ABSTRACT
These two reviews in the Athenaeum, a weekly ‘Journal of Literature, Science and the Fine Arts’ established in 1828, were first identified from the marked file of the weekly by Angus Easson. 1 . EG was a regular reader of the Athenaeum from 1849 onwards. She exchanged copies of it and also the Examiner with her friends Tottie Fox and Geraldine Jewsbury and she followed its notices and reviews of current books. Later, when writing The Life of Charlotte Brontë it became a regular point of reference in her letters to her new publisher George Smith (see Letters, pp. 414–5, 438, 465). A letter to her daughter Marianne [26 February 1852] referred to ‘a good piece of writing’ she had to do for the Athenaeum (Letters, p. 846).
