Eliza Lynn Linton

Journalist

• Born: February 10, 1822
• Birthplace: Keswick on Derwentwater, Cumbria, England
• Died: July 14, 1898
• Place of death: London, England

Biography

Eliza Lynn was born the youngest of twelve children. Her father was a Church of England clergyman in the town of Keswick in the English Lake District; her mother died soon after her birth. She was largely brought up by her older siblings and self- educated by reading her father’s library. She became particularly interested in mythology. In 1845, at the age of twenty-three, she persuaded her father to allow her to live in London, where she found a job at the Morning Chronicle while researching at the British museum for material for her first two novels.

Lynn’s first published work was a poem sent to Ainsworth’s Magazine in the same year, and her first two novels were well noted. Journalism, however, soon became her main source of income: indeed, she was one of the first Victorian women journalists. The first novel, Azeth the Egyptian was published in 1846, she having to contribute œ50 towards the costs of printing. Amymone, set in the time of Pericles, appeared in 1848, and was favorably reviewed by Walter Landor, the poet. She became close friends with Landor, visiting him often at Bath. She also moved in the literary circles of George Eliot and her partner.

In 1851, Lynn moved to Paris, where she became the Morning Chronicle’s correspondent. Having returned to England, she married in 1858 a widower, William James Linton, inheriting seven children. He was not a good money-earner, and she found herself working very hard at her writing in London whilst he lived at “Brantwood,” later to become John Ruskin’s home in the Lake District. In 1867, the marriage was finished. The next year, she began a series of thirty-seven essays or portraits on the contemporary woman, under the overall title “The Girl of the Period.” They were unsigned and highly controversial in a period when the feminist movement was beginning to spread its wings, since they were basically antifeminist.

In recent years, her stance has attracted renewed interest, as it seems to fall between traditional and modernist stances. She saw herself as a liberal until the 1890’s, when she began to call herself conservative. This uncertain position was also reflected in her religious views, which were neither orthodoxly Christian nor yet agnostic. She saw the need for spirituality and religious values.

Lynn frequently expressed views on women’s separate education from men, their rights, but also attacks their search for the franchise. The core of her antifeminist stance seems to be that women who merely become masculine in style or stance lose their identity and make men to become effeminate, thus losing their identity also. One of her later novels that seeks to express her views was The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland (1885), where, using a male pseudonym, she also described the literary life of London at the time in thinly disguised autobiography.

In all, Lynn wrote some twenty-two novels; a number of collection of tales and of essays; and several guidebooks. She died of pneumonia in 1898. She is remembered as a pioneer in women’s journalism and as a conservative voice in the feminist debate of first wave feminism. Her fiction is variable; her inconsistencies are the inconsistencies of the age.