From a book history perspective at least, this volume is something of a letdown. The title seems to announce an engagement with issues of gender in relation to two key developments in nineteenth-century publishing—the rapid emergence of a mass reading public and the gradual professionalization of the role of the author. Yet, in fact, we find little discussion of the specific conditions of contemporary readership, as described so brilliantly by E. S. Dallas in his series of articles on “Popular Literature” in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (January-December 1859). The burgeoning serial market with its seasonal rhythms; the plethora of bodies issuing tract and periodical literature; the varied reading communities served by circulating, institutional, and public libraries; the hierarchy of volume formats, from the stately triple-decker to the gaudy yellowback; or the wide range of print outlets for contemporary book advertising and reviewing—none of these gets much of a mention here. At the same time, we find little of detail concerning differences between male and female engagement in the business of authorship, whether concerning opportunities for journalistic and editorial employment, involvement in legal issues of copyright and contract, or relations to associations and agencies representing the interests of the writer, financial and otherwise. Though the editors explicitly claim a methodology emphasizing “the material conditions of production” (13), the essays collected here too often take the word “writer” simply as a synonym for “novelist” and worry about issues of canonicity that seem more germane to our contemporary educational institutions than to the Victorian literary marketplace.

Though there is no indication of this on the contents page, the nine essays collected here fall into three groups, respectively, concerning works of social commitment (represented by Mary Howitt, Eliza Meteyard, and Jessie Fothergill), writing for children (Charlotte M. Yonge, Louisa Molesworth, and Juliana Horatia Ewing), and sensation fiction (Ellen Wood, M. E. Braddon, and Rhoda Broughton). But the career of each writer is dealt with independently by a different contributor, so that there is little encouragement to explore common ground (e.g., Meteyard's intimacy with Mary Howitt or Ewing's debut in Yonge's Monthly Packet) or to make telling contrasts (between, say, Argosy and Belgravia, the principal editorial vehicles of Wood and Braddon, respectively). Indeed, the pattern underlying the essays comes uncomfortably close to that deadly literary recipe—a few spoonfuls of potted biography with large dollops of plot summary. (To sidestep this danger, it might have been worth thinking about separate boxed sections devoted to narrative sketches of the principle works referred to and a brief chronology of each author.) The editors’ introduction itself is unfortunately of limited help in holding things together. Between an unnecessarily lengthy survey of previous critical writing on fiction by Victorian women and a rather redundant précis of each of the essays included in the volume, we are given only a page or two on the three chosen genres—with little to explain why these are preferred to, say, the Gothic Romance, devotional writing, and “New Woman” fiction—and only a single muddy paragraph concerning the key concepts announced in the title. Of this the following remarks are representative: “All of the writers fall under the aegis of the popular writer in one way or another and we seek to demonstrate the richness and complexity of this term. Some of our writers were popular in the sense that their works sold well and others struggled to make a living in a competitive and saturated market. Some enjoyed more critical success than others, both at the time and subsequently and others were very aware of the minor status of their work, even during their career” (13).

It would be unjust, however, not to acknowledge that, from a literary critical perspective, the volume does include a number of sensitive and engaging readings of authors who have recently received little attention. I think here particularly of Valerie Sanders on Yonge's version of domestic realism and Helen Debenham on Fothergill's agnosticism, both focused interestingly on the complexities of the situation of the daughter of the house, as represented by writers who never married. Sanders offers a subtle unpicking of Yonge's contradictory feelings concerning the large bourgeois Victorian household, as woven into family chronicles like The Daisy Chain (1856) or The Pillars of the House (1873), where “self-sacrifice provides emotional thrills for those otherwise denied them” (107). In the preceding chapter, Debenham shows deftly how, in novels of regional life like Healey (1875) and Kith and Kin (1881), Fothergill's uncomfortable acceptance of a Godless universe is but one expression of her struggle with an almost overwhelming sense of modernity. In the social sphere, this sense tends to be embodied in the unstable situation of the respectable but impoverished daughter, who anticipates the New Woman in her yearnings for economic and emotional independence. Perhaps inevitably, given the chosen format and the amount of recent attention to the phenomenon, the later essays on the novelists of sensation offer least in the way of fresh insights. Indeed, the only essay that really does get to grips with “the material conditions of production” is the first in the collection, Brian Maidment's essay on Mary Howitt's literary career. Maidment's fascinating account is especially good on the gendered nature of the discourses of social progress elaborated by the husband-and-wife team of William and Mary. These are epitomized by the coedited Howitt's Journal of the late 1840s, which “seeks to translate diversity, manifested in social class, age and gender, into a single social project. In pursuit of this aim, its editors accept the need to construct differing modes of address, differing literary forms and differing literary persona to speak separately, but with a common purpose, to diverse readers” (39). In the end, though, the clarity of the chapters by Maidment, Debenham, and Sanders also serves to underline how much more sharply focused the volume as a whole might have been.