As with the representation of the shop girl as deviating from conventional femininity by many fin de siècle male authors, the picture of the woman writer in this period is rendered no less negatively in many contemporary male-penned writings. In the popular press of the fin de siècle period, the female writer is one of the New
Woman types commonly satirized. In popular journals like Punch, the female writer is often represented as either too knowing or too innocent, too masculine or too feminine, suggesting that the female gender is unfit for the writing enterprise. On the one hand, the female author is seen either as “a love-hungry spinster, living her life vicariously through her works” or as “an innocent young lady, writing about matters she knows nothing about and making herself unattractive in the bargain” (Marks 81). The overtly feminization of women as popular, romance writers by the male satirists is thus employed to come to the conclusion that women are not fit for serious literary work and that their writing is more often than not shallow.36
On the other hand, women trying their hands at serious writings, which have long been a realm occupied by male authors, are stigmatized as unwomanly or falling short of the perspective needed to sustain such an effort. A Punch rhyme of 1894 thus ridiculed the New Woman as female writer:
There is New Woman, and what do you think?
She lives upon nothing but Foolscap and Ink!
But, though Foolscap and Ink form the whole of her diet, This nagging New Woman can never be quiet!
Another instance of the New Woman writer as a sexually threatening presence is found in a cartoon in the Idler of 1894 depicting a man intimidated by women
throwing books at him, these books by the contemporary advanced female writers like Sarah Grand and Emma Frances Brooke signifying particularly a threat to fin de siècle
36 See Patricia Marks, Bicycles, Bangs, and Bloomers: The New Woman in the Popular Press. 80-89.
Male satirists often complain about the shallowness of female writing, which lacks “gusto and depth”
(84) and “adult literary ingredients as grammar, style and common sense” (85). Stereotypes on the female novelists as producing “inflated romantic verbosities with little plot and less significance” (80).
male sexual/gender identity.37
By contrast, the image of the female writer is rendered more positively in fin de siècle novels by New Women writers. These feminist writers, who often project a self-image onto their portrayals of the New Woman writer-heroine, are prone to offer sympathetic observations on the obstacles and battles she needs to fight to seek literary enterprise as a means of achieving self-assertion and self-fulfillment.38 As well as portraying the writer-heroine as fighting against the patriarchal forces
discouraging her literary pursuit, these feminist writers represent how she negotiates with the fin de siècle’s increasing commodification of literary production, a
phenomenon ascribed by the contemporary gender-biased, discriminating male writers to the female intrusion into the literary market. 39 Femininity was a trope commonly employed by fin de siècle male writers to deplore the degeneration of a literary market increasingly invaded by the emerging women writers and mass readers. Women
writers of this period were accused by their male counterparts of producing superficial, trashy works appealing to a largely undistinguishing female readership. Not only the author of mass culture text is gendered, but also the production of this text is
considered to be gendered. The woman taking part in the emerging mass literary
37 For more on the implications of this cartoon satirizing the female writer/writing, see Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800-1914 (London: Routledge, 1996) 132
38 See, for instance, novels like Mona Caird’s The Daughters of Danaus (1894), Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman (1894), Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book (1897), or Mary Cholmondeley’s Red Pottage (1899). For the updated studies of the female writer as figured in fin de siècle New Woman fiction, see Margaret Diane Stetz, “New Grub Street and the Woman Writer of the 1890s,” Transforming Genres: New Approaches to British Fiction of the 1890s (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1994) 21-45; Lyn Pykett, “Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman,” Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) 135-50; Penny Boumelha, “The Woman of Genius and the Woman of Grub Street: Figures of the Female Writer in British Fin de Siècle Fiction,” English Literature in Transition 40.3 (1997): 164-80.
39 For more on the commodification and feminization of the fin de siècle literary market, see Andreas Huyssen, “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other,” After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (London: Macmillan, 1986) 44-64.
market as a professional writer thus not only finds for her an opportunity of getting published and realizing her literary potential but also finds herself complicated in the gendered conception of women, literary production, and mass readership, which is especially perceived in the publishing trade of the fin de siècle when a shared fear about the feminization of literary market was felt by many male writers.40
However intimidating or benign these presences of the writing women in fin de siècle discourses might be, they indicate unfailingly that women writers are taking their place in a new professional world. The establishment of the Institute of Women Journalists in 1895, for instance, signals such a process, and by the end of the 1880s, at least 40 percent of the authors are women at large British publishing houses.
Census data in Britain and the United States testifies to women’s increased emergence into the profession of journalism. The 1841 census in Britain listed only fifteen
women professionally engaged as authors, editors, and journalists. By 1891 this number rose to 660. Between 1890 and 1900 the U. S. census reported an even more dramatic increase in the number of female reporters and editors from approximately 1000 to 2200.41 This emergence of female writers around the turn of the century is largely ascribable to the rise of mass literary market, which creates great demand for cheap papers and books from the working class and the expanding lower-middle class.42 New Journalism, a stylistic change happening to the periodic press of the
40 In her study of gendered cultural production in the fin de siècle period, Elaine Showalter indicates that by the time George Eliot died in 1880, women writers had constituted to their male counterparts “a set of frightening rivals in the literary market” and irritation with the productivity of the successful woman novelist “surfaces [often] . . . in critical essays and stories of the period written by men.” See Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Viking, 1990) 76-77.
41 See Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004) 334.
42 According to an 1898 article published in Woman at Home, “hundreds of thousands of pounds of
1880s and 1890s, characterizes particularly the mass literary production of this period.
A style made popular by the publisher George Newes, whose magazine Tit-Bits pioneers this stylistic innovation, New Journalism is noted for its lavish use of illustration, the employment of intimate, conversational tones, and a deeply felt sensationalism, the last a feature characterizing also the production of popular literature of this period.43
While in Romance of a Shop the Lorimer sisters embody female independence by opening a shop of their own and surviving fin de siècle London’s competitive business ambience, Gertrude Lorimer, a writer by avocation, exemplifies still another form of female self-assertion through managing to commit herself to literary efforts.
That Gertrude is also a female writer finding literary creation a means of
self-fulfillment and spiritual comfort is ignored by most critics of Romance of a Shop, who tend to focus on the eponymous routines the Lorimer sisters carry out to pursue their life of independence. A closer reading of the novel would, however, reveal that Levy does portray the heroine Gertrude a picture of the aspiring female writer in the city and thus a self-reflexive image of Levy herself,44 both mirroring fin de siècle women writers wanting to assert themselves amidst the increasingly competitive and commercialized literary market, and the turn-of-century city space that offers greater
capital are employed in the ladies’ newspapers of today; hundreds of bright, talented women, and men too, are busied incessantly in providing by pen and pencil every conceivable sort of information and illustration which can help to tell all the world what the feminine half is doing.” See Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London 334.
43 See Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800-1914 (London: Routledge, 1996) 124; W. T. Stead, a journalist of late-Victorian England, whose exposés best exemplify the sensational reportage characterizing his age, introduces New Journslism as that “personal style, that trick of bright colloquial language, that wealth of intimate picturesque detail, and that determination to arrest, amuse or startle” see Judith Walkowitz (1992: 84).
44 Many scholars have found Gertrude Levy’s alter-ego. Levy is herself one of the female writers active in London’s literary circles. Levy regularly contributor to fashionable journals addressing particularly the female readership.
opportunities for women would-be writers.
Gertrude is obviously aware that as a would-be writer, she is entering an enterprise growing competitive in her days. Her talent at writing is indicated at the beginning of the story, when Fanny suggests that Gertrude might make a fortune via her pen, because she writes “so beautifully,” (54) an idea rejected by the
practical-minded younger sister, who thinks that the literary market has become too competitive to venture upon. However, she never gives up writing even after committing herself to the comparatively more feasible work of photography. While deeming her everyday routine at the photo shop as a necessity to secure financial independence, Gertrude nevertheless mediates upon the limits such life entails:
. . . Was this life, this ceaseless messing about in a pokey glass out-house, this eating and drinking and sleeping in the shabby London rooms?
Was any human creature to be blamed who rebelled against it? Did not flesh and blood cry out against such sordidness, with all the revel of the spring-time going on in the world beyond?
It is base and ignoble perhaps to scorn the common round, the trivial task, but is it not also ignoble and base to become so immersed in them as to desire nothing beyond? (120)
This outburst should not be interpreted simply as her denial of the shop work, which Gertrude as well as her sisters has found helpful and contributive to female
independence. It is rather Gertrude’s complaint about the lack of perspective such work may involve. It is also her wish to find ways to transcend the changeless pattern of daily shop work.
In this regard, writing offers Gertrude a means of transcending trivialized shop work and a more elevated way of approaching daily reality. Literary writing is the
“old consolation” (119) Gertrude constantly resorts to in the pauses of professional work, a means of transcending her day-to-day routines of shop work. More often than not, Gertrude is portrayed as an urban observer seeing things through the lens of a writer:
. . . [For] Gertrude, the humours of the town had always possessed a curious fascination. She contemplated the familiar London pageant with an interest that had something of passion in it; and, for her part, was never inclined to quarrel with the fate which had transported her from the comparative tamness of Campden Hill to regions where the pulses of the great city could be felt distinctly as they beat and throbbed. (80)
Passages abound in the novel where Gertrude is found contemplating the city pageant.
Her regular walk around Regent’s Park before business hours is one of the few occasions she could exorcise “her demons” (119), taking a break from the hustle and bustle of day-to-day work and seeking inspiration for literary production she is embarking on. Besides, the numerous errands Gertrude runs while performing shop work doubtless offers her opportunities of walking and observing the city.
Portraying Gertrude as a female writer making home in the city, Levy anticipates many New women authors who represent women would-be writers as self-supporting, urban figures making their bare subsistence amidst the fin de siècle city’s increasingly competitive literary market.45 Like most of these writer-heroines,
45 See, for instance, novels like Mona Caird’s The Daughters of Danaus (1894), Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman (1894), Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book (1897), or Mary
Gertrude, when pursuing her literary ambition, is found confronting the traditional view on female employment that demands women engage in works of domestic, feminine nature. Committing herself to literary efforts, Gertrude is by no means going into one of those “dull little ways by which women, ladies, are generally reduced to earn their own living” (55). Rather, she aligns herself with a troop of self-assertive, independent women writers increasingly perceived as making home in London at the fin de siècle, who seek literary enterprise as profession and a means of
self-realization.
As a writer, Gertrude finds that the city London, with its ever-expanding
publication industry catering for the growing urban mass readership, provides the very opportunities for female authors like her who want to try their hands at the writing profession. The novel never fails to impress the reader that fin de siècle London is already a huge mass literary market.46 Most of the characters reveal themselves as consumers of daily newspapers or popular periodicals. Mrs. Maryon, the landlady to the Lorimers, is a faithful reader of Pall Mall Gazette, a daily newspaper providing her with sources of gossips and scandals about London people. Frank, a friend of the Lorimer sisters and a suitor of Lucy Lorimer, is revealed an avid reader of periodicals like The Sporting Times and Tit-bits, the latter a popular weekly penny paper in late-Victorian England and an emblem of New Journalism characterizing the massive,
Cholmondeley’s Red Pottage (1899). For the updated studies of the female writer as figured in fin de siècle New Woman fiction, see Margaret Diane Stetz, “New Grub Street and the Woman Writer of the 1890s,” Transforming Genres: New Approaches to British Fiction of the 1890s (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1994) 21-45; Lyn Pykett, “Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman,” Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) 135-50; Penny Boumelha, “The Woman of Genius and the Woman of Grub Street: Figures of the Female Writer in British Fin de Siècle Fiction,” English Literature in Transition 40 (3): 164-80.
46 In the novel, Paternoster Row is first introduced as synonymous with a cluster of publishers to which Gertrude has sent her manuscripts in vain.
sensational productions of the fin de siècle periodical press. The Lorimer sisters also indicate themselves as readers consuming popular magazines like Punch.
While creating greater demands for the production of newspapers and popular journals, such expanding urban mass readership in the fin de siècle period exercises nevertheless also an apparently degrading effect upon literary production. Gertrude is depicted as having to choose between producing mass-consumed, trashy works or committing herself to more serious, valued pieces that cater for only the elite reader.
As the novel makes it clear, Gertrude initially works on the more elevated forms like tragedy and some high-minded novels, which do not seem to meet the popular taste and have made numerous “frequent and fruitless visits” to the publishing house (59).
Gertrude is made aware that she is entering a commodified literary market, a market increasingly encroached upon by the popular, undiscriminating reader(ship), by her friend Frank, who ironically pokes at the vulgarized literary market, to which he and Gertrude contribute as illustrator and writer respectively:
We have all to get off our high horse, Miss Lorimer, if we want to live. I had ten guineas this morning for that thing; and there is the Death of
Oedipus with its face to the wall in the studio—and likely to remain there,
unless we run short of firewood one of these days (121-22).
At comparison here is the relative profitability of a little poem by Gertrude, for which Frank gives an illustration, over the classical Greek drama that has been held as an emblem of high-quality literature. It is also a comparison drawn between Gertrude’s light verses, which make a profit despite being “rather a come down,” (121) and her efforts at a tragedy in five acts entitled Charlotte Corday, which is a more serious
work yet has been rejected by the publisher largely because of its failing to appeal to the public taste.