ABSTRACT
This chapter examines women's literary partnerships in context of the late-Victorian cultural-economic matrix of issues that sustained the labor, production and circulation of creativity and created texts. It suggests that women's literary partnerships are differently gendered strategies or economies particular to the psychological and material needs of nineteenth-century women as disenfranchised author/subjects. The chapter shows that nineteenth-century women's collaborative writing processes took place within a homosocial and often homoerotic space where women worked together and learned, with confidence and validation, how to break rules of authorship, sex and gender. It focuses on how representations of women's collaborative writing processes at this time problematize the ideologies of the writing industry under patriarchy by reconceptualizing authorial labor, economies of production, and literary audience/ marketplace. The chapter also shows that nineteenth-century women's literary partnerships have a complex sense of audience, one that, at least in part, "produces" for what can be termed "queer markets".
