ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on metaphoric battle of gender waged through the figure of the famous woman, suggesting how celebrity keyed into a larger transatlantic warfare of politics and language, each feeding a complicated campaign for women's emancipation and enfranchisement. Literary critics used a strategy to undermine the gender/sex legitimacy of women-authored fiction. In 1895 the British literary critic George Saintsbury questioned the legitimacy of Charlotte Bront's genius and fame, arguing that it was precisely her feminine powers of representation that barred her from the halls of greatness. The piece as a whole also excoriates the rhetorical move of calling an exceptional woman sexless because such a label functions as a warning and reinforces the notion in all non-exceptional women that it is by sex you live. The metaphor is apt, for it locks Cholmondeley in seemingly mutually exclusive identity locations: the patrician and proper British woman with the undomestica.
