This concise new book, the first on Lynn Linton since 1987, considers the author’s oeuvre, placing its subject in new contexts and positioning Lynn Linton as a producer of popular texts designed to intervene in the key debates of her time. / Revealing its subject to be an astute manipulator of the literary marketplace, this book establishes Lynn Linton as a key participant in the nineteenth-century knowledge economy and argues for the restoration of a reputation that, as one of the first women members to the Council to the Society of Authors, she once enjoyed. / In the course of a career that spanned over half a decade, Eliza Lynn Linton (nee Elizabeth Lynn, 1822-98) wrote for multiple periodicals, penned numerous novels, several short-story collections and a series of non-fiction texts. / Her life spanned enormous changes in European society and culture, from the spread of the Comtean positivism and the spread of altruism to the Paris Commune and Irish Home Rule; from the popularity of Byronism and Bulwer Lytton to Paterian aestheticism, Zola and Tolstoy; from imperial expansion to the women’s rights movements, the extension of the franchise and changes in sexual regulation. / In the bicentenary of her birth, this study re-visits and re-evaluates a range of overlooked texts, demonstrating how Lynn Linton used her pen to contribute to the debates surrounding these changes. / Remembered by many for her controversial journalism, Lynn Linton is often caricatured as the purveyor of scandalously anti-feminist views. With critical focus directed on articles such as ‘The Girl of the Period’ (1869), ‘The Shrieking Sisterhood’ (1870), and the ‘Wild Women’ series (1891-2), scholarly discussions have centred around a tiny proportion of Lynn Linton’s writing and distorted our perception of the active role she played in nineteenth-century literary culture. This new book offers a broad and a detailed analysis.
