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These binaries formed part of the inherited sets of labels that, as Nicola Diane Thompson likewise warned a decade ago, “distort the complexity of the historically specific discourses and contexts in which the novels are embedded” (4). It is therefore vital to reconsider the self-reflexive counterreactions to such stereotyping that can be found in these texts themselves.
By the 1870s, sexually biased criticism had become a complex as well as pressing issue, one that, as Oliphant stressed, was receiving additional boosts from unexpected sources. Attendant controversies entered women’s writing on every level. In Charlotte Yonge’s 1873 multivolume domestic chronicle The Pillars of the House, for example, the lame artist Cherry Underwood achieves the height of her success when her well-received pictures are taken for the work of a (professional) male painter. It is perceived as a testimony to her talent that critics at an exhibition “should not have thought [her painting] a woman’s work”: “This, the most ambitioned praise a woman can receive, made her indeed Cherry-red” (2: 137). Yet if Cherry’s work explodes the notoriously gendered associations of High Art with predominantly male professionalism and popular art with femininity and amateur work in Victorian culture, her own appreciation of the attendant praise unquestionably acknowledges a gendered terminology of superiority. On an additional level, moreover, her paintings remain concentrated on the domestic. With yet another twist, this is precisely why they are more successful and, it is suggested, at least morally superior to her brother’s. By metaphorical projection, this expresses Yonge’s own ethos as an emphatically domestic writer. Such increasingly self-reflexive passages concerning the value of domestic narrative indeed achieved particular poignancy when issues of canonisation began to dominate critical debates on popular fiction from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Landmark essays such as Eliza Lynn Linton’s “The Girl of the Period” (1868) as well as Oliphant’s reviews or Yonge’s editorial work on The Monthly Packet, from its establishment in 1851 until her removal as editor in 1893, evince the urgency, pervasiveness, and most importantly, the wide range of what were later summed up as antifeminist engagements with a rapidly changing literary as well as cultural environment.