Remembering Linda Peterson

"1 Even as she unfolded Martineau's intervention in male tradition, Linda was of course herself intervening in standard accounts of Victorian autobiography and sage writing, which rarely discussed women writers.2 Martineau's work would remain a signal reference point for Linda; her 2007 edition of Martineau's Autobiography for Broadview Press enables us to approach this key Victorian text from a fresh perspective. Since Martineau wrote so prolifically for Victorian periodicals and newspapers, Linda's work on Martineau was surely one factor that led her to RSVP and her own work on periodicals. Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market appeared the next year.5 As Maria Frawley comments in her VPR review, this book "stands alone in grappling forcefully with the ways 'a cluster of mythic images' were propagated-and often deliberately cultivated-by women writers in ways that worked with the 'facts' of the market and in ways that were at least as 'enabling' as they were 'disabling.\n She hosted meetings of RSVP not once but twice, first in 1999, before there was a conference services office at Yale, which meant that she was delivering food to the meeting rooms even while dealing with massive travel disruptions due to a hurricane that hit just before the conference began.