ABSTRACT
Victorian women's authorial careers during the 1830s took shape against a backdrop of shifting definitions of popular authorship. The woman author's disregard for the categories of gendered writing is figured as a disruption in conventional sexual codes. According to many reviewers, the most socially useful women's writing depicted the morals and manners of middle-class domesticity. Both political and domestic, the useful middle-class woman embodied the contradiction between the ideology of separate spheres, which defined an exclusively domestic role for women, and new definitions of liberal individuality, which promised equal citizenship for all members of society. The most accessible journalistic media for women during the 1830s were the magazines and miscellanies, especially the Monthly Repository, Blackwood's Magazine, and Fraser's Magazine. The self-consciousness of periodical reviews during the 1830s demonstrates the instability of the female author as a critical construct and expresses anxieties about the role of journalism in formulating gender categories.
