Elizabeth Lynn Linton

The True History of Joshua Davidson (Dodo Press) Elizabeth Lynn Linton

Elizabeth nee Lynn Linton (1822-1898) was a British novelist, essayist, and journalist. She arrived in London in 1845 as the protege of poet Walter Savage Landor. In the following year she produced her first novel, Azeth: The Egyptian (1846); Amymone (1848), and Realities (1851), followed. None of these had any great success, and she became a journalist, joining the staff of the Morning Chronicle, and All the Year Round. In 1858, she married W. J. Linton, an eminent wood-engraver, who was also a poet of some note, a writer upon his craft, and a Chartist agitator. In 1867 they separated in a friendly way, the husband going to America, and the wife returning to writing novels, in which she finally attained wide popularity. Her most successful works were The True History of Joshua Davidson (1872) and Patricia Kemball (1874). The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland (1885) was her fictionalised autobiography using a male pseudonym. She was also a severe critic of "The New Woman". Her most famous essay on this subject, The Girl of the Period, was published in Saturday Review in 1868 and was a vehement attack on feminism.