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
Intertextuality and Influence Jane Hume Clapperton
Unlike many of her feminist contemporaries who refused association with author Eliza Lynn Linton on any matter, JHC approvingly cites Linton's Universal Review article The Philosophy of Marriage, September 1888, which suggested that divorce...
Intertextuality and Influence Frances Power Cobbe
This is a social progressivist argument, trading in chauvinistic notions of British cultural and racial superiority, and strongly dependent on the notion of inherited proclivities as well as faith in social systems as shapers of...
Intertextuality and Influence Frances Power Cobbe
FPC continued to promote women's writing and women's causes in tandem, in such places as her writings in 1869 and 1870 on Dinah Craik 's A Brave Lady, a fictional illustration of the need...
Leisure and Society May Crommelin
MC was a member of the Albemarle Club .
Who Was Who in Literature, 1906-1934. Gale Research, 1979, 2 vols.
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
Literary responses Jane Porter
JP was, with her sister , one of those praised by John O'Keeffe in his poem Female Authors, Being an Answer to a Lady, who asserted, that by transmigration the soul of Shakespeare lived in...
Literary responses Harriet Martineau
HM was highly regarded by many other women writers of her day. Elizabeth Barrett Browning pronounced her the most manlike woman in the three kingdoms (that is, in England, Scotland, and Ireland)...
Literary responses Julia Pardoe
Most reviewers of JP 's oeuvre felt it necessary to stress her minor status. At the end of the century Eliza Lynn Linton , looking back, thought JP had been a leading light in that...
Literary responses Rhoda Broughton
Eliza Lynn Linton , in an article that was in general highly complimentary, defended RB 's characterisation of Lenore: She is irritating and faulty, but not corrupt. Her temper and her taste are both equally...
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...
Literary responses Mary Russell Mitford
John Kenyon wrote in 1833 to tell MRM of the delight taken by himself and his brother in her tolerant and humanizing pen.
qtd. in
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers, 1870, 2 vols.
2: 145
Her reputation as a financially successful author brought her unwelcome...
Literary responses Rhoda Broughton
RB was convinced that Nancy would be a failure (and threatened in that case to stop writing), as she told Richard Bentley in a letter bemoaning a negative review in Pall Mall.
Sadleir, Michael. Things Past. Constable, 1944.
106
It...
Literary responses Frances Trollope
Mary Russell Mitford spoke for the more conventional side of early nineteenth-century opinion when she wrote that in spite of her terrible coarseness, [she] has certainly done two or three marvelously clever things.
qtd. in
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers, 1870, 2 vols.
2: 316
Literary responses Rhoda Broughton
The Athenæum, describing Belinda as RB 's worst novel, noted a similarity of her central couple to Dorothea and Casaubon in George Eliot 's Middlemarch. It deemed Eliot's characterisation decidedly superior, maintaning that...
Literary responses Rhoda Broughton
An article by Eliza Lynn Linton written in June 1887 (well after the ebbing of RB 's early, scandalous reputation) judged that her books were always essentially love-stories, and nothing else,
Linton, Eliza Lynn. “Miss Broughton’s Novels”. Temple Bar, Vol.
80
, June 1887, pp. 196-09.
203
but that without...
Literary responses Agnes Strickland
Lives of the Queens of England was frequently reprinted with additions and revisions; the 1852 edition, regarded as definitive, was reprinted in 1972 with an introduction by the Stricklands' fellow-biographer Antonia Fraser . Fraser 's...

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, 3 vols.
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.