Department of English Literature

THE BUSINESS OF A WOMAN’S LIFEfemale authorship, celebrity and fandom

in the long nineteenth century

March 26th 2018Museum of English Rural Life, London Road Campus

PROGRAMMETIME ACTION VENUE

09.00 Registration and RefreshmentsPlease collect your conference packs

Conference Room

09.25 Keynote Speaker – Prof. Alexis Easley

Going Viral: Cheap Newspapers, Scrapbooks, and the Construction of Women’s Poetic Celebrity, 1830–50

Conference Room

10.25 Session One –Panel A – Authors in ConversationPanel B – Authorship, in fiction and theory

A: ConferenceB: Seminar

11.20 Refreshment Break Conference Room

11.50 Session Two – Panel A: Gendering the text – form and contentPanel B: Gendering the writer/performer

A: ConferenceB: Seminar

13.10 Lunch Conference Room

14.10 Session Three –Panel A: Recontextualising – diaries and scrapbooks Panel B: Revisioning – women and celebrity

A: ConferenceB: Seminar

15.30 Panel Discussion on female literary friendship Conference Room

16.15 Refreshment Break Seminar Room

16.35 Session Four –Panel A – Out in Front – women and celebrityPanel B – Behind the scenes – the business of publishing

A: Conference B Seminar

17.30 Closing Remarks Conference Room

Invited Speakers

Supported by the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS): www.bavs.ac.uk

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Running order

Professor Alexis Easley - as a researcher, teacher, and editor, is interested in everything Victorian. She recently published the Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers (co-edited with Andrew King and John Morton), which received the 2017 Colby Prize. Other recent books include Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship, 1850–1914 (University of Delaware Press, 2011) and First-Person Anonymous: Women Writers and Victorian Print Media, 1830-70 (Ashgate, 2004). Alexis serves as editor of Victorian Periodicals Review, an international scholarly journal dedicated to research on the Victorian press. She is co-editor of the recently edited collection, Researching the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Case Studies  (Routledge, 2017). Alexis’s other current research and teaching interests include Victorian women writers, Victorian drama, working-class poetry, the Brontës, Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, detective fiction, Gothic novels, and professional editing.

Emily Midorikawa is the co-author, with Emma Claire Sweeney, of A Secret Sisterhood: the Hidden Friendships of Austen, Bront , Eliot and Woolfё , and with a foreword by Margaret Atwood. It is published by Aurum Press in the UK and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the USA. Emma and Emily also run the website Something Rhymed, which celebrates female literary friendship. Her journalism has appeared in, among other publications, the Daily Telegraph, the I

newspaper, and The Times. Emily was the winner of the 2015 Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize.

Dr Emma Claire Sweeney has won Arts Council, Royal Literary Fund and Escalator Awards, and has been shortlisted for several others. Emma publishes arts features and pieces on disability for the likes of the Guardian, the Independent on Sunday, Mslexia and The Times. She currently teaches creative writing at New York University, and has previously worked for Cambridge, City University’s Novel Studio, and the Open University. Her debut novel, Owl Song at Dawn, was inspired by her sister, who has cerebral palsy and autism, and is published by Legend Press.

Parallel Sessions

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Running order

Authors In Conversation.

Chair: Evan Hayles Gledhill

Club Membership of the Late 1880s: Women and Fin-De-Siecle Authorship, Fulya Kincal

‘Not indeed a good writer of novels’: The Trolling of Sydney Owenson, Sara J. Kerr

Authorship, in fiction and theory

Chair: Megen de Bruine- Molé

Braddon’s ‘Grub-Street Scribbler’: Antonia Thornton the professional writer at the end of Braddon’s career in The Infidel, Helen McKenzie

Mary Ward and the Business of Romance, Stephen Edwards

Gendering the text – form and content

Chair: Evan Hayles Gledhill

Ellen Wood’s gender bending – male voices from the quintessential ‘lady-wife-mother’, Chloé Holland

The Reception of a Nineteenth-Century Female Writer of ‘Unfeminine’ International European Politics, Rachel Egloff

Jane Austen: an honorary man, Chiara Codecà

Gendering the performer

Chair: Fulya Kincal

Performing Restraint: Alice Meynell’s American Lecture Tour, 1901-1902, Sarah Parker

‘What an actress this woman is! What an arch trickster – what an all-accomplished deceiver’: Mary Braddon’s Literary, Theatrical, and Personal Performances, Anne-Marie Beller

‘Marry an actress! No words can describe the horror’: Images of the professional actor and propriety in Mabel’s Progress (1867), Eleanor Dumbill

Recontextualising – diaries and scrapbooks

Chair: Sarah Parker

Recovering the Female Poetry Reader: Ann Warton Stock’s IllustratedCommonplace Book (1852-1860), Melissa Tricoire

Poaching, Gleaning, Spinning: The Gendered Metaphors of Appropriative Art, Megen de Bruin-Molé

Female authorship and celebrity in nineteenth-century Polish theatre: Helena Modrzejewska and her female fans, Agata Łuksza

Revisioning the past

Chair: Simon Avery

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Immodest Violets: A Neo-Victorian Female Botanist in Courtney Milan’s The Countess Conspiracy (2013), Caroline Duvezin-Caubet

The Glocalization of Women’s Concerns in a Filipino Version of Pride and Prejudice, Maria Lorena Santos

Another Secret Sisterhood: Christiane von Goethe and Ernestine Engels Step Back On Stage, Laura Ginters

Out in Front - women and celebrity

Chair: Agata Łuksza

Nineteenth-century Women’s Poetry and the Politics of Fame: Marketplace, Voice, Tradition, Simon Avery

‘An Obsessed Audience’: The Theatrical Life of Adah Isaacs Menken, Jessica Sebali

Behind the Scenes – the business of publishing

Chair: Evan Hayles Gledhill

‘Our Readers’ Own Realm’: Alice Corkran, L.T. Meade, and Reader Contribution in Victorian Girls’ Magazines, Beth Rodgers

Friendship and Fireworks: reinterpreting the relationship between Marie Corelli and George Bentley, Jenni Scott

SOCIAL MEDIAThe conference hashtag is #19thCwomen. The organiser, Evan Hayles Gledhill, will be tweeting panels from their personal account @GothicBodies. The handles of speakers who would welcome your live tweets are in the abstracts, alongside email addresses. Please do not share pictures without asking those in the shot before you post them. Please respect any speaker’s wish not to have their paper tweeted, even if you do not tag them – it might be a publishing agreement issue rather than a publicity concern.

CONFERENCE DINNER

Will be held at Bolan Thai restaurant in Reading Town centre, half a mile walk. I will be leading a walking group from the conference venue to the restaurant at 6pm. The bus from the nearby stop is the number 21, and we can guide you to that stop as we walk.

There is no car park at the restaurant. There are numerous pay and display carparks in central Reading, The Oracle shopping centre will be the largest and cheapest. The car park at MERL will not be locked, so you could walk and return to your car later.

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