Gender performativity in the George Eliot letters, 1857-1860

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Gender Performativity in the George

1860

–

Eliot Letters, 1857

Emily Maas

Universiteit Leiden Research Master thesis Thesis supervisor: Prof.dr. I.M. Tieken-Boon Van Ostade Second reader: Dr. G.J. Rutten

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1. Introduction

When thinking about Victorian female writers, it is not hard to come up with a list of great, well-known professional female authors: Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Harriet Martineau, just to name a few. The intense debates observed in this era about the position of women in society and about whether authorship could be seen as a profession is, however, less well known (Peterson 2009:1–4). Even though a lot of literary masterpieces written by women have come down to us, it was not very common for women to live by the pen. Men vastly dominated the literary market: literature was seen as an inherently masculine endeavour — by men for men. Periodical articles were also usually written by men, and male critics often patronised and stereotyped literature written by females in their reviews. Already from the end of the eighteenth century onwards issues on gender were discussed in several periodicals, but the contributions were most often written by men (Brake 2000:263). For all that, female authors did demand a place alongside their male counterparts in the world of letters. These female writers had different strategies to negotiate the literary market. For example, some published anonymously. Others published their work under a male pseudonym to avoid a focus on their femininity; comparison to other celebrated women writers; and to defy traditional stereotypes of what a female narrative should be (“silly romantic novels”, for instance).

In Victorian times, women’s language, or specifically their genderlect (distinctive language use by one gender cf. Cameron 1990:24), differed from men’s performance of language. Whether men and women speak different languages at present has been called into question by Deborah Cameron (Cameron 2008), who argues that the linguistic differences between men and women are a means to construct personal meaning and identity rather than resulting from innate differences in language use. While this principle may also to a certain extent hold for the nineteenth century, it would be anachronistic to assume that men and

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women did not speak somewhat differently from each other in the Victorian era either. After all, women were less educated and therefore had less access to literacy than men. Only women belonging to the middle and upper classes received any education and were presumably literate — in the vernacular, that is (Coates 1993:28). Manuals on how to improve linguistic behaviour were frequently published with a female audience in mind; it was seen as important for a lady to speak and write properly — as defined by men. A nom de plume was just one of the linguistic means women in the writing profession adopted to hide their gender. Laurel Brake (2000:250) points out that women wrote articles in periodicals, and that in doing so they used language in a way that could not “identify the gender of their authors as other than male”. However, it would not have been easy for female writers to overcome this setback and function linguistically as their better-educated counterparts. Women’s writing, usually comprising novels, poetry and letters, were often the subject of mockery. Only some did succeed and flourished.

This study will focus on the woman with the most successful and lasting nom de plume, still in use after the identity and gender of the author had become known (Bodenheimer 2001:20), George Eliot (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880). During her lifetime she was known under several names, six in total; every name accompanied a different stage in her life: Mary Anne Evans (at birth), Mary Ann Evans (from 1837), Marian Evans (from 1851), Marian Evans Lewes (from 1854), her nom de plume George Eliot, and Mary Ann Cross (1880) (ODNB, s.v. Evans, Marian). Eliot published under her pseudonym from 1857 to 1860 — although from 1859 she resolved to keep her identity no longer secret. Marian Evans found herself in the midst of a literary environment that disfavoured women, as described above. In her 30s, she moved from the provinces to London to pursue a career in journalism, starting out as an anonymous reviewer, and later editor, of the radical periodical The Westminster Review. Marian’s situation was an anomaly: women journalists were sparse, and a female editor was unheard of at the time (Brake 2000:251). After writing for the Westminster, Marian set out to publish novels of her own, deciding to focus on the realist novel as a genre. Whilst Marian used the

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name George Eliot primarily for her novels, she also wrote several letters under this name.

In this study, I will compare the letters written by George Eliot to those signed as Marian Evans to find out whether Marian used gendered language variation or performativity strategies in order to articulate her male persona. This way, the present study aims to throw light on George Eliot’s linguistic identity as reconstructed from her letters, and whether she used different linguistic tools to shape her male literary character. Marian signed her letters as George Eliot only for a short period, three years, after which she conducted her literary business as Marian Evans. By changing her name, Marian continually transformed parts of her identity and shaped her identity as an author. Her writing was also partly formed during the period she worked at the Westminster; therefore it could be that she used these linguistics tools to write letters as George Eliot to her editor.

The surviving letters and diary entries of George Eliot and her live-in partner George Henry Lewes (1817–1878), as well as some incoming letters from Eliot’s publisher, were compiled and published in nine substantial volumes (edited by Gordon S. Haight 1954). Sometimes historical documents are collected because they belonged to a famous or influential person, but more often than not documents survive because of sheer chance. When studying language from the past, linguists run into what William Labov (1994) famously coined the ‘bad data’ problem. Labov states that “historical linguistics can […] be thought of as the art of making the best use of bad data. The art is a highly developed one, but there are some limitations of the data that cannot be compensated for” (Labov 1994:11). Certainly, in the past, historical linguists more often than not felt the need to apologise for the text types they used for their analysis, e.g. court documents or plays, or because they solely had fragmentary data to work with (Jucker 2008:896). Sure enough, the limitations that Labov mentions have to do with a lack of available data, the absence of phonetic records, and the scarcity of information on the social position of the informant. Furthermore, Labov (1994:11) argues that because the documents came down to us by accident rather than by design, they are “are riddled with the effects

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of hypercorrection, dialect mixture, and scribal error”. Essentially, Labov is regarding spoken and written language as opposites. In this tradition, drawing on the dichotomy introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure, written language is secondary to spoken language: ‘speech’ is seen as the real representation of ‘language’ and in turn written language is considered to be an inexact visual representation of speech – and a rather poor one at that (Romaine 2009:14). While the bad data problem is also prevalent in modern sociolinguistics, be it in other forms—such as the infeasibility of repeating elicitations on the same subjects, hypercorrection, dialect mixture and the problems such as observer’s paradox, etc.—the historical sociolinguist has to take the abovementioned limitations into account. Actual ‘speech’ from the past is indeed no longer available.

Slowly, the attitude in academia towards the position of speech and written texts are changing. Suzanne Romaine’s Socio-Historical Linguistics (1982) was the first attempt to apply the Labovian sociolinguistic framework to written historical data. In this work, she already argues that written texts are communicative acts in their right, with inherent properties and values. Koch and Oesterreicher (1985 as cited in Jucker 2008:896) argue for another dichotomy to overcome the idea that writing is subordinate to spoken language. They propose to replace this division by ‘phonic’ versus ‘graphic’ realisations of language, as well as the use of an index between what they call the language of immediacy and the language of distance. Especially the last opposition is interesting; the difference between spoken and written language may be less significant than language distance. For example, speech can be formal and detached, as there is hardly any interaction in a formal monologue, and private correspondence can be both highly informal and interactive or formal, depending on correspondents’ social status and relationship. Nowadays, there is a growing academic focus on specific language use of groups of people or idiolects, rather than the discription language use in general (Jucker 2008:896). Therefore, written language is now less often seen as a poor reflection of spoken language than it used to be, but as something to be studied in its own right.

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Labov mentions scribal errors as one of the reasons for the bad data problem. However, these errors cannot be solely attributed to scribes in the past. Sure enough, mistakes or differences in manuscripts can be attributed to scribes, but modern transcribers also tamper with the data. Documents are not always transcribed by linguists; commonly, historical documents are copied by modern enthusiasts or historians paying little attention to spelling and abbreviations, who for the sake of clarity transcribe old spellings as their modern equivalent and spell out abbreviations in full. A more pressing problem is the availability of the documents, as Labov (1994: 11) states: “Historical records survive by chance and not by design, and the selection that is available is the product of an unpredictable series of historical accidents”. And what happy ‘accidents’ they are. However, Labov makes a bold statement: a lot of historical records do survive by design because of their information, for example, legal writings. Personal correspondence of influential people was also sometimes kept for this reason. It is harder to find private documents, i.e. diaries or letters, from ordinary people; but they do exist (on all levels of literacy cf. Sokoll 2001; Fairman 2006). There are more records available in archives than are now being analysed by historian and linguists alike. The disadvantage of lack of time, funds or even knowledge of these documents’ existence is that the materials often lie dormant in archives or private attics, waiting to be uncovered, transcribed and published for research. In the meantime, however, much can be done with data that has already been transcribed and published.

Terttu Nevalainen & Helena Raumolin-Brunberg (2003)propose an interdisci-plinary approach to overcome the abovementioned problems. Social history can provide insights into the level of literacy and other social conditions and social structures in a particular period. For some periods of history providing a sociohistorical embedding of informants, their status and education as well as their social circles are sometimes impossible to reconstruct — the evidence needed for this kind of reconstruction is simply not found in historical sources. However, with regard to the Late Modern English period (17001900), this needs not be as much

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of a problem, since the social position and education of writers is often more estab-lished and can thus be ascertained. Furthermore, anthropological research on social networks can be successfully applied in linguistics, thus helping us to further understand an informant’s social circle. Finally, the quantitative analysis of historical data is made possible due to advances in computer technology, digitised historical documents, and annotated corpora. The present study also takes an inter-disciplinary approach and aims to show that the bad data problem can be overcome with the help of a combination of theory and computer technology that can make up for lack of data; a large corpus consisting of millions of words is no longer a prerequisite for doing sound historical sociolinguistic research.

As far as I am aware, preciously little has been written on the language of George Eliot, even though the documents are available. Gordon Sherman Haight, the editor of the George Eliot letters, did not provide an in-depth analysis of her correspondence, although he does make a passing remark on her language: “All her life George Eliot used many old forms which are still current in America though no longer common in Britain” (Haight 1954a:xxxv). Haight’s comments seem to refer to Eliot’s spelling rather than other aspects of her language use. The associations between George Eliot and gender which I discussed above are not new; research on George Eliot and gender has been done, though merely from a literary point of view. These studies often deal with gender and sexuality in the works of George Eliot, not with George Eliot’s language use in her letters. The connection between gender and forms of writing has been studied as well (see e.g. Brake 1994; Showalter 1999); these publications again do not present a linguistic point of view of women’s language use but instead focus on how women situated themselves in the literary world, and thus they have to be regarded as historical works or as a contribution to the history of female literature. In historical sociolinguistics, however, a recent focus has been on the relationship between notions of gender and social roles in language, for example in various articles presented in Social roles and language practices in Late Modern English (Pahta et al. 2010). Nevertheless, within this field, the concept of gender performativity in language in the Late

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Modern English period has not — as far as I know — been examined yet. Gender and performativity are topics which have been studied in the context of modern sociolinguistics, by Deborah Cameron and Don Kulick (2003), for instance. In my own study, I want to combine historical sociolinguistic theory with theories on gender from disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, and philosophy. My thesis, therefore, aims to see whether it is feasible to draw on this contemporary theory in a historical sociolinguistic context. By combining a qualitative analysis (gender theory) with a quantitative approach (drawing on computational and corpus linguistics) I want to see whether Marian Ann Evans performed linguistically differently when writing as George Eliot and how her language use differed.

This study begins with a discussion of theories used in sociolinguistics and historical sociolinguistics and how different poststructural theories on gender and performativity from various fields of study can add to the understanding of differences in creating identities through language use, and linguistic strategies men and women use to construct or adhere to social roles. The aim of the chapter is to explore how the language of women and men differs (or shows similarities) and which linguistic features define these differences. The third chapter will describe a historiography of women in the literary market that will help to describe how George Eliot created her identity and whether we should see her as a new phenomenon in the literary world at the time or whether she belongs to a longer tradition set by women before her. The next chapter will describe the corpora and the quantitative methods used in this study to analyse the data. This study will not start out with particular features that signify gender difference but will focus on the differences based on the 100 most frequent words and how these are used by men and women. The final chapter shows the results, brings together the qualitative analysis together with poststructural theory and discusses the findings.

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2. Theorising (historical) sociolinguistics

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts […]. (Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII) “One is not born, but ratherbecomes, a woman”. (Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex 1949)

2.1 Introduction

This study and this chapter attempt to integrate new sets of theory and different techniques for doing historical sociolinguistics. For several decades poststructuralist theories have been prominent in most of the humanities and the social sciences, but have not been adopted on anything like a wide scale in linguistics.1 However, what is

known as the linguistic turn (the idea in which language is perceived to be subjective and everything is (in)formed by language), despite its name, does not usually inform approaches in linguistics. To start with, I will therefore introduce poststructuralist theory here to establish a context for the gender theory discussed further down in this chapter. One aim of this thesis is to test the empirical analysis of George Eliot’s letters against the theoretical background of poststructuralism and gender theory. Hopefully, this will allow for deeper understanding of the linguistic devices used. At the very least, this thesis explores this avenue for combining qualitative and quantitative research.

Linguistics was founded as a structuralist science by Ferdinand de Saussure, and has in many ways remained a structuralist discipline (Honeybone & Salmons 2015:32). In many ways, this ‘unexamined structuralist baggage’ (Kiparsky 2014:81 in Honeybone & Salmons 2015:32) has stayed prevalent within the field. Yet, some poststructuralist theories may add to historical sociolinguistic research, like the poststructuralist notion of roles (initially a structuralist school of thought), identity forming, gender and performativity. The first part of the chapter will address the ‘philosophy of linguistics’ (or ‘theory of linguistics’); the second part elucidates the poststructuralist theories to be used in this study.

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2.2 Introducing Poststructuralism

Poststructuralism and the linguistic turn look at the process of knowledge as it is constructed through language (Carter 2013:583). It is an offspring of structuralist theory, which is concerned with binary. Thus, the idea within linguistics that the world can be divided into oppositions goes back to Saussurian theory who divided language up into langue and parole. The first, the structure of language, was promoted as the object of scientific study as opposed to actual language use. Binary oppositions are also found in dichotomies such as male/female, mind/body, and speech/writing. In structuralism, these oppositions show the underlying ‘realities’ (Chandler & Munday 2011 s.v. ‘oppositions’).

Poststructuralists argue against this kind of underlying structure or reality. As can be seen from Figures 1 and 2 below, poststructuralism challenges the structuralist view of reality by turning the episteme around: language constructs a reality, “language is one of the ways by which [reality] comes to be seen as real” (Ng 1998:174). In other words, language does not reflect reality; rather, if it reflects anything, it does so through the power in society which through language shapes reality.

perceived by coded by

reality cognition language

Figure 1: Structuralist episteme (Ng 1998: 174)

work through constructs

socio-political forces reality language (perception of) Figure 2: Poststructuralism on language and reality (Ng 1998: 174)

Several scholars have tried to explain why poststructuralist theories have not gained any footing in linguistics. Honeybone (2011:20), for instance, argues that this is because many linguists see linguistics as a ‘hard science’, analogous to the physical sciences, and poststructuralist notions are perceived as having no place in science. This justification, however, does not explain why poststructuralist thought has fundamen-tally influenced parts of the social sciences.2 Mainstream linguistics is concerned with

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across languages (for example, negation exists in every language). Poststructuralism, on the other hand, looks at the function of language in creating meaning, in which language has a broader communicative function, shaping who people are by forming identities, forming social norms and political values (Ng 1998:173). The focus on the language use of the individual or a group lies in the act or process of signification, e.g. the labelling of categories or phenomena, rather than merely considering language use as an utterance (Ng 1998:173). Poststructuralists also attribute a dynamic role to culture, as this intertwines with power relations that largely determine ‘reality’ which is, in turn, articulated through language (Ng 1998: 177). One of the biggest distinctions between structuralists and poststructuralists is the idea of structure (social institution or structures are seen to be independent of individuals and determine people’s behaviour) versus agency (the emphasis here is on the individual’s choice rather than structures).

However, within linguistics there has been some resistance towards adopting poststructuralist thought. Many linguists resist engaging more with sociological theory because of a fear of testing social issues rather than testing linguistic theories (Carter 2013:582). Carter ( 2013:590–592) thinks advances can be made by working on the following under-theorised poststructuralist ideas on language: focussing more on how subjects experience their identity through language rather than focussing on linguistic variation; studying the language of the individual rather than the variationist emphasis on groups; and continuing interdisciplinarity.

2.3 Constructing Gender: Roles and Performativity

Although the distinction between gender and sex has been made in historical sociolinguistic works since the 1990s, gender is often still taken for granted.3_Little

work has been done within historical sociolinguistics with gender performativity. With the basic tenents of poststructuralist thought in mind, we can look at how this way of thinking underlies theories of gender. In terms of gender, the structuralist versus poststructuralist debate translates into the following question: Are people merely acting out a script that was already written before they came on to the stage or are they actors

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free to perform as they like? Moreover, to what extent are their choices not already ‘structured’? Can gender be only binary and are we acting out a script from birth and are we socialised into conforming to that gender role?

The study of looking at the roles people perform in a social setting is referred to as role theory (Biddle 1986). The term is somewhat misleading, since there is not one overarching theoretical framework, but different perspectives on performance. The central thread is the tension between an individual’s behaviour and social structures: society to a certain extent dictates a person’s roles in life, but social interactions further guide the individual’s behaviour. The term ‘role theory’ was coined as a theatrical metaphor with the idea that actors on stage are obliged to perform the parts of a written script (Biddle 1986:68). The theory is thus concerned with patterned behaviours, ‘parts’ and identities that the performers adhere to by understood scripts and expectations in any given social situation.

Role theory can be best illustrated through the following riddle that is often used to expose the existing gender bias: a father and son are in a bad car crash that kills the dad. The son is rushed to hospital; just as he is about to go under the knife, the surgeon says, “I can’t operate—that boy is my son!” Explain. Most people guess that the son is adopted and the father was gay. Only less than 20% of people explaining this riddle think that the surgeon can also be a woman. (Barlow 2014). Thus, in terms of role theory, being a doctor comes with certain social expectations, namely that a doctor is a man.

The observed roles are not necessarily deterministic in the strictest sense; the displayed behaviour can either be altered or is predictable depending on people’s identities or situation in life (Biddle 1986:68). As in the theatre, there are actors and spectators: the latter are individuals in power (such as parents, teachers, etc.) who make sure that the performers carry out their roles appropriately according to the social script. The general idea is that people adhere to social or gender-typical roles because acting out of character comes with losses (the actor will be reprimanded) and rewards and reinforcements when acted out suitably. A person can enact several roles at the same time, for example that of ‘the mother’ but also that of ‘the doctor’.

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Roles are a constant negotiation between existing social norms, the attitudes of the participants, and the context as it is understood by the participants in a situation (Biddle 1986:71). A role is not necessarily fixed: an individual takes on a ‘role’ through an exchange of information as understood by the participants to which the participants respond with certain behaviours, enforcing their identity. An individual signifies a stable social role by regularly relying on symbols, such as: “[…] clothing; sex; racial characteristics; […] speech patterns; facial expressions; [and] bodily gestures; […]” (Goffman 1959:14–15).

Earlier scholarship was focused on the idea of sex role socialisation: the idea that young children learn how to act out the appropriate gender roles and associated behaviour by reinforcement of their surroundings (Risman & Davis 2013:737). For example, children that are assigned as boys are encouraged to perform masculine behaviour by playing with cars rather than dolls. Newer approaches focused instead on the notion of doing one’s gender. The sociologists West and Zimmerman in their article “Doing Gender” (1987:126) were the first to propose that gender is something people

do, as a routine and an accomplishment, rather than what they are. Here, the discussion on social structure versus agency returns (see the discussion in the previous section); sex role socialisation reinforces a notion of ‘naturally’ occurring binary opposition consisting of male/female, whereas ‘doing gender’ emphasises agency and non-binary opposition.

West and Zimmerman (1987: 127) propose a triadic division of ‘sex’, ‘sex category’, and ‘gender’ to replace the traditional sex/gender dichotomy. ‘Sex’ constitutes the social designation on the basis of conventional biological criteria to distinguish between male and female. ‘Sex category’ is the assumed sex of an actor by “identificatory displays” and performance that proclaim one’s masculinity or femininity (West & Zimmerman 1987:127). The displays are symbols that show one’s membership to one of the sex categories through, for example, language, clothes, etc. Lastly, ‘gender’ is the result of interactions determined by normative expectations that are deemed to be appropriate regarding a person’s conformity to a sex category.

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Judith Butler (1990; 2011) also proposed that one “does gender”, by ‘performance’. Like West and Zimmerman, she says that by doing gender, the mutually exclusive gender opposition is maintained (Butler 1990:6). Performance can be understood linguistically, since speech acts can name something into being, as well as theatrically since the acts are immediately acted out (Butler 1990:xxi). For example, the announcement of a baby’s sex at birth is based on the child’s genitalia; gender becomes a reality by declaring ‘it’s a boy’ and people start to act accordingly (saying that the boy is a boxer because it pumps its fists is more appropriate than calling the boy cute).

Being female, however, is claimed by Butler to not be a natural given, but is instead a culturally produced performance of gender. Making gender normative, a cultural norm imposed on subjects (Butler 2011:xi–xii; Butler 1990:7). Taking on gender is also compulsory in language, since a person is always indicated by the grammar of gender (Butler 1990:21). Butler explains how gender is constructed, as in Simone de Beauvoir’s famous quote: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”. Following this argument the question arises whether gender something people ‘have’, or is it what they ‘are’ as part of an identity? Butler argues that “gender is always a doing”, that gender is not part of an identity, or a ‘self’: “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very "expressions" that are said to be its results” (Butler 1990:25). In other words, identity and gender are not ‘who you are’; there is not a gender ‘core’, but gender and identity are made up out of what you do and say, i.e. perform. However, performativity is not a single act, but according to Butler a “reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names” (Butler 2011:xii).

In a way, performativity is also normative since it reproduces and maintains dominant gender norms, which in turn can ben subverted by gendered acts. Gender and identity can be produced, reproduced and challenged by signification, for instance by words, acts and gestures, much like Goffman’s symbols, produce gender (Butler 1990:136). The acts then constitute reality creating the illusion of a ‘true’ gender identity (Butler 1990:136). Gendered acts which are a short performance of gender (e.g. drag, whereby a person dresses up and acts out someone of the opposite gender) are not

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the same as gender performativity since the latter is a repetition or a ritual of acts over time through which the person becomes understood. In the second section of chapter three, we will see how gender norms dictated the expectations towards women authors and how they could adopt and enact a male persona in order to escape the gender roles expected of them.

2.4 Gender and Language

The approach to gender as being performative gave rise to new kinds of linguistic research. Deterministic generalisations as found in the beginnings of sociolinguistics, like Labovian variationist framework, that proposed which women and men spoke in a particular way are still popular in work on language and gender today (Meyerhoff 2014:1). However, feminist theories have given new urgency to challenge this kind of linguistic determinism (Cameron 1990:2).

Before the performance approach, gender differences in language were classically divided into ‘difference’(real difference in male and female language use) or ‘dominance’ (differences in women’s and men’s speech are the result of male domi-nance) (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 2003:1). This division can be traced back to important linguistic works on the language of men and women. Otto Jespersen (1922, as cited in Cameron 1990:22), for example, sees women as “conservative, timorous, overly polite and delicate, trivial in their subject matter, and given to simple, repetitive or incomplete/illogical sentence structures, softly spoken and soft in the head”. Jespersen thus operated within a ‘difference’ framework. However, this idea of women’s speech as tentative and trivial is repeated in Lakoff’s Language and Woman’s place (1975), in which she argues that women’s language is marked by “overpoliteness, heavily qualified statements, ‘empty’ vocabulary, and trivial subject matter” (Lakoff 1975 as cited in Cameron 1990:23). Lakoff argues that this way of speaking excludes women from positions of power, turning language into a tool of oppression (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 2003:1).

Recurring gender-based stereotypes of the past several decades include: women prefer to talk about relationships (Tannen 1990; Aries 1976); men interrupt women in

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conversations (Tannen 1994); women tend to be more polite because they tend to compliment and apologise more than their male counterparts (Holmes 1995); women use tag-questions and hedge more often (Holmes 1984; Lakoff 1975); women amplify their language (“I’m so glad you’re here”) (Lakoff 1975). Women’s language also tends to show more involvement. Involvement creates a interactive dimension in language by using more first- and second-person pronouns, intensifiers, modals, present tense verbs, private verbs (e.g. think, wish, feel) and ‘that’ deletion (Biber 1995; Palander-Collin 1999). Gender difference has also been explained in terms of ‘standard’ versus ‘vernacular’ language use (McConnell-Ginet 1978; Romaine 2003). It is usually argued that women use standard, more prestigious, forms more often than men. Peter Trudgill (1983:162 in Romaine 2003:102) emphasises this by saying it is “the single most consistent finding to have emerged from social dialect studies over the past twenty years”. Another recurring argument from the past twenties year is that women hypercorrect their speech more than men (mostly in the lower middle class) (Romaine 2003:102).

However, studies in differences in language use do not have to follow the more stereotypical lines sketched above. John Burrows's (1987) study Computation into Criticism, for instance, shows with multivariate statistical techniques how each character in Jane Austen’s novels has their own idiolect. Stylistic markers can readily be indentified from rather common words that are often deemed to be insignificant —

function words. Indeed Burrows shows that men and women in Jane Austen’s novels show a significant difference in style by their use of personal pronouns alone. Hota et al. (2006) automatically classified gender by language use of the gender performances in Shakespeare’s plays. Previous work by Argamon et al. (2003) showed that men display a more informal style by using more determiners, numbers, adjectives, prepositions and post-modifiers. Women, on the other hand used a more involved style with explicit negation, first- and second-person pronouns, present tense verbs and the use of prepositions for and with (Hota et al. 2006:82). Hota et al.(2006:83) included in their study features such as topic independent words (what they call frequent words), mostly function words, prepositions and numbers as well content words, which were

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all the words that were used more than ten times in the corpus (this method is called a bag of words). The bag of words analysis showed that men use more cardinal numbers, and plural and mass nouns, for example swords, dogs, water (Hota et al. 2006:84). Female characters in Shakespeare’s plays used more singular nouns such as woman,

mother, heart (Hota et al. 2006:84). However, they see these words as a strong evidence for female singular noun usage but also shows one of the dangers of classifying gender on the basis of content words. It is not unlikely that content words like woman, mother, and heart are words that are generally used more often by women and therefore not necessarily a good example of a strong indication of singular noun usage. Female characters were found to use more adverbs, adjectives, auxiliary verbs and pronouns and men more determiners, while some prepositions seemed to belong more to the male characters (Hota et al. 2006:84). In the early plays determiner the also seems to be a strong indicator of male characters.

The problem with gender difference study findings is that they demonstrate underlying binary ideologies such as educated/uneducated, articulate/inarticulate, pretentious/unpretentious. Many of these stereotypes readily assume that women have access to education and are familiar with the standard language, though even today, many women do not have access to prestige language (Romaine 2003:109). But especially in the past in Britain, even upper-class women did not receive as much education as men. Thereby they were excluded from prestigious norms in written language (Romaine 2003:109). Romaine proposes that women adopting standard language could also do this not because it represents prestigious norm but rather to avoid the stigma of non-standard speech (Romaine 2003:110). In order to go beyond the simplistic correlations between language use and gender, it is therefore important to note that language use is a choosing of sorts mediated through performances of identities. Women can change their language use and style by adopting styles more favoured by men.

Thus, Deborah Schiffrin (1996:199) suggests that “identity is neither categorical nor fixed: we may act more or less middle-class, more or less female, and so on, depending on what we are doing and with whom”. Gendered language use, if such a

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thing exists, is now perceived as a linguistic resource that creates index categories such as femininity or masculinity, resources which both men and women can draw from (Meyerhoff 2014:3). Modern research in this vein is mostly concerned with the language use of those who identify as being on the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) spectrum. Here, the idea of indexicality of male and female speech styles will be applied to a female author, Marian Evans, who created a male persona.

2.5 Concluding Remarks

Structuralism divides the world in oppositions, whereas poststructuralists question binary oppositions, by saying that these are social constructs that are only perceived to be ‘natural’. Within the poststructuralist framework gender is not seen as a natural given but as a ‘doing’, a ‘performance’ that becomes meaningful by employing different styles (clothes, speech). Sex does not determine a person’s gender if that person performs the same repetition of gendered acts.

Linguistic form is related to gender in the sense that gendered acts, social interactions and social constructs command a linguistic style. Gender becomes meaningful through language by pragmatic considerations, social expectations and how identities are understood. Previously, linguists have argued that there is a gender difference in language use. Stereotypically, women’s language use is seen as tentative or overly polite. Feminist theory in linguistics argued to the contrary, that negative stereotypes of women’s language use is no longer tenable and posits that gendered language is a resource to situate one’s identity.

In this study, qualitative and quantitative analyses are seen as complementary. A quantitative analysis of the qualitative notion of gender as fluid rather than fixed which is given meaning by a range of styles can help us see whether George Eliot drew from a male linguistic index when writing as an invented male persona.

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1_{In this study modernism and postmodernism are treated as larger cultural and}

philo-sophical movements — a zeitgeist. Structuralism and, its contender poststructuralism, are treated here as the more theoretical movements concerned with certain thinkers within the modern and postmodern era. Postmodernism and poststructuralism are often used synonymously in academic works, since postmodernism adopted many poststructuralist ideas. Judith Butler (1990), for instance, places herself in the poststructuralist philosophical tradition rather than the postmodern tradition. This furthermore encouraged me to use poststructuralist theory as opposed to postmodern theory.

2_{The assumption here would be that the social sciences are actually not science but}

an art.

3 For example Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg (2012) use gender instead of sex, but

categorise monarchs such as Elizabeth I as female. I think this should be problema-tized by for example talking about a spectrum of gender rather than in traditional sex roles, then we can acknowledge that even though Queen Elizabeth may have showed female traits, her performance was rather different than was expected of women at that time (leadership for example was not among that). It is interesting, then, to see how she manifested both masculine and feminine behaviours (use different roles as instruments).

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3. The Lady Novelist

For several reasons I am very anxious to retain my incognito for some time to come, and to an author not already famous, anonymity is the highest prestige. (George Eliot to John Blackwood, 14 March 1857)

3.1 Introduction

In order to understand language variation as something that is not self-contained, it is necessary to provide a social dimension. As social historian Peter Burke (1987:4) explains, “[…] women do not happen to simply speak differently from men but have been trained to so in male-dominated societies, expressing their subordination in their speech”. To a certain extent, language differences are conditioned and prescribed. In the next section we will see, that even the way women were supposed to write and what topics were deemed appropriate were prescribed by a critical and discriminatory male establishment.

This chapter first examines different views of historians on the professional circumstances of women writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century literary market in England. Some historians argue that women were unable to participate in the literary market due to gender restrictions and thereby failing to become professional writers. Others argue in favour of women using strategies, such as pseudonymous publishing, to become professional in a male-dominated literary institution. The rise of the periodical press in the nineteenth century gave women to a certain extent some freedom to publish anonymously, and gave rise to a new model on which women could build a professional career. Finally, I will look at how George Eliot used periodical writing to her advantage to build a complex authorial persona.

3.2 Literary Historiography: Professionalisation of the Female Novelist

Women writers in the nineteenth century were hardly a new concept. In the eighteenth century, there were hundreds of successful women; prolific in multiple genres and largely responsible for the success of the novel (for instance see Spender 1986 and Clarke 2004 for a list of writers and detailed literary careers of some of these

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women). Historians, however, disagree on the position of writing women in the eighteenth century. There are two schools of thought: according to some, women retreated into domesticity, writing novels while feeling largely uneasy about getting paid for their work—these women are not deemed professional writers in the modern notion of professional denoting financial remuneration (Clarke 2004; and to a certain extent Spender 1986). The other school of thought perceives women writers taking on a public and active role as a professional in the literary marketplace (Showalter 1999; Schellenberg 2005; Peterson 2009). Only in the first model does gender seem to play an important role, more precisely the exclusion of women from public roles and victimisation are asserted. The discussion of the role of earlier women is important since generalisations of the female writer of the 1790s enlightenment thinking shaped how professional women in the nineteenth century were conceived. Thus, the understanding of the economic, social status and the idea of the exclusion or inclusion of women in these two models differs and has direct implications on how to interpret the role of the nineteenth-century female author.

The gender exclusion model is mainly concerned with public and private domains in which women and men each had their roles; the private sphere served for the construction of the enclosed domestic woman (Klein 1995:97). The domains in the public sphere, outside the home, were solely reserved for men. As Klein (1995:97) emphasises, the organisation of spaces forms “a contrast between assigned practices— the difference between men’s work and women’s, between female accomplishments and men”. The beginnings of gendered discourse on women writers largely stems from literary biographers from the 1750s, such as George Ballard (c. 1706 –1755), who created a universal mould for them to fit in: an authoress has to be “modest, middle-class, well-read, pious, [and] charitable” and “does not challenge her society in any direct way except to urge further educational activities” (Schellenberg 2005:7).

Clarke (2004) places the rise of the female writer at the beginning and mid-eighteenth century when patrician culture and domesticity were highly celebrated. Women writers in this period were to be admired and worshipped for their literary genius. The Bluestockings, a mid- to the late eighteenth-century circle of

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learned women and men (later the term Bluestocking became to be more associated with the women of the group rather than the men), is a prime example. The Bluestocking women were “admired as an ornament and exception to her sex” (Clarke 2004:3). Clarke (2004:3) argues that the writings of these women functioned in an aristocratic milieu with Elizabeth Montagu (née Robinson 1718–1800) as “queen of the Blues”. Clarke (2004:8-9) states that women writers did not write for economic gain and often refused to take on a professional role; they were still functioning in the older system of patronage. The Bluestockings, in The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters

(Clarke 2004), are presented as being uncomfortable with all kinds of commercial enterprises and recompenses.

The fall in Clarke’s The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters (2004) paradoxically stems from improved education and the vast expansion of the commercial press by the end of the eighteenth century. More and more middle-class women embraced the pen and some prospered. The novel was made successful by these middle-class authoresses who were perfectly able to make profits from their pens. Thus, the Bluestockings, as presented by Clarke, seem to be an exception with their uneasy relationship with money and publishing, since the vast majority of women writers did write to support themselves and their families (Spender 1985:4). Circulating books without publishing them was an enterprise reserved for upper-class women or writers with a supporting patron. Most women could not afford not to publish their books on the mass market.

The exclusion of women based on gender, in line with what Clarke (2004:339) says on this, is more or less an invention from the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth century. However, Irish author Oliver Goldsmith (1728?– 1774), sometimes wrote under a female pseudonym and “suspected that [more] men were writing sentimental novels under female pseudonyms, [… as well as] write books on childcare, midwifery, housekeeping, and cooking” ( Showalter 1999:17). By means of adopting a female pseudonym, men could profit from the literary market led by women. Women were making inroads into the literary market in almost unprece-dented numbers, a trend that continued throughout the nineteenth century. Men of

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letters perceived the literary market as being overflown with women novelists. However, as Showalter (1999:40) asserts, the “[…] ‘female dominance’ was always in the eye of the male beholder”. The perceived deluge of novels written by women was solely a male exaggeration, since women only made up about twenty percent of the market (Spender 1985:23). However, men too started to write more fiction in this period and doubtlessly saw these women as adversaries cheating them out of their readership.

Clarke (2004: 338) argues that the status of the authoress declined when they entered the mass market and their literature became marked as ‘popular’ and ‘low’, whilst serious literature was perceived to be a male enterprise. Spender (1986:161) sees the devaluation of literature by women as a male backlash due to their enormous success. From the nineteenth century onwards, the pervasive notion of silly novels by silly women began to be parroted by critics in periodicals and started to undermine the established presence of women on the literary market. Terms such as ‘Bluestocking’ and even ‘Austen’, referring Jane Austen (1775–1817), acquired pejorative meanings, denoting overambitious, pedantic, self-important, dull and ignorant women (Clarke 2004:339). Discourse on women’s professionalisation was seen as controversial, and this negative discourse about authoresses continued well into mid-century. Where Spender (1986:1) places Jane Austen in a “long and well-established tradition of women's novels”, fully aware of and indebted to her precursors; the lady novelists from the 1840s were certainly not directly influenced by predecessors like Fanny Burney (1752–1840), Anne Radcliffe (1764–1823) or Austen because these women and their works were seen as silly or too didactic (Showalter 1999:101).

The new ideal of normative gender roles, in the form of extreme femininity, peaked in the nineteenth century, when womanhood was seen as a vocation in itself. The domestic sphere was the place for the stereotype of “The Angel in the House” (from a poem by Coventry Patmore 1854), submissive to the men in her life (Showalter 1999:14). For some women authorship acquired a new meaning. Women worked for others in the roles of the teacher, a helper, or a mother; working for self-development was in stark conflict with the Victorian philanthropic ideals (Showalter 1999:22). Some

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women began to write as an extension of their feminine roles, for example as educators, believing that writing augmented their womanhood and usefulness (Showalter 1999:85). Women, such as Mrs Gaskell (née Stevenson, 1810–1865), domesticated their profession by writing from their dining rooms or drawing rooms rather than a study (Showalter 1999:85). This discourse is also prevalent in the periodicals of that time. A

Fraser’s Magazine issue from 1836 published an illustration and sketch of leading authoresses, sitting around a table in a domestic setting drinking tea (Peterson 2009:15). Some Frasers’s Magazine issues, published between 1830 to 1833, included individual portraits of important literary ladies. These women were also depicted in domestic settings and praised the authoresses beauty, femininity and domesticity (Peterson 2009:26). These illustrations and women’s assertions of writing in a domestic setting, rather than in a room of their own, was to maintain a sense of domestic propriety. Women writers who deviated from these ideals, were perceived by the periodical as ‘masculine’ women, were severely satirised. Harriet Martineau (1802–1876), for instance, considerably deviated from the norm of prescribed femininity in person and work, is not depicted in Fraser’s in a domestic setting, but in London lodgings (Peterson 2009:30).

The Victorian discourse on authorship did create a new myth of the female writer: a woman who was supposedly mannish, professional as opposed to domestic, unhappy and frustrated (Showalter 1999:84–85). In Victorian discourse the female was inextricably linked to the body; the female was understood as the weaker sex and prone to all sorts of ailments (Showalter 1999:76). Intellectual enterprises on the woman’s part were seen as a mere “self-destructive imitation of a male skill but also a masculine development” (Showalter 1999:77). Public discourse was concerned with finding masculine traits in female writers, often in the form of physical metaphors. General allusions like these were also made to George Eliot, who was described as having large hands and large eyes (Showalter 1999:77). Other women writers were described in metaphors as having a large nose or large feet, everything that was regarded as unfeminine. Authoresses such as women from the Bluestockings Circle, Fanny Burney, Sarah Fielding (1710–1768) and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) are often are

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presented in literary historiographies as authoresses unrepresentative of other women or as an exception to their sex. These were women who had be “admired as an ornament” and were presented as being without peers (Clarke 2004:3; Spender 1986:150). Of course, these statements have foundations in the perceptions of the contemporaries of the women writers, who explained the success of intellectual women in terms of being mannish or sexless (Clarke 2004:8). Women like Anna Seward (1742–1809) could rise in the social order, and “they took on an honorary masculinity” (Clarke 2004:306). Showalter (1984:1) sees women denying their sex altogether, by stating that they are just writers instead of women writers writing on women subjects (romances). Since women’s literature became more associated with ‘silly novels’ and concerned with love stories, serious women took pains not to be associated with these stereotypes and did not want to write for other women: “For to be seen to write about women or for women is to be damned” (Spender 1986:165).

Historiographies on women writers in the eighteenth century, and especially those concerned with the nineteenth century, emphasise the distinct and separare public and private spheres in Victorian times, thereby only enforcing binaries such as male/female and public/private. The proposed binaries in the primary sources often come from people in power or assert their power, and can, therefore, be misleading when they are taken over uncritically. Klein (1995:98) maintains that “[…] the hege-monic role often assigned to binary oppositions in the discursive worlds of past people is less solid and total than it is sometimes made out to be”. Rather, oppositions are generalisations. Klein thus sees dealing in absolutes as a heritage favoured by structuralists: commonly, distinctions are more complex rather than binary in charac-ter. Even in the most rigid form of the domestic thesis, there seems to be a gap in theory and practice: “Most historians agree that over the course of the eighteenth century, and more insistently in the nineteenth, a private and public sphere were constructed ideologically and endowed with gender and class meaning. But the degree to which in practice families actually adhered to 'separate spheres' ideology remains the subject of much debate” (Hunt 1992 as cited by Klein 1995:101).

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Klein (1995: 102-105) tries to problematize this issue even further by looking at the possible meanings of these public and private spheres. In the case of the organisation and use of space by men and women on the basis of letters and diaries, it appears that women did move about in public. Klein shows the movements of women in the seventeenth century by using Pepys’s diaries as a case study. In the diaries, Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) does not only mention the movements of his wife Elizabeth Pepys (1640–1669), but also those of friends seen in public spaces. Additionally, Lady Mary Pierrepont (bap. 1689, d. 1762), later Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, in her letters during her courtship with Edward Wortley (1678–1761), mentions several public spaces which women could visit (Klein 1995: 102-105). Thus, private sphere did not entail housebound. The Oxford English Dictionary does not necessarily prove very useful in providing insight into what public or private meant in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The public in the sense of “a person acting or performing in public” does not seem to be reserved for men when we look at the entries for the nineteenth century (OED, s.v. public 1a). The meaning “of or relating to a person in the capacity in which he or she comes into contact with society, as opposed to his or her private or personal capacity” has only one nineteenth-century reference, from Jane Austen referring to a preacher (OED, s.v. public 5). The taxonomies of meanings for

private did not prove more fruitful. Klein (1995:103) maintains that these words are taken for granted and seen as common knowledge. As Klein states (1995:103): “[p]erhaps the most egregious aspect of treatments of the gendering of public and private is simple anachronism”. Thus, the error of modern scholars may be that they project their definitions of public and private on past definitions of these concepts.

The spatial division of public and private goes hand in hand with cultural con-structions of labour, i.e. what kind of vocation is suitable for men and women (Klein 1995:97). The woman question, concerned with the fundamental role of women in society and with women’s work, attracted a lot of debate in the past decades. New discourse generated on the nature of women’s work emerged and challenged the notion of the separate spheres. In the early nineteenth century, the only suitable occupations for a single untrained middle-class woman was to become a dressmaker or a governess.

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In both vocations, the market was heavily overcrowded with young single women. From the 1840s onwards women increasingly took up positions in retail (Jordan 1999:68). But the debate on vocations for women flared up with the publications by Anna Jameson (née Murphy, 1794–1860) and Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1827– 1891) in the 1850s, both arguing that women were to take up a wider range of profes-sions. From this period, and especially after 1860, potential vocations for young women expanded drastically (Jordan 1999:74). The new discourse did away with the ideal that only philanthropic work was suitable for women, to make way for a new discourse on work as self-realisation. The publications by Jameson and Bodichon argued that men and women both had duties in the public and private spheres (Peterson 2009:46). Peterson (2009:46) argues that this slippage of separate domains of work made the full professionalisation of the authoress possible.

The women writer, however, could even be seen as professional and public before the 1850s after all. The gender historian Joan Scott (1999:16-27) illustrates studies that show that women in the past occupied several roles, even so-called ‘public’ ones. Furthermore, both eighteenth and nineteenth-century authoresses participated in the literary market in a business-like way. A market, according to Klein (1995: 104), is always a public phenomenon and demands some sort of professionalism. This was even the case in the eighteenth century with the Bluestockings since they were seen as “women writing, publishing, and taking a public role in the life of the mind” (Myers 1990:244 as cited by Sairio 2008:137). It is therefore important to go beyond the over-simplifications of women being restricted to a private sphere in order to see variations in women writer’s agency (Schellenberg 2005:45). In the next sections of this study, women writers are understood as active participants of the literary market, each woman in her own way. These women had different ways to navigate the prevailing power structures, without being stripped of their agency or by the public undoing their gender. As we will see in the next section, if a woman chose to undo her gender, it was but one way to succeed as a professional author.

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3.3 Complex Authorial Identities

Victorians had narrow definitions of female authorship. Women who wrote on subjects that were deemed inappropriate or used unconventional language, such as slang, collo-quialisms or dialect, were reprimanded in reviews of their work (Showalter 1999:25). The start of the mass production of the periodical at the beginning of the nineteenth century contributed to new types of criticism of works by women, but at the same time gave women a new opportunity to publish their work. Periodicals were relatively cheap and formed an integral part of staying informed in middle-class life. During the first half of the nineteenth century, anonymous contributions were the norm in periodical journalism, a practice which opened up opportunities for women economically as well as the freedom to publish articles on diverse subjects without risking ad feminam

criticism (Beetham 2006:236). Women were able to contribute to ‘masculine’ topics or controversial issues and “allowed them to evade essentialized notions of 'feminine' voice and identity” (Easley 2004:1). Women wrote under the veil of anonymity as experts on a diverse range of topics without anyone questioning their authority. With the expansion of the periodical press came the practice of literary reviewing, a feature that soon started to mark serious magazines. As Easley (2004:2) puts it:

To be a woman author in Victorian society was to be 'first-person anonymous', that is, to both construct and subvert notions of individual authorial identity […]. By investigating ways that women negotiated and capitalised upon these publishing conventions, we can begin to complicate our understanding of the construction and gendering of the authorial role of the Victorian period.

Harriet Martineau was a forerunner in redefining women’s authorship, by working in a manifold print media. She regularly and anonymously contributed to the big titles of the periodical press, among others the Edinburgh Review and the London and Westminster Review. Martineau distanced her work, even the work concerned with women’s place in society, from forms of feminine writing (Easley 2004:38). Periodicals kept up the appearance of having mostly male contributors and a male

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editorial board. When contributing to magazines women wrote in a neutral tone or even adopted a style that deliberately made it look like a man’s writing (Haight 1968:268). Martineau often wrote in a ‘mannish’ way and even adopted a male persona in her essays on women as to appear objective but also to open up the debate for a broader audience (Easley 2004:38-39). Martineau set a new model for the woman of letter in the form of “anonymous submission to and acceptance by a periodical […]; a continuing relationship with that periodical, including useful professional advice from its editors and positive response from readers; then, the development of a similar relationship with a book publisher, on whom she could count to place her work” (Peterson 2009:61). Peterson sees the woman professional as a person negotiating with publishers, readers, and editors as well as dealing with making money. After publishing under her own name, however, Martineau became an instant literary icon.

Martineau’s work was mostly praised by reviewers, but some of them criticised her on emotionality and her relative inexperience (Easley 2004:41). These stereotypical feminine writing traits were often invoked by reviewers. This type of reviewing was not exclusive for women, even anonymously published works were categorised as male or female according to whether it was sentimental, original or refined (Showalter 1999:90–91). An author’s gender could be determined by tallying the stereotypes present in a certain work. Critics became obsessed with finding out the gender of anonymous works. As Elizabeth Gaskell writes in The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857): “The whole reading-world of England was in a ferment to discover the unknown author [of Jane Eyre] […]. Every little incident was mentioned in the book was turned this way and that to answer, if possible, the much-vexed question of sex” (Showalter 1999:91–92).

Women could, however, retaliate by providing their own anonymous reviews of women’s works or essays on topics of cultural or social criticism in the periodical press. This enabled women to fade in and out of the public eye when they deemed it necessary. With reading and writing, women could participate in public debates. The periodical provided women with the freedom to work and fine-tune their ideas by means of a public discussion that would otherwise be inaccessible to them, before

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implementing these ideas in work of fiction or non-fiction. “Most women who began their careers as journalists cling to authorial anonymity throughout their lives as a means of evading socially constructed definitions of the female author” (Easley 2004:58). Thus, the anonymous print media gave women a platform to experiment with and shape their authorial and gender identities.

3.4 George Eliot

Similar to Harriet Martineau, Marian Evans had her foundations in anonymous print. Evans was, however, more careful about assuming a public identity when she furthered her career in fiction. This was partly due to her relationship with the already married George Henry Lewes, with whom she lived until his death. Lewes and his wife had separated on good terms, and his wife lived with another man with whom she had a child. However, when Evans and Lewes decided to move in together, in 1854, it caused quite a public scandal resulting in an arduous relationship with her immediate family. Although Lewes could not get an official divorce, Marian took on his name and signed her letters accordingly as Marian Lewes. For a while, Evans was also shunned by London society, but her relations with friends and high London society ameliorated over time. The scandal was one good reason for Evans to rely on anonymity and pseudonymity during her career. With the creation of George Eliot, Evans was able to resist stereotypes of feminine writing and subject matters. Easley (2004:117) sees Evans presenting “George Eliot” to the public as a way to avoid scandals and express “a cultured rather than essentially gendered perspective on moral questions”.

Marian Evans’s start of her writing career and her acquaintance with the publisher John Chapman came by accident. Chapman needed a translation of Strauss’s

Life of Jesus (1835), a task reserved and started by Elizabeth Rebecca Brabant (1811– 1898). Brabant, however, married soon after the start of the translation to the brother-in-law of one of Evans’s closest friends, the Brays. Evans, still known as Mary Ann Evans, at the time, was familiar with German, Latin, Greek and Hebrew. The Brays introduced Evans to Chapman, who decided she was suitable for the job. At the age of 24, she took up the job as an anonymous translator and finished two years later in 1846

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(Ashton 2006:23). Chapman published the book with no translator publicised on the edition. Although the edition did not sell well the reviews praised the translator’s thorough knowledge and accurate translation (Ashton 2006:25). After the death of her father in 1849 Evans travelled around Europe with the Brays, to return to England in 1850. Mary was unsure what to do with her life and asked around to find out what Chapman, her only acquaintance in the London area, charged for lodgings (Ashton 2006:83).

Evans took up residence with Chapman in 1851. He managed to place a literary review by her hand in the Westminster Review, a periodical he was trying to take over. In the same year Chapman bought the periodical. Mary Ann changed her name to Marian, as she saw this as a more adult name to suit her career in London (Ashton 2006:85). Marian started as Chapman’s assistant editor after his acquisition of the

Westminster Review, however, she was formally responsible for most of the editing work. From 1851 up to 1854, while Evans was also a regular contributor of the

Westminster Review, she wrote many essays and literary reviews for the journal. Marian’s position at the periodical was solidified and the editorship of the Westminster

was resolved in a letter to Chapman:

With regard to the secret of the Editorship, it will perhaps be the best plan for you to state, that for the present you are to be regarded as the responsible person, but that you employ an Editor in whose literary and general ability you confide (9 June 1851 in Ashton 2006:95)

The role of the editor of mainstream periodicals was always understood as a male job. This was either an illusion, as was the case in in Blackwood’s and Fraser’s where the editorial board was fictional, or the editorial ‘we’ as male was implied to disguise the female contributions to the magazine (Easley 2004:27). In a way the ‘editor’ of the

Westminster was as much a construct as the fictional ones of Blackwood’s and Fraser’s. Marian’s plan to assume editorship meant that she could keep on enjoying anonymity without being ostracised for pursuing an independent career or risking the reputation

Gender performativity in the George Eliot letters, 1857-1860