During her lifetime, Augusta Webster enjoyed a distinguished reputation as one of the pre-eminent writers of the late Victorian period. So highly was she esteemed that she was seen as the natural heir to the title of Britain’s foremost poetess following the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. What is interesting about that particular comparison is that while Browning was a great poet, she is studied almost exclusively as a writer of verse, whereas in addition to producing volumes of poetry Webster was also a playwright, novelist, translator and first women in British history to be elected to office. And, of course, she was also a provocative and prolific essayist. Almost immediately upon her death, however, her reputation began to suffer and within just a few decades she was all but forgotten. What might be the reason behind such a stupendously dramatic decline in fortune? Well, there is one thing that stands out above all others. She was a provocative and prolific essayist.
Webster’s introduction to her essays originally published in the Examiner before being collected to form A Housewife’s Opinions is almost prescient in its understanding of what the volume contained:
“Because the matters to which I have tried, in one guise or another, to give help or hindrance are no mere momentary questions begun and ended with the talk of the week, I can ask acquittal from any charge of impertinence in venturing to make a book out of some.”
Webster understood full well the risk she was running of impertinence in making a book-length collection out of prose published as entertainment in “lighter columns” of newspapers intended for and read almost exclusively by women. She knew enough to take the extra step of disguising what is actually some very serious, contrarian and non-conformist social criticism as mere home and kitchen advice by slapping a title not just broad in its irony, but deep in its subversive resolve. It is easy (and fun) to imagine Victorian husband seeing a copy of A Housewife’s Opinions in the grip of their spouses and chuckling to themselves at the thought of how only a woman could become so engrossed in a book of recipes and corset-buying tips.
The housewife would have a smirk of her own as she read Webster’s extolling of equal educational opportunities for women, a call for equality of divorce laws and empowering the idea that being a wife is a career as worthy of salary and legal rights as any other.
The real question is not why Webster’s reputation began to suffer almost at the instant of her demise, but what took so long! While she was alive, Webster sheer force of personality combined with her estimable accomplishments made it difficult to attack clearly established credentials and qualities of artistic expression. Once that obstruction was out of the way, the assault upon her for daring to be rebellious and call into question so many conventional ideas could commence.
Certainly it is not by accident that Webster’s re-emergence as a major literary figure of the Victorian coincides with a rebranding of her significance not as a poet seeking to displace a legendary precursor, but as a unique and powerful leader at the vanguard of feminist writing and progressive political essays. Not to go without notice also is that Webster’s reintroduction upon the literary stage also corresponds with the late 20th-century transformation of irony as the dominant tenor of creative expression. As a master of ironic subversion a century before it became the de facto mode of literary technique, Webster was almost fated to come back into vogue with the end of the century which commenced her fall.
