Abstract
This chapter explores the Brontës’ engagement with the literary marketplace, 1846–1860. This discussion focuses primarily on Charlotte since her involvement in press networks is well documented in letters to friends and publishers. A close look at Charlotte's engagement with the literary marketplace reveals her intimate understanding of the periodical genres, niche markets, and editorial practices that generated the publicity necessary for a successful literary career. Charlotte Brontë's novels were the focus of critical discourse during the 1840s and 1850s in part because they resonated with contemporary concerns about the status of women and the working classes in Victorian society. Family magazines, prestigious journals, women's periodicals, and magazines of popular progress used her novels to argue for social reform and to theorize the proper limits of women's activism in the public realm. An equally important segment of the Victorian literary marketplace was the regional press, which interpreted Brontë's life and works in local terms. Investigation of this more dispersed critical history—incorporating highbrow and lowbrow periodicals, women's magazines and “masculine” journals, national and local newspapers—enables us to understand the ways in which periodical media could be used to fashion a literary career but also how literary works and lives were interpreted in multiple ways to serve the interests of niche markets of readers.