This collection traces the unique experiences of nineteenth-century women writers within a celebrity culture that was intimately connected to the expansion of print technology and of visual and material culture in the nineteenth century. The contributors examine a range of artifacts, including prefaces, portraits, frontispieces, birthday books and even gossip columns, in this suggestive exploration of how nineteenth-century women writers achieved popular, critical and commercial success.

Contents: Preface; Introduction: women writers and the artifacts of celebrity, Maura Ives; Celebrity and anonymity in the Monthly Review's notices of 19th-century novels, Stephanie Eckroth; 'Faultless herself, as nearly as human nature can be': the construction of Jane Austen's public image, 1817-1917, Katie Halsey; The portrait, the beauty, and the book: celebrity and the Countess of Blessington, Ann R. Hawkins; 'A place among its more successful sisters': Louisa May Alcott's wayward Moods, Catherine S. Blackwell; 'The summit of an author's fame': Victorian women writers and the Birthday Book, Maura Ives; 'Almost idolatrous love': Caroline Dall, Sarah Knowles Bolton, Mary C. Crawford and the case of Elizabeth Whitman, Jennifer Harris; Women writers and celebrity news at the fin de siècle, Alexis Easley; 'A characteristic product of the present era': gender and celebrity in Helen C. Black's Notable Women Authors of the Day (1893), Troy J. Bassett; Presenting Alice Meynell: the book, the photograph, and the calendar, Linda H. Peterson; Motherhood, authorship, and rivalry: sons' memoirs of the lives of Ellen Price Wood and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Jennifer Phegley; Commodifying the self: portraits of the artist in the novels of Marie Corelli, Lizzie White; Pauline Johnson and celebrity in Canada: 'the most unique fixture in the literary world of today', Carole Gerson; Works cited; Index.