Lecturing Women in British Fiction, Periodicals and Public Orality, 1870–1910 The First Speech

Sifting through the archives of lecture institutions (the Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institution, the London Institution and the Royal Institution), penny fiction weeklies and feminist weeklies, New Woman and suffrage novels, autobiographical writings and rhetorical manuals, this book reconstructs the changing mediascape of late Victorian London and treats speech events, in print and on site, as catalysts for democratic participation. Undertaking an archaeology of women's presence in the lecture hall, it explores conservative fantasies in fiction of the female speaking automaton alongside new writings that transformed women orators from objects of sensation into public agents. By analysing women's collective self-education in rhetoric and elocution, this book traces the emergence in political fictions of key narrative tropes of oral performance: the surprise encounter in the lecture hall, the moment of conversion during a lecture and the symbolic 'first speech' of new suffrage recruits.
Read more