Representations of Ireland

In 1883, the Bentley firm published A Struggle for Fame, the autobiographical novel by Irish-born Charlotte Riddell (née Cowan, 1832–1906). The three-decker work features vivid pen-portraits of Newby, Tinsley, Bentley and other publishers, and details a young Irish woman’s struggles for success in mid-century literary London, against contemporary views that ‘Irish stories are quite gone out’. More than once, its acerbic narrator diagnoses astutely the forces constraining women‘s literary fame.