Current PhD Student

Brenda Metcalfe

Thesis Title:

Anonymity to Autofiction: Journalism, Fiction, and Narrative Authority in Eliza Lynn Linton's writing.

Supervisor:

Dr Emma Major

Description:

Eliza Lynn Linton was one of the most prolific female writers of the nineteenth century. Despite breaking boundaries, much of her life and work has been forgotten. She wrote over twenty novels and was a prolific periodical writer, receiving praise from Charles Dickens as a highly valued contributor to his journals. Lynn Linton was the first woman in England to draw a fixed salary as a journalist and one of the first women elected to the Society of Authors. Today she is largely remembered as a Victorian anti-feminist writer. With her changing opinions across the whole spectrum of public debate, the description of antifeminist is inadequate. As someone who was subversive and ground-breaking, whilst she is an awkward figure for feminist history, by reducing Lynn Linton to a simple label of ‘anti-feminist’ it overlooks the complexity of her life and writing. The modern binary of feminist/anti-feminist distorts our understanding of Victorian women’s lives which were much more nuanced, as women were constantly testing and renegotiating boundaries. This study contributes to a reassessment of Lynn Linton as a ground-breaking woman writer.

Lynn Linton was a paradoxical figure; her gender identity was not normative and she lived a life that directly contradicted the conservative ideology she preached. This study tracks the progress of Lynn Linton’s career from the position of uncredited anonymous journalism to a unique form of autofiction. This thesis reassesses the complex, conflicted, and contradictory representations in Lynn Linton’s writing which are discussed within critical, cultural, and feminist theoretical frameworks, and in the context of current critical debate and gender identities.