Eliza Lynn Linton
February 10, 1822-July 14, 1898
The word that leaps to mind when describing Linton is "spunky." She was that odd Victorian being, a thoroughly emancipated anti-feminist. She educated herself in her father's library (one of Woolf's "daughter's of educated gentlemen") and in 1845 she went to London by herself to become a writer.
Although she was not an instant literary success, Linton received enough encouragement (and remuneration) to continue her work, and was eventually able to support herself through journalism.
Iconoclastic in almost every way, Linton lived alone in the city, was an atheist, separated amicably from her impecunious husband, and began her career writing historical romances that she researched at the British Museum. Although her works are not highly regarded in a literary light, they are useful and entertaining portraits of her age. Moreover, the puzzle of Linton's stance towards her own gender continues to tease scholars.
She harshly critiqued women who sought expanded political rights (or any political rights at all, for that matter), leveling at them the old accusation of masculinity, while she herself reveled in an unbecoming freedom, education, and professional life. Her final work, the rambling Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland is self-evidently about the author, yet written by means of a male persona. Why did Linton effectively deny others the freedom she herself enjoyed? Why did she condemn viragos, only to identify herself with a male protagonist? Difficult as her politics are to explain (in fact, I'm not sure that, according to her own scheme, she ought to have politics), they are not unique. Many proto-feminists and emancipated women exhibited similar or related misogyny, from George Eliot, in her essay "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists," and Harriet Martineau in her Autobiography, to Gertrude Bell and Edith Nesbit - some only indulged periodically, while for others it was a way of life.
Drawn loosely from:
Dorothea M. Thompson, Carnegie-Mellon University
in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 18: Victorian Novelists After 1885 . A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Ira B. Nadel, University of British Columbia and William E. Fredeman, University of British Columbia. The Gale Group, 1983. pp. 153-158.
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