Abstract
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, women became increasingly numerous and prominent in British journalism, promoting themselves as never before, and capitalizing in new ways on the changing conditions of journalism. Ella Hepworth Dixon, in addition to making a living as a journalist, published many well-received short stories and novels that featured female journalists as protagonists. Sarah Tooley and Hulda Friederichs published interviews with some of the best-known celebrities of the day (including Frances Hodgson Burnett, William Morris, and Princess May), in the process granting their own names broad circulation. Flora Shaw sent to the Times investigative articles from African and Australian colonies that had the entire British Commonwealth talking.
‘I should much like to know what the Pall Mall means to pay me for the weekly articles. I shall not growl at £1 10s.; but £2 would make me very happy.’
(Alice Meynell)1
‘For every hundred persons who listen to the priest, the journalist … speaks to a thousand; and while the words of the one are often heard merely as a formality, those of the other … may effectively influence the thoughts and consciences and actions of thousands in the near future. Shallow, indeed, would be the mind which undervalued the power of the journalist, or underrated the seriousness of his vocation.’
(Florence Fenwick-Miller)2
‘… it was the fundamentally heterogeneous form of the Victorian periodical, its multiple and mostly anonymous authorship, its imperative of diversity, that provided a very particular space, both fluid and dynamic, in which women could negotiate a writing identity or writing identities.’3
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Notes
Viola Meynell, Alice Meynell: A Memoir (London: Jonathan Cape, 1929), 100.
Florence Fenwick-Miller, Harriet Martineau (London: W. H. Allen, 1884), 164–5.
Hilary Fraser, Stephanie Green, and Judith Johnston, Gender and the Victorian Periodical (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 44.
Martin Conboy, Journalism in Britain: A Historical Introduction (London: Sage, 2011), 79.
Deborah Chambers, Linda Steiner, and Carole Fleming, Women and Journalism (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 230.
Andrea Broomfield, ‘Eliza Lynn Linton, Sarah Grand and the Spectacle of the Victorian Woman Question,’ English Literature in Transition 37 no. 4 (2004), 251–272.
Brake and Codell observe that ‘A journal title promises a false unity, appearing to present, despite its many articles, topics, and illustrations, a unified policy, or set of beliefs, as if the journal itself were a single author’ (Laurel Brake and Julie Codell, eds, Encounters in the Victorian Press: Editors, Authors, Readers (Basingstoke Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 1).
Marysa Demoor, ed., Marketing the Author: Authorial Personae, Narrative Selves and Self-Fashioning, 1880–1930 (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 15.
Anne Sebba, Battling for News: The Rise of the Woman Reporter (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1994), 56.
Ellen Jordan, The Women’s Movement and Women’s Employment in Nineteenth Century Britain (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 78–79.
W. T. Stead, ‘Young Women and Journalism,’ The Young Woman 1 (1893), 12–14.
Emily Crawford, ‘Journalism as a Profession for Women,’ Contemporary Review 64 (1893), 362–71.
Frances Low, Press Work for Women (London: L. Upcott Gill, 1904).
Charlotte O’Conor Eccles, ‘The Experiences of a Woman Journalist,’ Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 153 (June 1893), 830–838. Reprinted in Victorian Print Media: A Reader. Eds Andrew King and John Plunkett, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 330–334: 334.
Arnold Bennett, Journalism for Women: A Practical Guide (John Lane: London and New York, 1898), 6–7.
See Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914 (London: Routledge, 1996), 1–2; and Fraser, Green, and Johnston, Gender, 7.
John Oldcastle (a pseudonym for Wilfrid Meynell) wrote in Journals and Journalism: With a Guide for Literary Beginners (Field and Tuer: London, 1880), that while journalism was ‘writing for newspapers,’ literature was ‘the writing of books, magazines, and reviews.’ Quoted in Sally Mitchell, ‘Ephemeral Journalism and its Uses: Lucie Cobbe Heaton Armstong (1851–1907),’ Victorian Periodicals Review 42, no. 1 (2009), 81–92: 82.
Janet E. Hogarth, ‘The Monstrous Regiment of Women,’ Fortnightly Review 68 (1897), 926–936: 928.
Dallas Liddle, The Dynamics of Genre: Journalism and the Practice of Literature in Mid-Victorian Britain (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 3.
Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Bloomsbury, 1991).
See Barbara Onslow, Women of the Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000); Fraser, Green, and Johnston, Gender; and Alexis Easley, First-Person Anonymous: Women Writers and Victorian Print Media, 1830–1870 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
Matthew Arnold, ‘Up to Easter,’ Nineteenth Century 123 (May 1887), 629–643: 638, emphasis in the original.
Michelle Tusan, Women Making News: Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 155.
Penny Boumelha, ‘The Woman of Genius and the Woman of Grub Street: Figures of the Female Writer in British Fin-de-siècle Fiction,’ English Literature in Transition 40, no. 2 (1997), 164–180.
Kathy Psomiades, Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 3.
Katharine Tynan Hinkson, The Middle Years (London: Constable & Co, 1916), 112.
For the definitive account of Marriott Watson’s career, see Linda Hughes, Graham R: Rosamund Marriott Watson, Woman of Letters (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2005).
For a detailed discussion of the debates over defining ‘journalist’, and the rhetoric about journalists’ self-definitions, see Mark Hampton, ‘Defining Journalism in Late-Nineteenth Century Britain,’ Critical Studies in Media Communication 22, no. 2 (2005): 138–155.
Henri de Blowitz, ‘Journalism as a Profession,’ Contemporary Review 63 (January 1893), 37–46: 41.
Recent years have seen the publication of a number of valuable works focussing more directly on late Victorian women writers’ proto-feminism, including Tusan’s Women Making News and Ann Heilmann’s New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004).
A very limited sample of significant treatments of individual writers’ feminist self-positioning includes those of Ella Hepworth Dixon, in Valerie Fehlbaum’s Ella Hepworth Dixon: The Story of a Modern Woman (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005);
Frances Power Cobbe, in Sally Mitchell’s Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2004)
and Susan Hamilton’s Frances Power Cobbe and Victorian Feminism (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006);
and Florence Fenwick-Miller, in Rosemary VanArsdel’s Florence Fenwick-Miller: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, and Educator (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). Fraser’s, Green’s, and Johnston’s Gender and the Victorian Periodical (2003) offers essential reading on the issue of the periodical press’s reinstatements and challenges to gender ideologies.
George Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954–55), 2:287; emphasis in the original.
Sally Mitchell, ‘Victorian Journalism in Plenty,’ Victorian Literature and Culture 37 (2009), 311–321: 311.
Lorna Shelley, ed., Female Journalists of the Fin de Siècle, 4 vols. (New York and London: Routledge, 2010).
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© 2012 F. Elizabeth Gray
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Gray, F.E. (2012). Introduction. In: Gray, F.E. (eds) Women in Journalism at the Fin de Siècle. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137001306_1
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