Eliza Lynn Linton

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Standard Name: Linton, Eliza Lynn
Birth Name: Elizabeth Lynn
Married Name: Elizabeth Linton
Indexed Name: Mrs Lynn Linton
Indexed Name: E. Lynn Linton
ELL 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.
Photo of a carbon print of Eliza Lynn Linton by W. and D. Downey, published by Cassell, 1890. She sits at a small chinoiserie table with lattice-style legs, as if paused in the act of writing on a sheaf of papers. Her right hand holds a pen; her chin rests on her left. She has a broad face with wire spectacles perched on her nose, and wears a white cap and a dark (black?) dress in several layers, with lace at the wrists and a good deal of dark decoration including jet beads sewn on. She has a metal cuff bra

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Leisure and Society May Crommelin
MC was a member of the Albemarle Club .
Who Was Who in Literature, 1906-1934. Gale Research.
vol. 1
She also belonged to the Society of Authors , and acted as a steward (along with over a hundred other luminaries including Walter Besant
Textual Production Charles Dickens
Other contributions were appeared from Mrs Alexander , Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Edward Bulwer-Lytton , Caroline Chisholm (later parodied by CD ), Wilkie Collins , Dinah Mulock and Georgiana Craik , Amelia B. Edwards ,...
Friends, Associates George Eliot
In addition to his intellectual heterodoxy, Charles Bray was a sexual nonconformist. He had several illegitimate children, of whom he and his wife adopted at least one. GE may or may not have known about...
Author summary Sarah Stickney Ellis
The prolific SSE , author of thirty-four books, was the most popular writer of Victorian conduct literature. Her four advice books addressed women in the burgeoning middle class; she also wrote novels, poems, and didactic...
Publishing Isabella Ormston Ford
On 23 April 1892 IOF contributed an article entitled Women and the Labour Party to a special series for the Leeds Times on Social and Political Questions by Representative English Women. Other notable contributors...
Friends, Associates Kate Parry Frye
KPF met Millicent Garrett Fawcett in 1896.
Frye, Kate Parry. “Introduction”. Campaigning for the Vote: Kate Parry Frye’s Suffrage Diary, edited by Elizabeth Crawford, Francis Boutle Publishers, pp. 9-34.
27
Her diary mentions meeting briefly many leaders in the suffrage campaign. Her fellow activists and sympathizers included: sisters Alexandra and Gladys Wright ; Sanitary Inspector and fellow...
Literary responses Sarah Grand
The Review of Reviews perhaps disingenuously took SG 's acknowledgement of faults in The Modern Girl to mean that she deplored the emergence of this type: Mrs. Lynn Linton will chortle for joy when she...
Publishing Beatrice Harraden
The Bookman printed BH 's two-page valedictory reminiscence of Eliza Lynn Linton , who had died two months before this.
Harraden, Beatrice. “Mrs. Lynn Linton”. The Bookman, Vol.
8
, pp. 16-17.
16
Textual Production Beatrice Harraden
In her novel Youth Calling, BH presented a friendship between a young woman writer and an older woman which is thought to be based on her early relationship with Eliza Lynn Linton .
“Youth Calling”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 1191, p. 733.
733
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Friends, Associates Beatrice Harraden
BH described herself as the literary god-daughter of Eliza Lynn Linton . (Her literary godfather was William Blackwood ). Her first meeting with Linton (the turning-point of her life, she wrote)
Harraden, Beatrice. “Mrs. Lynn Linton”. The Bookman, Vol.
8
, pp. 16-17.
16
took place in...
Friends, Associates Beatrice Harraden
Apart from Eliza Lynn Linton , her close literary friends included Evelyn Glover , Catharine Amy Dawson Scott , Evelyn Sharp , and Flora Annie Steel (with whom she corresponded).
Publishing Beatrice Harraden
BH had her first short story accepted for Belgravia (formerly edited by Mary Elizabeth Braddon ) after Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine had declined it.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
She went on to publish other contributions to Blackwood's; even by...
Textual Production Beatrice Harraden
In 1899 BH edited Eliza Lynn Linton 's posthumously published memoir, My Literary Life.
Textual Production Matilda Charlotte Houstoun
Within the span of nine years MCH produced eleven more novels, a biographical memoir, a novella, and a work of social commentary (The Poor of the Period; or, Leaves from a Loiterer's Diary...
Reception Henry James
The story proved both controversial and lucrative for him. Eliza Lynn Linton , ever interested in the changing moral complexion of young girls, wrote privately to James asking him to account for the heroine's behaviour...

Timeline

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Texts

Linton, Eliza Lynn. The Rebel of the Family. Editor Meem, Deborah T., Broadview, 2002.
Linton, Eliza Lynn, and George Somes Layard. The Second Youth of Theodora Desanges. Hutchinson, 1900.
Linton, Eliza Lynn. “The Threatened Abdication of Man”. National Review, Vol.
77
, pp. 577-92.
Linton, Eliza Lynn. The True History of Joshua Davidson. Strahan, 1872.
Linton, Eliza Lynn, and Arthur Hopkins. Under Which Lord?. Chatto and Windus, 1879.
Linton, Eliza Lynn, editor. Witch Stories. Chapman and Hall, 1861.
Oliphant, Margaret et al. Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign. Hurst and Blackett, 1897.