SOURCE: Cross, Nigel. “The Female Drudge: Women Novelists and their Publishers.” In The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth-Century Grub Street, pp. 164-203. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

In the following excerpt, Cross documents the economic hardships common to nineteenth-century women writers, torn between society's expectations of the female's proper role and the necessity of earning a living.

Throughout the nineteenth century and especially in the Victorian age women writers were distinguished from men not so much by their works as by their sex. Women of such different styles and temperaments as Caroline Norton, Charlotte Yonge and George Eliot were lumped together in the catalogues and literary histories simply because they were women. There were no books or articles on Notable Male Authors of the Day, Silly Male Novelists, the Masculine Lyric, Memoirs of the Literary Gentlemen of England. There is undoubtedly a womanly quality in the best work of...