Eliza Lynn Linton was a Victorian novelist and memoirist whose historical importance rests largely on her pioneering role as a professional journalist who blazed a trail for her sex. She both held and promoted radical views early in life. Nevertheless, as is well known, many of her 200 periodical contributions are antifeminist essays which celebrate traditional women in traditional roles, and ridicule attempts at new departures for women as either a fad or a sham.
Milestones
1845 Eliza Lynn, later Linton, first reached print with a poem entitled "The National Convention of the Gods", for which she received two guineas in payment from
Ainsworth's Magazine.
14 March 1868 ELL published the most famous of her series of anonymous 'middle' essays for the
Saturday Review on topics involving women (education, marriage, employment):
"The Girl of the Period".
12 May 1870 ELL published another in her controversial
Saturday Review essays, attacking radical or progressive women, "the 'shrieking sisterhood,'" or those who sought the vote.
January-December 1880 ELL's first 'New Woman' novel (a phrase which was not to become current for several more years),
The Rebel of the Family was serialized in
Temple Bar. It appeared in volume form the same year.
19 November 1883 ELL published at
London and
New York, with her name,
The Girl of the Period, and Other Social Essays, fifteen years after their periodical printing and years after two of the essays appeared at
New York as a pamphlet.
