ABSTRACT
In 1869—the year which saw the publication of John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women—the most bestselling female novelist on both sides of the Atlantic called time on the cult of Lord Byron. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s target was the misogyny of the British literary establishment. As Susan Wolfson observes, the nineteenth century feared its literature had been effeminized by women readers and writers, and by sentimentalism: Sir Egerton Brydges, Charles Kingsley, and Alfred Austin reminded themselves with relief that at least ‘Byron was a man’. His predilection for boys, if it was suspected, merely confirmed his hyper-masculinity. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s riposte to Blackwood’s slander was ‘The True Story of Lady Byron’s Life’, published in the American Atlantic Monthly and British Macmillan’s Magazine, which became the ‘most widely discussed article dealing with a man of letters to appear in nineteenth-century England’ and probably America, too.
