or in ostensi-bly objective representations of “Aunt Jane.”

The “Jane Austen” constructed in late Victorian periodicals is an unam-bitious, domestic woman who inhabits the circumscribed world of the country parsonage. Yet at the same time she is a professional writer whose novels deserve serious textual analysis. Halsey argues that Austen became the professional ideal against which female writers measured themselves and were measured, but my analysis shows that she also became the yard-stick for the ordinary middle-class woman at the end of the nineteenth century. As gender definitions shifted, Austen’s life and works were contin-ually defined and redefined in popular periodicals. Representations of Aus-ten have evolved considerably over the last one hundred and forty years; indeed, in 2017 she will become the face of the ten-pound note.69 This


Figure 2: Advertisement, Ventilated Refrigerators, Women’s Penny Paper, February 22, 1890.


supposedly domestic woman will soon be very much in public circulation. This “ladylike” writer, allegedly unconcerned with material gain, will soon be in “possession” of a 700-billion fortune.70 This ironic turn suggests that Austen is for us, as she was for the Victorians, an archetype of the feminin-ity we covet.

University of St Andrews/ Edinburgh Napier University

NOTES

1. Of course much has been accomplished in the last decade; indeed, Victorian Periodicals Review has been instrumental in this revival. However, studies of individual women’s periodicals are still relatively scarce. An important recent contribution is Kathryn Ledbetter’s British Victorian Women’s Peri-odicals, which explores the role of poetry in nineteenth-century women’s magazines. Further titles in twenty-first century include Onslow’s Women of the Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Phegley’s Educating the Proper Woman Reader, and Palmer’s Women’s Authorship and Editorship in Victo-rian Culture.

2. Boardman, “The Ideology of Domesticity,” 151.3. Halsey, Jane Austen and Her Readers, 144–45, 169–70. 4. Despite their success and wide circulation, these magazines have received

limited scholarly attention, with the possible exception of the Englishwom-an’s Domestic Magazine. In A Magazine of Her Own?, Beetham devotes three chapters to the Beetons and the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine. The periodical is also discussed in Sharon Marcus’s Between Women and Beetham and Boardman’s Victorian Women’s Magazines. Victorian Periodi-cals Review has published considerable scholarship on the English Woman’s Domestic Magazine: for instance, Bloomfield’s “Rushing Dinner to the Table,” Ward’s “A Charm in those Fingers,” and De Ridder’s “What? How? Why?”

5. Austen-Leigh, Memoir, 130.6. “Jane Austen,” 5.7. Boardman, “The Ideology of Domesticity,” 150.8. Austen-Leigh did not have access to the letters inherited by Lady Knacht-

bull, formerly Fanny Knight and allegedly Austen’s favourite niece. Lady Knachtbull had inherited a considerable archive of materials at the death of Austen’s sister Cassandra, including the surviving letters exchanged by the sisters. Sutherland, “Introduction,” xxiv.

9. Ibid., xxxiii.10. Beetham, Magazine of Her Own, 62.11. Ibid., 61, 65.


12. Ibid., 65, 73.13. The series is unsigned and to this date remains anonymous. There is a

strong possibility that a different author was responsible for each essay in the series or that more than one author wrote any given essay. This would partly explain the radical change of tone in the Austen essay I analyse below. Between May 1872 and May 1873, the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine issued the series “Distinguished Maiden Ladies,” which also included Jane Austen. As the title suggests, this earlier series was generally more conservative in tone although the depiction of Austen is similarly mixed. I have chosen to focus on “Celebrated Authoresses” (1878) because it is chronologically closer to the articles from the Girl’s Own Paper (1882) and the Women’s Penny Paper (1890).

14. As a whole, the series follows no chronological or alphabetical order, so the order of female authors included in the series is worthy of study. They are (in this order) Mrs. Norton, Frederika Bremer, Jane Austen, Maria Edge-worth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Fanny Burney, Lady Morgan, Mary Russell Mitford, Laetitia Elizabeth Landon, Charlotte Brontë, Joanna Bail-lie, Mrs. Jameson, Laetitia Dorethea Hemans, Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Inchbald, Anne Radcliffe, Lady Nairn, Lady Anne Barnard, Madame de Stael, Adelaide Anne Proctor, Elizabeth Gaskell, Hannah More, Amelia Opie, the Countess of Blessington, George Eliot, and Susan Ferrier. The first two profiles in the series are of Lady Stirling Max-Well (“the Hon-ourable Mrs. Norton”) and Frederika Bremer. Caroline Norton, who had abandoned her husband, was also known as a social reformer and defender of women’s rights. Her portrait may have been placed before Austen’s on account of her higher social status—even if it was obtained through mar-riage. Bremer’s open defence of women’s rights must have struck a chord with the more progressive sensibilities of the late nineteenth century, yet at the same time, as a foreigner (Swedish), she would not have challenged the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine’s more conservative readers. It is nevertheless interesting that the magazine associates Austen with two proto-feminist activists such as Norton and Bremer through their placement in the series.

15. As late as 1941, Mary Lascelles still complained about the patronising tone of male critics and the biographical orientation of their studies. Lascelles, Art, v.

16. “Celebrated Authoresses: Jane Austen,” 267–68.17. Austen-Leigh, Memoir, 43.18. “Celebrated Authoresses: Jane Austen,” 269.19. Austen-Leigh, Memoir, 73.20. “Celebrated Authoresses: Jane Austen,” 268–69.21. For instance, Oliphant highlighted Austen’s “malicious, brilliant wit of

youth” and her ability to perceive the ridiculous in life. Oliphant, “Miss Austen and Miss Mitford,” 303.


22. “Celebrated Authoresses: Jane Austen,” 269–70.23. “Jane Austen,” Saturday Review, 119.24. “Celebrated Authoresses: Jane Austen,” 268–69. Austen-Leigh emphasised,

“In vain do I try to recall any word or expression of Aunt Jane’s that had reference to public events.” Memoir, 173.

25. “Celebrated Authoresses: Jane Austen,” 271.26. Ibid.27. Ibid.28. Dixon, “Instruction to Amusement,” 63.29. Beetham, Magazine of Her Own, 190.30. Baggs, “Reading Room,” 288.31. Gorham, Victorian Girl, 18, 32.32. Quoted in Doughty, Selections, 9.33. Girl’s Own Paper, January 3, 1880, 36, 42, 54.34. “Varieties,” 382.35. Childe-Pemberton, “Women of Intellect,” 378.36. Austen-Leigh, Memoir, 130.37. “Celebrated Authoresses: Jane Austen,” 271.38. Childe-Pemberton, “Women of Intellect,” 378; my italics.39. Ibid.; my italics.40. Ibid., 379; my italics.41. Ibid.; my italics.42. Austen-Leigh, Memoir, 103, 106.43. Childe-Pemberton, “Women of Intellect,” 378.44. In 1811, Austen stayed with her brother Henry in Sloane Street while over-

seeing the publication of Sense and Sensibility. During this visit, she did mix with society. In a letter to her sister Cassandra (April 25, 1811), Jane describes a musical soiree in London where she “was quite surrounded by acquaintance, especially Gentlemen; & what with Mr Hampson, Mr Sey-mour, Mr W. Knatchbull, Mr Guillemarde, Mr Cure, a Capt Simpson . . . I had quite as much upon my hands as I could do.” LeFaye, Letters, 183.

45. In the Memoir, Austen-Leigh reproduced several of Jane’s letters to Cas-sandra from London, although interestingly not the one I quote above. See Austen-Leigh, Memoir, 86–89. Childe-Pemberton mentions the Memoir in her essay, so her account is clearly based on his work. Childe-Pemberton, “Women of Intellect,” 378.

46. Childe-Pemberton, “Women of Intellect,” 378. Kathryn Sutherland describes these games as follows: “In the game of spilikins, thin slips of wood were thrown in a heap and the player had to pull them off one at a time without disturbing the rest. In the game of cup and ball, the ball was attached by cord to a stick having a cup at one end and a spike at the other. The aim was to toss the ball in the air and catch it either in the cup or (more difficult) on the spike.” Sutherland, “Notes,” 235.


47. Huxley, “Emancipation,” 561.48. Doughty, Selections, 9. 49. “Varieties,” 32.50. Childe-Pemberton, “Women of Intellect,” 378–79. Eliza’s correspondence,

recently collected and edited by Deidre Le Faye for the first time, corrobo-rates Childe-Pemberton’s impressions: it is full of gossip about the French court and encounters with Marie Antoinette, descriptions of the Reign of Terror and Eliza’s subsequent flirtations with two Austen brothers. Le Faye, Jane Austen’s “Outlandish Cousin.” Eliza also becomes an important figure in Jon Spence’s fictional biography, Becoming Jane Austen, and its subse-quent film adaptation, Becoming Jane.

51. Doughty, Selections, 8.52. Doughan and Sanchez, Feminist Periodicals, 13. 53. It is difficult to determine exact circulation numbers for the Women’s Penny

Paper, but Tusan considers numerous references to the paper in mainstream periodicals to be a mark of its extensive readership throughout Britain. Tusan, Women Making News, 117.

54. Temple, “Our Policy,” 1.55. Ibid.56. Ibid.57. Saintsbury, Preface, ix. The nephews and nieces who were closest to Austen

died in the late nineteenth century: Anna Lefroy (1872), James Edward Austen-Leigh (1874), Caroline Austen (1880), and Lady Knatchbull (1882). See Sutherland, Jane Austen’s Textual Lives, 238–39.

58. Mantell, “A Few Words on Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë I,” 208. Although Mantell does not elaborate on this point, Brontë famously dis-missed Austen’s work as being “without poetry,” further remarking that the “passions are perfectly unknown to her.” Brontë, “Charlotte Brontë on Jane Austen,” 140.

59. Mantell, “A Few Words on Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë I,” 208.60. Ibid.61. Mantell, “A Few Words on Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë II,” 220.62. G. H. Lewes had similarly claimed, “What we most heartily enjoy and

applaud, is truth in the delineation of life and character [as found in Aus-ten’s novels]: incidents however wonderful, adventures however perilous, are almost as naught when compared with the deep and lasting interest excited by any thing like a correct representation of life.” Lewes, “G. H. Lewes on Austen,” 137.

63. Mantell, “A Few Words on Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë I,” 208.64. Two decades earlier, Anne Thackeray had similarly assimilated Austen’s

“gifts” and “goodness” to the “country landscape, where the cattle are grazing” and “birds are flying about the old house.” Thackeray, “Jane Aus-ten,” 167–68.


65. “The Rational Dress Society,” 209.66. Ibid.67. Ibid.68. “Improved Ventilated Refrigerators,” 214.69. See Johnson for a discussion of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-

century representations of Austen in painting and sculpture. Johnson, Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures.

70. The approximate number of ten-pound notes circulating at the time of writ-ing (October 2013) is 723 million; therefore, the total amount of money distributed in ten-pound notes is 723 billion. In 2017, these notes will be replaced by new ones with Austen’s image. Personal communication, Bank of England, October 8, 2013.

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The Outlandish Jane: Austen and Female Identity in Victorian Female Periodicals

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