A regular contributor to both the Dickens journals — Household Words (1850-1859) and All the Year Round (30 April 1859-), Eliza Lynn Linton (1822-1898) was both a noted journalist and prolific novelist; her chief editor, Dickens, regarded her as thoroughly flexible and highly reliable. In My Literary Life (1899), she pronounced him as "one, who wrote so tenderly, so sentimentally, so gushingly, [yet] had a strain of hardness in his nature which was like a rod of iron in his soul" (cited by Davis, 209).
1822 10 February, born at Keswick, Cumberland, to the Reverend J. Lynn, vicar of Crosthwaite, Cumberland; on her mother's side she was a granddaughter of Dr. Samuel Goodenough, the Bishop of Carlisle.
1827 Her mother dies, leaving twelve children to a husband not much interested in them.
1845 Determined to become a journalist, she moves to London and becomes the protege of Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864). She begins her career by researching a pair of historical romances in the Reading Room of the British Museum.
1846 Novel Azeth the Egyptian (3 vols., 1846).
1848 Novel Amymone: A Romance in the Days of Pericles.
1851 Novel Realities, A Tale of Modern Life (3 vols.); joins the staff of The Morning Chronicle.
1858 Marries the Chartist, radical printer, and book and magazine illustrator W. J. Linton, a widower some ten years her senior.
1860 May. She contributes her first article to Charles Dickens's new weekly journal All the Year Round, and publishes a volume of short fiction, Witch Stories.
1864 Travel book The Lake Country, illustrated by W. J. Linton.
1865 Novel Grasp Your Nettle. 3 vols.
1866 Novel Lizzie Lorton of Greyrigg (2 vols.); joins the staff of the Monthly Review; in The Saturday Review she publishes the first of her attacks on "The New Woman."
1867 Novel Sowing the Wind. 3 vols. She and Linton separate; he emigrates to New Haven, Connecticut, to found the Appleton Press; she returns to her career as a London journalist.
1872 Novel The True History of Joshua Davidson.
1874-75 Novel Patricia Kemble. Feb. 1874-Feb 1875 in Temple Bar.
1875-76 Novel The Atonement of Leam Dundasruns from August 1875 through June 1876 in Vols. 31-33 of The Cornhill Magazine; and is subsequently published in volume form.
1877 Novel The World Well Lost serialised in Belgravia Jan.-Dec.
1878 Novel Under Which Lord?.
1879 Short story "Misericordia."
1880 Novel The Rebel of the Family published as a triple-decker by Chatto and Windus, London; short story collection "With a Silken Thread" and Other Stories published in 3 vols. (rpt. from Household Words, All the Year Round, and Queen.
1880 Novel Ione serialised in Temple Bar Jan.-Dec., and subsequently published in 3 vols. (1883); short story "The Fate of Madame Cabanel."
1881 Novel "My Love!" serialised in The Bolton Evening News, and subsequently published in 3 vols.
1885 Novella Stabbed in the Dark, Rift in the Lute: A Tale, and the critically acclaimed novel The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland.
1886 Novel Paston Carew, Millionaire and Miser published serially from Jan. to Dec. in Temple Bar.
1888 Novel Through the Long Night serialised in The People.
1890 Travel book About Ulster.
1891 Travel book About Ireland; short story collection "An Octave of Friends," with Other Silhouettes and Stories.
1894 Novel The One Too Many serialised in the Lady's Pictorial.
1895 Novel In Haste and At Leisure published in 3 vols.
1896 Novel Dulcie Everton published in 3 vols.; short story collection "Twixt Cup and Lip," and Other Stories.
1898 14 July, dies in London.
1899 My Literary Life, her autobiography, published posthumously.
1900 G. S. Layard published a biography of Linton, and the novel The Second Youth of Theodora Desanges with an introduction by Layard published posthumously.
References
Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990.
Anderson, Nancy Fix. "Linton, Eliza Lynn (1822-1898)." The Victorian Encyclopedia, ed. Sally Mitchell. New York: Garland, 1988.
—. Woman against Women in Victorian England. Bloomington, IN: Indiana U. P., 1987.
Cousin, John William. A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature . London: J. M. Dent & sons; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1910.
Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Checkmark and Facts on File, 1999.
"Eliza Lynn Linton [1822-1898]." Online Encyclopedia. Rpt. From Encyclopedia Britannica (1911), Vol. 16, p. 736. Accessed 17 January 2008. http://encyclopedia.jrank/LEO_LOB/LINTON_ELIZA_LYNN_ 1822_1898_.html
"Eliza Lynn Linton." Wikipedia. Accessed 17 January 2008. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki /Eliza_Lynn_Linton
"Linton, Eliza Lynn: February 10, 1822-July 14, 1898." Accessed 17 January 2008. http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~ulrich/RHE309/vicfembios/ elizallinton.htm
"Mrs. Lynn Linton." "Saturday Review of Books and Art." The New York Times. 30 July 1898. BR 511.
Flanders, Judith. Inside the Victorian Home: a Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004.
Ray, Martin (ed.). Thomas Hardy Remembered. Aldershot & Burlington: Ashgate, 2007.
Spender, Dale, and Janet Todd, eds. British Women Writers: An Anthology from the Fourteenth Century to the Present. New York: Peter Bedrick, 1989.
Thompson, Dorothea M. "Eliza Lynn Linton." Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 18: Victorian Novelists After 1885. Ed. Ira B. Nadel and William E. Fredeman. Detroit: The Gale Group and Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1983. 153-158.
Last modified 4 July 2014