New Media and the Rise of the Popular Woman Writer, 1832–1860

Alexis Easley is Professor of English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. She is the author of First-Person Anonymous: Women Writers and Victorian Print Media, 1830–70 (2004) and Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship, 1850–1914 (2011). She has also co-edited four books, most recently Women, Periodicals, and Print Culture in Britain, 1830s–1900s, with Clare Gill and Beth Rodgers (2019). Her most recent book publication is New Media and the Rise of the Popular Woman Writer, 1832–60 (2021). This project was a 2019 recipient of the Linda H. Peterson Prize awarded by the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. She is currently at work on a biography of Eliza Cook.

There is much to admire in Easley’s well-researched study: there are moments of quiet revelation that might be showier in the work of other scholars.

• IntroductionChapter 1: Felicia Hemans and the Birth of the Mass-Market Woman PoetChapter 2: Eliza Cook, New Media InnovatorChapter 3: George Eliot, the Brontës and the Market for PoetryChapter 4: Women Writers and Chambers’s Edinburgh JournalChapter 5: Frances Brown and the ‘Modern’ Market for PrintChapter 6: Scrapbooks and Women’s Reading PracticesCodaBibliographyIndex