My Love by Eliza Lynn Linton

The anonymous literary reviewer of ‘Mrs Lynn Linton’s New Novel’ published in the Pall Mall Gazette dated 25th June 1881, gives the opinion that: “Mrs Lynn Linton’s new novel is not at all what its title suggests. It is more a study of duty than of passion, of character than of sentiment. Love is starved throughout in the interest of duty…” (pp.19-20). This same reviewer comments on Linton’s tendency to superfluous detailing of her characters in her efforts to achieve realism, resulting in the further opinion that though the book is well-written and interesting, that it is too long. In hindsight, one might wonder if this long-windedness results from the origin of the novel as serialised fiction. It seems logical to suppose that newspaper readers would want their money’s worth from a serialised story and at the same time the publisher would want the story to extend over as many issues as possible, thus retaining the readership. Though Linton is best known to us as an author of fiction, it is worth while recalling that she also made a name for herself in journalism and would therefore be familiar with making her words fit the available space in a periodical. Writing stories of moral and social interest, she reveals her political inspirations, which began with Daniel O’Connell, the advocate of freedom and equal rights, who waved at her and friends as they cheered his passing when Eliza was twelve years old, (‘Mrs Lynn Linton’, Times of India, 11th April 1884). O’Donnell was the self-promoted King of Ireland (O’Leary, 2019), who fought by every peaceful manner for Irish and English Catholic emancipation and Linton never lost any of her loyalty to those views as she grew to be a “Liberal of the Liberals, a philosophic Republican and a Democrat” (‘Mrs Lynn Linton’, Times of India, 11th April 1884, p.5). She also contributed to The Morning Chronicle up to three times a week when Dickens was the editor of that periodical. 

Renowned as the first woman journalist, successful author and political activist, yet not a suffragette, she was notable as female at a time when women were not recognised as equals of men. She clearly had power to influence men as she was immortalised in sonnet by William Savage Landor who loved his protégé as a daughter, and his sonnet quoted here in the Gentlewoman of 21st November 1891: