‘The Victorian age, to hazard another generalisation, was the age of the professional man’ (E 2.35), Woolf asserts in a 1916 essay on the Victorian biographer Samuel Butler. Given her deep immersion in late-Victorian literary networks, Woolf knew that this applied to authorship as well as more traditional professions. Leslie Stephen’s career as a journalist, editor, and biographer coincided with the radical transformation of the literary market through better copyright protection, the growth of markets outside of lending libraries, and the relative profitability of journalism, which made authorship a viable career option for a growing number of writers. After leaving a lectureship at Cambridge University, Stephen quickly moved from contributing miscellaneous essays and literary criticism to a variety of journals to the more lucrative position of editor of the Cornhill Magazine; and, having solidified his reputation as a scholar and biographer, he eventually assumed the editorship of the Dictionary of National Biography.

If Stephen’s early career demonstrates how a versatile writer could contrive to survive as a professional journalist, this later eminent position aligns him closely with the development of a culture of literary celebrity from the 1880s onwards. Sarah Wah identifies a ‘contemporary shift in public interest from a writer’s work to publications that disclosed details about a favourite author’s private life’ as a key feature. Where earlier writers had published from the anonymity of their home, authors now needed to actively manage ‘the structures of feeling generated by a publicity-hungry culture’: the writer had become a public professional. This development included the woman writer as well as the man of letters: although inequalities in pay and prestige persisted, by the end of the century, female authorship had been normalised enough for Linda Peterson to argue that ‘a duality –if, indeed, it is legitimate to reduce complexities to binaries –splits not “proper lady” from the “woman writer” (a socially gendered distinction) but the popular writer from the high-art woman of letters (economic and aesthetic distinctions)’.

Although Virginia Woolf lived and wrote during a period when professional authorship was the norm, her history of women’s writing largely fails to acknowledge this development. When the narrator of Three Guineas turns to the nineteenth century in a quest for female role models in the professions, she is disappointed: ‘But there would seem to be a gap in your library, Madam.