Loughborough University
Browse
Beller Bestsellers article final.pdf (406.25 kB)

Popularity and proliferation: Shifting modes of authorship in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Doctor's Wife and Vixen

Download (406.25 kB)
journal contribution
posted on 2016-09-26, 12:41 authored by Anne-Marie BellerAnne-Marie Beller
Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s long career coincided with a shift in writing practices, as the Victorian literary marketplace became increasingly professionalized and competitive. This article argues that Braddon intervened in contemporary debates about the status of the popular novelist and the nature of authorship through her fiction, implicitly mounting a defence against the critical attacks on her own prolific production. Through a discussion of representations of authorship in The Doctor’s Wife (1864) and Vixen (1879), it is suggested that Braddon offers an important example of a bestselling female novelist who both exemplified the changing construction of composition in the nineteenth century and the move towards mass culture, and also engaged with and commented on this transition in interesting ways.

History

Department

  • English and Drama

Published in

Women's Writing

Volume

23

Issue

2

Pages

245 - 261

Citation

BELLER, A-M., 2016. Popularity and Proliferation: Shifting Modes of Authorship in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Doctor's Wife and Vixen. Women's Writing, 23(2), pp. 245-261.

Publisher

©Taylor & Francis (Routledge)

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2014-08-04

Publication date

2016-01-26

Notes

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Women's Writing on 20 Jan 2016, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09699082.2015.1130284.

ISSN

1747-5848

Language

  • en

Usage metrics

    Loughborough Publications

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC