ABSTRACT
Nineteenth-century women authors contended with the gender ideology of their class as they participated in reproducing it. Critics are divided as to how nineteenth-century popular women novelists viewed authorship. Judith Fetterley maintains that they “seemed to manifest a considerable degree of comfort with the act of writing and with the presentation of themselves as writers and relatively little sense of disjunctiveness between ‘woman’and ‘pen’”. Most writers did not feel comfortable acknowledging publicly the economic imperatives that compelled their careers. The Lamplighter is representative of many novels written during this period by middle-class women. The impoverished heroine may give piano lessons, teach, color, and illustrate, but only until she is rescued by marriage.
