Lecturing Women in British Fiction, Periodicals and Public Orality, 1870-1910: The First Speech (The Nineteenth Century Series)

This book examines the emergence of women as audiences and speakers on the British metropolitan lecture circuit and in mass print representations from 1870 to 1910.Bringing together research on Victorian lecturing, periodicals, voice studies and the cultural history of feminism, it sheds new light on the interdependence of orality and print and the rise of the British women’s movement. Sifting through the archives of lecture institutions (the Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institution, the London Institution and the Royal Institution), penny fiction weeklies and feminist weeklies, New Woman and suffrage novels, autobiographical writings and rhetorical manuals, this book reconstructs the changing mediascape of late Victorian London and treats speech events, in print and on site, as catalysts for democratic participation.Undertaking an archaeology of women’s presence in the lecture hall, it explores conservative fantasies in fiction of the female speaking automaton alongside new writin