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Referencing Carol Poster’s 1996 article “Oxidation Is a Feminist Issue,” which deplored that “while we theorise, unrecovered Victorian women’s writings, printed on acid paper, crumble into permanent and irretrievable oblivion” (289), Gilbert emphasises that a renewed, more open-minded, recuperative work remains the best way to show that Victorian authors are vastly different, versatile, complicated, and often self-contradictory: in short, that they refuse to be sorted into neat little categories.
In the second chapter, “Marketing Antifeminism: Eliza Lynn Linton’s ‘Wild Women’ Series and the Possibilities of Periodical Signature,” Susan Hamilton then addresses a significant issue in the shifting epistemologies of antifeminism by analysing Linton’s writing as dynamic and openly scandalous as it weaved in and out of the emerging antisuffrage movement. A close analysis of Linton’s “Wild Women” articles in the journal Nineteenth Century, read side by side with Mona Caird’s “A Defence of the So-Called Wild Women” (1892), published a year after the appearance of the first in Linton’s series, helps trace the ways in which antifeminism was marketed and began to form a particular kind of press writing with distinct strategies and formal properties. In this, the chapter also forms a companion piece to Kristine Moruzi’s “‘The Inferiority of Women’: Complicating Charlotte Yonge’s Perception of Girlhood in The Monthly Packet.” Moruzi newly explores Yonge’s editorial work on The Monthly Packet beyond her series of articles on the subject of “Womankind,” which have—like Linton’s “Girl of the Period”—been regularly cited out of context. Reading the “editorial content” of Yonge’s magazine alongside the fictional works that were simultaneously serialised within its pages, Moruzi shows that decades of editorial work and a prolific output of fiction reveal Yonge’s perspective towards her girl readers—her main target group—to be intensely complex and oftentimes contradictory, albeit always sensitive to changing needs and expectations. At the same time, Yonge’s endeavour to respond to the challenges posed by Linton’s scandalous articles evinces the impossibility to pin down Victorian antifeminism as a particular set of attitudes or concepts.
As we move from Moruzi’s exploration of Yonge’s editorial writing and her fiction side by side to close readings, first, of Yonge’s most popular, not to say notorious, novels and, then, of Oliphant’s partly parodic experiments in genre, the following chapters are grouped together to reassess authors and works most commonly dismissed as antifeminist, domestic, and popular.