Eliza Lynn Linton

From Philosopedia

Eliza Lynn Linton (10 February 1822 - 14 July 1898)

Linton, a novelist and journalist, was born in England. The daughter of the vicar of Crosthwaite in Cumberland, she moved by herself to London in the mid-1840s to launch a literary career. She researched her early historic novels at the British Museum and worked as Paris correspondent of London newspapers (1851-1854). She was briefly married to Willim James Linton.

She was the author of Azeth the Egyptian (1846) and Amymone (1848). Her rationalist novel, True History of Joshua Davidson (1872), enhanced her reputation, followed by Under Which Lord? (1879).

Biographer G.S. Layard, who edited Mrs. Lynn Linton: Her Life, Letters and Opinions, documented her well-known agnosticism. Her essays attacking feminism offended many of her female contemporaries. In a posthumously published memoir, My Literary Life (1899), she wrote a notably hostile portrait of George Eliot. Feminist literary critics today consider her a prime example of that Victorian paradox: a thoroughly emancipated anti-feminist author.

Linton was a regular contributor to many leading newspapers and magazines, as well as a frequent contributor to the Agnostic Annual.

On the subject of women’s rights, she once wrote,

• I see no light behind that terrible curtain. I do not think one religion better than another, and I think that the Christian religion has brought far more misery, crime, and suffering, far more tyranny and evil, than any other.

{BDF; FFRF; OEL; TRI; RAT; RE}