The Work of Oliver Byrd, by Adeline Sergeant (1902)

This is a guest post by Dr. Sarah Lonsdale.

Here’s a Victorian writer’s conundrum for you.

Option one: you publish nearly 100 novels and stories – many bestsellers – in your lifetime. You make a good living from your writing and have some impact, particularly within the burgeoning women’s equality movement, as many of your female protagonists are strong, independent and clever. Highbrow critics, suspicious of your copious output however, ignore you. A century after your death, not one of your novels is read, beyond the odd specialist scholar. The occasional mildewed cloth-bound first edition turns up in second hand bookshops and anyone who takes the chance to read your effortless prose is amazed they hadn’t heard of you. But you’re never going to be canonical, not even in this current revival period when forgotten women novelists are being exhumed more rapidly than the dead rise up in a zombie apocalypse. There are just too many of you.

Option two: you publish a handful of well-received literary novels, a couple of which, 100 years after your death are still in print, having made it onto university English studies reading lists. One, about turn-of-the-century English rural life, that critics considered your best (though you didn’t), is turned into a costume drama starring, I don’t know, Benedict Cumberbatch or Alicia Vikander. In your lifetime you’re never quite solvent and never quite satisfied, but you have a kind of immortality, even in a fleeting film credit.

Which would you choose? Or back then, being a writer on a vast production line with very little agency, could you choose at all? So many late-Victorian novels have sunk without trace, victims of what was recognised even at the time as “over-production”. But this is of course what this site is for, to find gems such as those that disappeared under what the Daily Mail described in 1903 as “the flood of fiction”. The Mail complained that of the 1600 novels published each year, barely any would survive the season and that “women are the worst offenders if over-production be an offence.” One estimate is that 99.5% of all nineteenth century novels printed, read and relished in their tens of thousands have vanished into what Franco Moretti called ‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature’.

So, now we come to the case of Adeline Sergeant (1851-1904), named and shamed in the Daily Mail as one of the women culprits who wrote too many novels. She wrote 90 novels and stories in her lifetime, her output increasing with her years – publishing six a year 1901-1903 and eight in 1904. Even popular newspaper reviewers expressed fatigue at having to read yet another of her novels, one critic complaining: “Adeline Sergeant, like the poor, will always be with us.” She was so prolific that fourteen novels were published after she died, presumably of writing fatigue, in a boarding house on the south coast of England where so many English spinster novelists went to die. Her productivity meant that reviewers couldn’t keep up and only a fraction of her output received any critical notice. Many of her novels were sensational pot-boilers with romance or crime at their heart, often with a moral, heavily influenced by her religion – she moved from committed Methodist to committed Catholic through her life – and with titles like The Failure of Sibyl Fletcher and The Claim of Anthony Lockhart.

But even in cases like Sergeant’s, there is always the one that got away.

The Work of Oliver Byrd slipped out, unnoticed, in 1902, between The Master of Beechwood and Barbara’s Money. Very different from her other novels, it is remarkable for capturing the lives of early professional women living alone in London and negotiating social opprobrium for not accepting the chosen path laid for them of marriage and motherhood. While post-Second World War writers like Margaret Drabble and Muriel Spark are held to be the first to depict the lives of professional women, Sergeant and other forgotten women writers of the turn of the last century were doing this some fifty years earlier. The popular writer Dolf Wyllarde, for example, goes into great detail on lives in women-only boarding houses right down to the choice of wearing dark colours to disguise ink stains in her novel The Pathway of the Pioneer (1906).

As Virginia Woolf acknowledged in Three Guineas, the only area of work where women were allowed to compete with men, because of its low pay and prospects, was the world of writing, the world Sergeant chose for herself. The Work of Oliver Byrd records the lives of professional women writers at the turn of the twentieth century and is to some extent, a feminist response to George Gissing’s famous critique of the writer’s life, New Grub Street (1891). Where the literary men of New Grub Street have to battle with populist taste, uncomprehending publishers and critics and lowbrow journalists, the women in Sergeant’s novel have to start by deconstructing their very selves. Women who want to be taken seriously as writers either have to marry a publisher against their better judgement or to conceal their feminity and write under a male pseudonym. The Work of Oliver Byrd follows two women who explore these routes to pursue their writing, the act of which is presented as a grand passion, a vocation that none who is called can resist, no matter the risk. And the risk, with a predatory, exploitative male editor, is great. While these women writers accept being under-paid, even plagiarised, , the worst risk is that of being found out to be a writer at all. For while women were indeed able to scratch out livings with their pen, the woman writer still attracted social opprobrium, hence the widespread use of male pseudonyms at this time. Oliver Byrd, it is no spoiler to reveal, is actually a woman called Avis Rignold, who goes to great lengths to disguise her indentity, using Post Office boxes, false addresses and avoiding in-person meetings.

There is a great detail of autobiography in the novel: while writing it Sergeant was living at the Chenies Street Ladies Chambers in Bloomsbury, a haven for single, intellectual women including the Quaker campaigner Emily Hobhouse, archaeologist Mary Brodrick and the historian Charlotte Fell-Smith. The most important room in the apartment of one of the professional women in the novel is described by Sergeant in loving detail:

It was lined on two sides with books – heavy, ponderous, learned-looking tomes, the bindings of which were darkly, yet richly coloured like leaves in autumn, lit with gleams of gold. A substantial writing-desk, with drawers and pigeon-holes innumerable, stood near the middle of the room, and before it stood a circular-backed, leather-seated armchair, which formed Eleanor’s usual seat when she had work to do.

Be still my beating heart.
Perhaps, with the exception of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s epic poem Aurora Leigh, I haven’t read an earlier depiction of the woman writer at her desk, striving to call words down from the heavens to translate onto paper:

What should she write about tonight? What had she to say? Her head throbbed, her eyes burned: she wanted to lie down quietly and go to sleep. But the wants of the public had to be satisfied and for this she must take up her pen and weave together laboriously the light fancies, the vague dreams of her better hours…she threw on a dressing-gown, turned up the gas and sat down to write.

There is a feminist message to the novel: the women writers are presented as either serious campaigners for justice or as uniquely able to capture “knowledge of the human heart”, while the dastardly male editor only seeks to repress them or pass their work off as his own. Written at a time when few women writers – including Sergeant herself- were taken seriously, it is a passionate plea to women to be proud of their work and continue fighting the fight. I wonder if Oliver Byrd, written towards the end of Sergeant’s life is some kind of letter of regret, that she didn’t allow her talent or novels to breathe, instead chasing one after the other after the other in a phenomenal sense of urgency that prioritised quantity over literary immortality. For she certainly could write – her prose is as easy and pleasant to consume as a jar of warm honey – and her novels are bursting with sparkling and contemporarily urgent ideas on social justice, women’s equality and the plight of the poor in wealthy imperial London. Maybe, like Avis Rignold, she didn’t quite have the courage to say: “This is who I am, and no one else.”

The Work of Oliver Byrd, by Adeline Sergeant
London: James Nisbet and Co. Ltd., 1902

Sarah Lonsdale is a journalist, critic and author. Her latest book, Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers (MUP, 2020) investigates how women in the 1920s and 30s overcame social and political obstacles in a range of occupations including mountaineering, engineering and foreign correspondence. She lectures in history and journalism at City, University of London.