correspondent for The Leader, which her husband had helped found. She was a regular contributor to Charles Dickens's Household Words and to St James's Gazette, the Daily News, Ainsworth's Magazine, The Cornhill Magazine and other leading newspapers. The prolific Linton became one of the best-known women periodical contributors of her time. Her 1864 guide to The Lake Country still bears reading for tart comments on the tourist rituals of the Victorians. In 1881 and 1883 she travelled to Palermo, where she met Tina Whitaker and encouraged her to write. After separating from her husband, Linton returned to writing novels, in which she finally attained wide popularity. Her most successful works were The True History of Joshua Davidson (1872), Patricia Kemball (1874), and The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland (1885), the latter being in fact a thinly disguised autobiography. In 1896, she became one of the first women to be elected to the Society of Authors and was the first woman to serve on the society's committee. Views Linton was a severe critic of early feminism. Her prominent essay on the subject, "The Girl of the Period," appeared in the Saturday Review in 1868 as a vehement attack. In 1891, she wrote "Wild Women as Politicians", explaining her view that politics were naturally the sphere of men, as was fame of any sort. "Amongst our most renowned women," she wrote, "are some who say with their whole heart, I would rather have been the wife of a great man, or the mother of a hero, than what I am, famous in my own person." Linton exemplifies how the fight against votes for women was not organised only by men (see Anti-suffragism). Her obituary in The Times noted her "animosity towards all, or rather, some of those facets which may be conveniently called the 'New Woman'," but added that "it would perhaps be difficult to reduce Mrs. Lynn Linton's views on what was and what was not desirable for her own sex to a logical and connected form." Revisionist critics have noted an unconscious sympathy for the dashing "modern women" in her fiction, and to her support for the right of married women to own property and so gain greater independence. (See Married Women's Property Act 1870 and Married Women's Property Act 1882.) Linton's contribution to a symposium on English fiction in 1890 took a less aggressive stance towards Grundyism than her fellow-contributor