ABSTRACT
This chapter draws attention to a largely ignored mid-Victorian feminist novel, Eliza Lynn Linton’s Realities (1851), and elucidates its critical contribution to the mid-century discourse on women’s work. As a Victorian theatre novel, Realities offers a remarkably early representation of the challenges faced by women in male-dominated lines of work, including what is now widely recognized as gender harassment in the workplace. Even more strikingly, Lynn suggests as a solution, not women’s flight into the safety of marital domesticity but a resilient professionalism and participation in social reform. As I will show, Lynn radically revises the widespread association of Victorian actresses with prostitution by showing the actress as having rid herself of false notions of respectability and thus being distinctly well-suited to take on the socially stigmatized work of rescuing and rehabilitating prostitutes. I also draw attention to Lynn’s radical deployment of the Godiva myth to contest conventional notions of women’s social roles and authorship.
