'The Victorian Sibyl': Women reviewers and the reinvention of critical tradition

The eighteenth-century periodical regularly invoked the gentleman's club as a model of intellectual community. This rhetoric of male sociability survived in the public image and professional rituals of the Victorian reviews. Often provided with desultory educations, excluded from the social life of the major periodical firms, and considered unfit for the rigorous work of criticism, women reviewers were thus very much outsiders to the trade. The Victorian Sibyl, directed by Deborah E. Nord and U.C. Knoepflmacher, contends that women reviewers joined and transformed the critical profession by developing alternative models of community and transforming negative stereotypes of the female critic into an empowering mythology.; In an effort to complicate the sage canon first proposed in John Holloway's The Victorian Sage (1953), I chart a network of female thinkers who participated in an evolving, competitive, and market-driven profession, which they could enter only by contesting existing critical practices. Chapters 1 and 2 contend that Anna Jameson and Lady Elizabeth Eastlake assailed male critics for demonstrating precisely the kind of sentimental, anti-social rhetoric often invoked to discredit women writers. Together, Jameson and Eastlake set the stage for a new kind of female critic - one capable of leaving her bower to join the wider critical community.; Chapter 3 argues that, at a time when women were blamed for declining literary standards, Margaret Oliphant presented the woman reviewer as a redemptive figure capable of heading Blackwood's renowned circle of "tavern sages." Chapter 4 turns to the essays of Anne Thackeray Ritchie, who used supernatural tropes to depict the female critic as a "modern sibyl" whose oracular power springs from intellectual fellowship. Chapter 5 contends that Eliot's reviews, particularly "Woman in France" (1854), present the female-guided salon as a model for intellectual community with direct historical ties to Victorian journalism. Chapter 6 situates Eliza Lynn Linton's presumably misogynist "Girl of the Period" essays as part of her campaign against the partisanship of late Victorian critical communities. The Victorian Sibyl concludes by considering how nineteenth-century women reviewers anticipated the more diffuse, modernist communities envisioned by Vernon Lee and the most famous modern woman reviewer, Virginia Woolf.