ABSTRACT
This book is about criticism. It deals with criticism and the gender of the critics; but it is also about structures of power influencing the changes in the cultural production. Through their reviews, the women reviewers of the Athenaeum made their bid for some of that power but, as appears from this study, they only sporadically inscribed their gender into their reviews in a clearly recognizable way. Their reviews, unlike the ones produced by many of their male colleagues, were by and large ungendered or gender-neutral, as if the author had no gender. If we may rely on the few testimonies by women reviewers about their professional practice, disguising their gender seemed the right (and only) course to adopt. Elizabeth Barrett Browning probably modelled Aurora Leigh's situation to some extent on her own when she wrote: ' I learnt the use /Of the editorial "we" in a review/ As courtly ladies the fine trick of trains,/ And swept it grandly through the open doors/ As if one could not pass through doors at all/ Save so encumbered' 2 As reviewers, these professional women enjoyed a certain economic freedom: their regular contributions gave them financial security as well as the liberty to write less remunerative stuff: '...what you do/ For bread, will taste of common grain,/ Not grapes,.../ To work with one hand for the booksellers/ While working with 130the other for myself. One of the most powerful accounts of a woman reviewer's need to shed her gender when writing reviews comes in the form of a well-known review by Virginia Woolf. In her essay 'Professions for Women' Woolf explains how she had to kill the Angel in the House before being able to write her first review: Ί discovered that if I were going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom ... It was she who used to come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews. It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her'. 3
