ABSTRACT
The structure of society – and the literary field – in the 1880s meant far fewer options for an ambitious single woman writer, especially if she was the illegitimate daughter of a minor poet and his housekeeper. Sir Hall Caine is a kind of male Marie Corelli. He is the great master of the art of self-advertising. He is always being interviewed by reporters and is simply mad with vanity. There is a striking image near the end of Caine's first moderately successful book, Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It is of the painter-poet's last moments attended by a small group consisting of his family and close friends. Caine's self-construction as one of Rossetti's most loyal and intimate friends was vital in enabling his entry into the literary field and he wasted no time in exploiting it. A number of critics have figured the period's literary field in terms of an opposition between realism/art/masculinity and romance/the market/femininity.
