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tends to construe the woman artist entirely in terms of public per-
formance and self-display, on the other hand, the culture idealizes
an essentially private womanhood, constituted in terms of the
intimate bonds of romantic or familial affection. (In her fascinating
novel Ethel Churchill, Landon splits the analysis of celebrity through
two characters, the aspiring writer Walter Maynard and the perfor-
mative, admiration-craving Lady Marchmont; neither character finds
130 Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity
emotional fulfillment, and both meet disastrous ends.)50 If Landon s
exploration of Byronic fandom connects her to the position of many
of her readers, Landon s relationship to Byron also has to do with
Landon s self-positioning as a writer and literary personality within
the terms of this dilemma. The language of Byronism serves Landon s
effort to forge an identity for herself as a literary professional, in dec-
ades in which as Fraser s awkward treatment of female authorship
suggests no easy model for such an identity exists for women poets.
Thomas Pfau notes that professionalization pivots on the emergence
of an entirely new aesthetics of social appearance, one that identifies
some individuals as professionals and, by the same token, confers on
them the social credit of a dedicated professional community. 51 For
Landon, as we have seen, Byron is a figure against whom she can test
her own ambition and her own experience of visibility. With Scott s,
however, his romances are also the resource for a professionalizing
aesthetics in Pfau s sense, which she deploys through the themes of
chivalry and romance, feudal pageants and Eastern splendour Mary
Howitt identified as her characteristic province.52
Jerdan s review of The Improvisatrice, the reader will recall, has
Landon filling in the gap left in the world of (bestselling) romance
now that the minstrel of the Border is hushed and the light of Childe
Harold is extinguished. Byron and Scott are particularly appealing
models for Landon because their celebrity sutures the romance of
originary authorship and the new-found glamour of the publishing
scene: their success points at once to a residual notion of authorial
power and to the power of the literary system as a system. As the
heroic ideal of authorship morphed by fits and starts into the idea
of the literary professional, the publishing scene began in the
1820s and 1830s to acquire a glamour in its own right. Publishers
and editors were recognized as key literary players, and the behind-
the-scenes action of publishing became sensationalized as an object
of public fascination. In Moore s 1830 Life of Byron, for example,
Byron s correspondence with his publisher Murray is reproduced as
a central piece of the drama of the poet s career, and the action in
Murray s establishment is restaged as a prime object of the reader s
fascination.53 Even as it foregrounds the grubby mechanics of the
industrialized world of publishing, the highly self-reflexive com-
mentary on the literary scene in the periodicals seems to trade on
the reader s desire to go behind the scenes, somewhat in the manner
The Atmosphere of Authorship 131
of a Hollywood confidential.54 In the 1830s, Fraser s Gallery gives
prominence to editors and publishers as well as writers (it begins
in fact with a portrait of William Jerdan) and, like the Noctes
Ambrosianae series in Blackwood s in the 1820s, trades in literary
gossip that satirizes its objects, writers or editors, but also flaunts its
knowingness in a way that seems to anticipate (or to call for) pub-
lic curiosity about the literary scene as scene.55 If the glamour that
attaches not only to authors themselves but also to the apparatus
of authorship reflects the mythic power accorded individual gen-
ius in these decades, the growing recognition of the power of the
publishing apparatus also calls such myths of individual genius into
question.
Male writers in these decades have access to an emergent ideal of
what Patrick Leary terms the author-businessman as respectable
literary professional that at least partially reconciles genius and the
marketplace by subduing a heroic ideal of Romantic authorship to
Victorian ideas of productivity and propriety.56 But while women
writers of these decades proved themselves extremely adept and suc-
cessful professionals, it was riskier for them to appear in this char-
acter in public, especially without the cover of an aristocratic title;
indeed, a model for women comparable to the author-businessman
did not yet exist. For women, as we have seen already in the cases of
Landon and Martineau, fame as a working writer could often spell
association either with sexual scandal or with aggressive masculinity;
in the early nineteenth century, the scandalizing example of Mary
Wollstonecraft still resonated loudly. Hemans responded to this
dilemma by publicly distancing herself from the publishing scene:
though a tough and acute negotiator of contracts (she demanded,
and got, a higher fee for her contributions to Blackwood s than any of
the magazine s male contributors), she never visited London, staying
in Wales with her brood of children (and so, in fact, devoting herself
to writing).57 Landon, by contrast, identified herself closely with the
London literary scene, moving in fashionable society circles (includ-
ing Caroline Lamb s), forging friendships with writers and editors,
attaining prominence as an editor and reviewer herself, and writing
about the literary scene in her fiction. Contemporary discourse about
L.E.L. consistently locates her within this world as well: Blackwood s
review of The Improvisatrice, for example, does so literally in its intro-
duction to the writer by taking the reader on a meandering stroll
132 Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity
through London, passing the new house Mr. Murray of Albemarle
Street has just taken in that corner of the world before finally arriv-
ing at Landon s home at 131 Sloane Street.58 A letter Landon wrote
congratulating a friend on an upcoming publication gives a good
flavor of Landon s self-awareness about celebrity in these terms and
her sense of the imperative of professionalization. Here is Landon in
late 1825, writing to Katherine Thomson, whose Memoirs of the Court
of Henry VIII was about to appear:
My dearest Mrs. Thomson, your appearance in the atmosphere
of authorship is a consummation devoutly to be wished by all
who have the good name of their profession at heart. I shall
think of my calling, my shame in crowds, with somewhat of
complacency, when I can call up your image, instead of visions
of longitude in blue, and latitude in yellow. Already I see you a
regular lioness. Have you got Mrs. Thomson s autograph? I am
sure you will be at my party when I tell you Mrs. Thomson is to be
there she is the great historianess, a most charming, delightful
woman. Good gracious! can that be an authoress? Why, dear
me, ma am, she has such a fine family! 59
The pun on atmosphere as elevated region and as milieu or ambi-
ence suggests the conjunction Landon negotiates between the thrill
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