Florence Marryat (1833-99) was a novelist, editor, playwright, spiritualist, singer and actress. She wrote nearly seventy novels during her varied career, most of which were dismissed by critics but loved by her reading public. Much of the opprobrium aimed at her originated from fellow women authors such as Eliza Lynn Linton and Marie Corelli, but it was Geraldine Jewsbury who launched the strongest attack on Marryat’s “shocking violations of good taste”.

This paper will look at Jewsbury’s role as publisher’s reader for Bentley & Son in which she substantially revised the text of Marryat’s first novel, Love’s Conflict (1865). Shocked by its themes of prostitution, alcoholism, murder, extra-marital sex and domestic violence, Jewsbury convinced Richard Bentley that the novel would cause outrage unless her changes were implemented. Although Marryat compromised on many of the suggestions, I will argue that in subsequent early novels she resisted critics’ attempts to shape her work and also retracted the concessions she had made to Jewsbury.