In Memoriam of Andrew Brown

Andrew Missak: Cleverley Brown died peacefully at home on 21 January 2014, days short of his sixty-fourth birthday, and only months after his retirement from the position of Development Director for Academic Publishing at Cambridge University Press. He joined the Press as a Graduate Trainee in 1976, and over subsequent decades was influential in developing first the literary studies list, then Humanities and Social Science more broadly, and finality the whole of Academic and Professional Publishing. While he had an extraordinary range of interests, his scholarly heartland was Victorian fiction: his Cambridge doctorate was on \u27The Metaphysical Novels of Edward Bulwer Lytton\u27 (1979), and of his subsequent publications, the most notable is his definitive edition of Romola for Oxford\u27s Clarendon Edition of the novels of George Eliot (1993). A Cambridge person through and through, it was a source of pride to Andy that he should bring out a major scholarly work from a rival press. Certainly his adherence to the belief that the great university presses have a responsibility to support major scholarly editions served Cambridge well in many of the ventures now in train or brought to a successful conclusion. I met Andy Brown in 1992, on his first visit to Australia. My colleague Judy Johnston and I were in the early stages of work on our edition of George Eliot\u27s journals, while he was in the final stages of preparation of the Clarendon Romola. We were not at a loss for conversation, though I\u27m not sure how much talking I did. I certainly remember a vigorous discussion of the question of how far explanatory annotation in a scholarly edition ought to be pursued, the highlight being Andy\u27s disquisition on a passage in Romola about the preparation of purple dye. I was to come to recognize the erudition and the eloquence he displayed as characteristic, along with the element of self-mockery that pervaded the utterance. To clarify my memory after the lapse of time, I located the passage of twelve lines in the second paragraph of chapter xxxviii, concerning the derivation of the family name of Bernardo Rucellai, an historical figure who appears in the novel. The name \u27Rucellai\u27, George Eliot explains, comes from \u27a little lichen, popularly named orcella or roccella, which grows on the rocks of Greek isles and in the Canaries\u27 that when exposed to light \u27under certain circumstances\u27 gives out \u27a reddish purple dye, very grateful to the eyes of men’. What is there to be said about this prime example of George Eliot\u27s pedantry? The editor identifies her likely authority, and more. Andy\u27s note depends from the phrase, \u27under certain circumstances\u27, and reads \u27In his end of Marietta de\u27 Ricci (almost certainly GE\u27s source) Luigi Passerini notes that to produce the dye the lichen had to be mixed with urine\u27. Provision of George Eliot\u27s unexpected source for the information on marine biology (Marietta de\u27 Ricci, 1841, is a novel by Agostino Adamello) creates an opportunity to include further detail from that source, not strictly relevant, but surely irresistibly indelicate. Did George Eliot herself hold back from explaining \u27certain circumstances\u27? Andy raised the question in conversation, but left it implicit in his explanatory apparatus. My justification for labouring the point is that this small example is of a piece with innumerable other instances of Andy\u27s elegant editorial decisions, deft exercise of critical judgment and potent scholarly argument

Review of Women and Literature in Britain 1800-1900

This book of thirteen essays by leading scholars in the field is an impressive and valuable contribution to the study of nineteenth-century women writers. Canonical figures such as Austen, the Bronte sisters, Gaskell and Eliot are examined in the wider context of the social, cultural and economic conditions which influenced the production and dissemination of their work and reputations. In addition, the very nature and construction of the canon of nineteenth-century woman writers is interrogated. These essays reveal the tremendous extent and variety of women\u27s contribution to the expanding range of discourses that helped to form the culture of the nineteenth century. Fiction, poetry and drama are strongly represented but space is also made for biography and other forms of life-writing, religious fiction, journalistic polemic, scientific and political essays, and writing for children. The studies are contextualised within a broader examination of women as consumers as well as producers of print, and revelations concerning the process of canon formation that accompanied the mid-century celebration and reassessment of their extraordinary rise to literary prominence. Joanne Shattock\u27s focus on Wollstonecraft, Austen, Charlotte Bronte and Eliot reveals the seminal role played by contemporary biographies in establishing a sense of literary community among women although the emphasis was placed on notions of \u27womanhood\u27 rather than literary talent. Joanne Wilkes contributes to this theme in her discussion of the impact of the sexual politics of the canonizers on the literary reputations of their subjects. Margaret Beetham reveals how industrialization and imperialism transformed the market in print by targeting the new generation of women readers and writers. She identifies the \u27cultural anxiety\u27 stimulated by the question of women\u27s intellectual and physical responses to the \u27pleasure and power to create new ways of being in the world\u27 that literature afforded them. Lyn Pykett\u27s essay reveals how \u27masculinist\u27 publishing houses and gendered critical discourse shaped women\u27s representations of gender, sexuality and motherhood in fiction, poetry, magazine articles, conduct books, pamphlets, and life-writing. Her readings of work by Bronte, Nightingale, Eliot, Caird, Cholmondeley, Gaskell and Braddon demonstrate how women writers reacted and responded to the \u27often deeply contradictory stories that their culture told about themselves\u27. Valerie Sanders examines the influence of \u27the male clubland of editors, publishers and reviewers\u27 on women\u27s literary careers and suggests that by the middle of the century women handled their careers with a greater degree of professionalism. Mounting a strong challenge to the triple-decker novel women also overturned what H. G. Wells described as \u27the prevailing trivial estimate of fiction\u27

Models of Authorship: Margaret Oliphant and George Eliot

This article is about the profession of authorship in the nineteenth century. More specifically it is about the writing lives of two women novelists. Margaret Oliphant\u27s (1828-1897) work is unfamiliar to most modem readers, apart from her Autobiography, one or two of her supernatural tales, and possibly the \u27Chronicles of Carlingford\u27, the series for which she was best known, novels and stories set in an English provincial town where life revolves around church and chapel. George Eliot (1819-1880) on the other hand, needs no introduction to today\u27s readers. In one of her many reviews of the works of her contemporaries, Margaret Oliphant referred wistfully to what she called \u27the elysium of a popular edition\u27,1 a compliment that was denied to her during her lifetime and afterwards. Remembering that she wrote a total of ninety-eight novels, fifty short stories, five full length biographies, three literary histories, historical guides to European cities, and more than three hundred journal articles, this may not seem in the least surprising. I and fourteen colleagues are currently engaged in a twenty-five volume edition of Oliphant’s Selected Works. I am hoping that an indirect outcome of what follows will be to show why we think the edition is important My main focus, however, is on factors that determined the career of a professional author in the mid-nineteenth century, from apprenticeship and early publication, to the role of the publisher, and then to what I will call the publishing end game. I want to raise the question of whether there were perceived \u27models\u27 of a writing career, some possibly more highly regarded than others, and to what extent authors consciously or subconsciously, measured their own achievements against these models. In 1885 the publisher William Blackwood sent Margaret Oliphant an inscribed copy of a long-awaited publication, the three volume biography of George Eliot by her widower John Walter Cross. As one of its longest-serving reviewers, and as a Blackwood author herself Oliphant could reasonably have expected to have reviewed the book for Blackwood\u27s Magazine, but William Blackwood clearly thought otherwise. Oliphant seems not to have been put out. Writing to congratulate him on the publication she commented, \u27I don\u27t think anyone will like George Eliot better from this book, or even come nearer to her\u27. And then in another letter she added: \u27It is quite astounding to see how little humour or vivacity she had in real life. Surely Mr. Cross must have cut out all the human parts\u27.\u27 This was precisely what contemporary reviewers and readers were to say about the biography

The Thirty-first George Eliot Memorial Lecture; Jane Austen and George Eliot: Afterlives and Letters

\u27A woman and her book are identical\u27 - or so the American writer Edgar Allen Poe reflected when reading an early collection of poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.\u27 Remembering the autobiographical nature of much of Barrett Browning\u27s early work, his comment is not surprising. But it has a more general relevance for nineteenth-century women writers. The charge that they could only write of what they knew, and that what they knew best was themselves, was made regularly by reviewers. The easy association of the life and the work, or more accurately, a refusal to separate them, was crucial to the reading of these writers by their contemporaries. In this lecture I am concerned with the reading of nineteenth-century women, how they were read in their lifetime, particularly how they read one another, and how we read them today. More specifically I am interested in the role that contemporary biography played in this process: how in a number of celebrated instances, a biography constructed the woman writer inherited by the next generation of writers and readers of both sexes. It was the American feminist critic Ellen Moers who first made the point that nineteenth-century English women writers sought and created the sense of a literary community by reading one another\u27s books. \u27The personal give-and-take of the literary life was closed to them\u27, she wrote. \u27Without it they studied with a special closeness the works written by their own sex, and developed a sense of easy, almost rude familiarity with the women who wrote them\u27. 2 Of course these were highly intelligent women reading the work of other highly intelligent women. They knew better than to look only for self-representation in these texts. They were astute critics of one another\u27s work and conveyed their views, sometimes in personal correspondence, sometimes in published reviews. But to these writers, reading one another\u27s books made them feel that they knew the authors. It was an alternative to a female literary society. This reading culture was not confined to women writers as readers. It extended to all women readers. In her study of attitudes to women\u27s reading in the Victorian period Kate Flint notes the sense of community felt by women readers of fiction and the emergence of female heroines as role models.\u27 I want to suggest that both the search for role models, and the felt need for a personal knowledge of these women governed the reading of biographies as well as the works of women writers. To the wider reading public, both male and female, the biographies attracted the curious and the prurient as biographies have always done, but for this wider readership too there was a sense of wanting to know the woman behind the books