Abstract
The woman described is Flora Shaw, colonial editor of the Times of London. The words are those of the African traveller Mary Kingsley, whose sharp-edged remarks reflect the fact that she held Shaw responsible for the newspaper ignoring her books about West Africa. How did Flora Shaw come to hold such an elevated position in the world of British journalism in the 1890s? She grew up appreciating the military and political contributions to the British nation made by her Anglo-Irish forbears. She also understood from that tradition that if an upper-middle-class daughter wished to realize her ambition to become a writer, she would have to negotiate the conventional expectations of her family and class. Shaw’s mother’s death and her father’s remarriage, when she was 19, provided her with her first opportunity to strike out on her own. She left home for an extended visit with her mother’s relatives in France. This proved to be the first of a lifetime of choices based on the principle that if one pushed resolutely at the outer boundaries of what was possible, the next set of choices would be wider.
The author wishes to express gratitude for helpful suggestions to members of the Women Writing Women’s Lives and the Columbia Women and Society seminars, and especially to the editor of this volume, F. Elizabeth Gray.
‘She is a fine, handsome, bright, upstanding young woman, as clever as they make them, capable of any immense amount of work, as hard as nails and talking like a Times leader all the time. … She is imbued with the modern form of public imperialism. It is her religion.’2
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Mary Kingsley to John Holt, 20 February 1899, quoted in Katherine Frank, A Voyager Out: The Life of Mary Kingsley (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1986), 264.
E. Moberly Bell, Flora Shaw (Lady Lugard D.B.E.) (London: Constable, 1947), 20–23. Diaries cited by Bell are now lost.
John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain, new edn., 4 vols. (London: George Allen, 1896), vol. 4, Letter 87, March 1878, 313–314.
Abd al-Rahman Munir Zubayr Pasha 18307–1912. Roger Owen, Lord Cromer: Victorian Imperialist, Edwardian Proconsul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 196–200, 202, 212.
Flora L. Shaw, ‘The Story of Zebehr Pasha, as told by himself, Parts I, II, and III,’ Contemporary Review, 52 (September, October, and November, 1887), 333–349, 568–585, 658–682.
Flora L. Shaw, ‘The Australian Outlook,’ Royal Colonial Institute 25 (1893–94), 138–65.
The newspaper had just lost a costly libel case brought by the Irish leader Charles Parnell. The History of The Times: The Twentieth Century Test, 1884–1912 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1947), 89, 112, 161–162. E.H.C. Moberly Bell, The Life & Letters of C.F. Moberly Bell (London: The Richards Press, 1927), 140, 156.
Quoted in Phyllis Lewsen, Selections from the Correspondence of John X. Merriman, 4 vols. (Cape Town: Van Riebeck Society), vol. 2 (1963), 8.
Clive Moore, Jacqueline Leckie, Douglas Munro, eds., Labour in the South Pacific (Townsville: James Cook University of Queensland, 1990);
Adrian Graves, Cane and Labour: The Political Economy of the Queensland Sugar Industry, 1862–1906 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993);
Tom Brass, ‘Contextualizing Sugar Production in Nineteenth-Century Queensland,’ Slavery and Abolition 15, no. 1 (April 1994), 100–117;
and Patricia Mercer, White Australia Defied: Pacific Islander Settlement in Northern Queensland (Townsville: History Department, James Cook University, 1995).
F. Edmund Garrett to his cousin Agnes Garrett, 9 June 1897 in Gerald Shaw, The Garrett Papers (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1984), 95. M.G. Fawcett to Shaw, 14 November 1894, SPRH.
Quoted in Barbara Onslow, Women of the Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd, 2000), 51–52.
Michelle Elizabeth Tusan, ‘Inventing the New Woman: Print Culture and Identity Politics during the Fin-de-Siecle,’ Victorian Periodicals Review 31, no. 2 (Summer 1998), 169–82: 173.
Shaw to Norton, 22 February 1889, NP. There is still discussion of whether feminism in the second half of the nineteenth century consisted solely of a commitment to systematic campaigning for women’s rights or also a ‘sensitivity to [women’s] needs, awareness of their problems and concern for their situation’. Mary Maynard, ‘Privilege and Patriarchy: Feminist Thought in the Nineteenth Century,’ in Sexuality & Subordination: Interdisciplinary Studies of Gender in the Nineteenth Century, eds Susan Mendus and Jane Rendall (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 222.
Shaw to Lugard, 25 January [1902] SPRH. The relationship between experience and knowledge, and whether the experience of being a woman in a patriarchal society itself leads inevitably to resistance to oppression is still being debated. See, for example, Joan W. Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience,’ Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (summer 1991), esp. 786–87.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2012 Dorothy O. Helly
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Helly, D.O. (2012). Flora Shaw and the Times: Becoming a Journalist, Advocating Empire . 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_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137001306_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-34836-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-00130-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)