The Annotated Eliza Lynn Linton

Eliza Lynn Linton was born at Kenswick on February 10, 1822. She was the youngest of twelve children. She was daughter to the vicar of Crosthwaite, Cumberland Rev. J Lynn, and the maternal granddaughter of Bishop of Carlisle Dr. Samuel Goodenough. Linton's mother died when when Eliza Lynn was five months old. An autodidact with little paternal supervision, Linton educated herself in her father's library (Allingham). In 1845, at the age of 23, Linton moved to London to pursue a career in writing. 

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In London, Linton started her career researching and writing history romances in the Reading Room of the British Museum. Linton's early novels had little commercial or critical success, prompting her to become a freelance and regular journalist to support herself. After contributing to The Morning Chronicle, she received a salary of twenty guineas a month. Linton additionally published 225 pieces of fiction and non-fiction in The Saturday Review, All the Year Round, and Queens (Allingham). Linton worked with Dickens and published works in his magazines All the Year Round and Household Works. Dickens described her as "Good for anything, and thoroughly reliable" (Anderson). Linton is often characterized as "the first Englishwoman to receive a regular salary as a journalist" and considered herself to be the "vanguard of the independent women" writers in Victorian England (Anderson). 

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Despite her iconoclastic lifestyle largely independent of male support, Linton was publically a virulently anti-feminist. Originally a champion of women's rights, Linton's second novel Amymone (1848) eulogizes Aspasia, the learned mistress of Pericles, who introduced "a spirit of women's freedom" to Athens. By the 1850s, Linton began view feminists as "unsexed" women who sought to overthrow man's natural role as the ruling gender (Anderson). The Victorian fin-de-siécle saw the rise of "The New Woman," characterized as a woman who rejected the societally-imposed limitations of their sex and sought political, social, and economic liberation (Melani). From 1866-77 Linton published in The Saturday Review a myriad of attacks directed at The New Woman. Some of her most well-known essays include "The Girl of the Period," "The Wild Women as Politicians," and "The Wild Women as Social Insurgents." 

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Linton had a brief marriage to political radical and engraver William James Linton (1812-1898), an illustrator for the Illustrated London News, from 1858-1867. The couple had no children. Linton lived alone after her divorce and continued to publish essays and novels. Her novel The Atonement of Leam Dundas (1875) was regarded as The Daily Telegraph's 53 best of one hundred novels of all time in 1899. Linton remained a staunch atheist until her death on July 14, 1898 in London (Allingham).