Market suitability: the case of Eliza Lynn Linton

Abstract

Market Suitability: The Case of Eliza Lynn Linton At the beginning of her career Linton wrote ‘bold’ novels and articles supporting women’s emancipation but later insisted that the emancipation of women was a “giant mistake.” This paper argues that she changed from a vanguard of modern womanhood into an anti-suffrage misogynist to suit the anti-suffrage press backed by the ruling aristocrats. Her attacks on women began with the women’s emancipation movements and her sensational article ‘The Girl of the Period’ and similar essays criticized the New Woman and highlighted women’s points of weakness. Through chronologically setting the change in her public attitude against real life events, taken from her letters and her barely concealed autobiographic works, this paper attempts to show that Linton’s conversion to anti-feminism in the later part of the 1860s was a change in tactics rather than conviction and a part of her literary industry to achieve fame and keep a reasonable flow of income.