Women, Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1830s-1900s - The Victorian Period

New perspectives on women, periodicals and print culture in Victorian Britain by experts in media, literary and cultural history The period covered in this volume witnessed the proliferation of print culture and the greater availability of periodicals for an increasingly diverse audience of women readers. This was also a significant period in women's history, in which the 'Woman Question' dominated public debate, and writers and commentators from a range of perspectives engaged with ideas and ideals about womanhood ranging from the 'Angel in the House' to the New Woman. Essays in this collection gather together expertise from leading scholars as well as emerging new voices in order to produce sustained analysis of underexplored periodicals and authors and to reveal in new ways the dynamic and integral relationship between women's history and print culture in Victorian society. Alexis Easley is Professor of English at the University of St Thomas in St Paul, Minnesota. Clare Gill is Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of St Andrews. Beth Rodgers is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at Aberystwyth University.

List of contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Women, Periodicals, and Print Culture in the Victorian Period - Alexis Easley, Clare Gill, Beth Rodgers

Part I: (Re)Imagining Domestic Life

Introduction

1. The Rise and Rise of the Domestic Magazine: Femininity at Home in Popular Periodicals - Margaret Beetham

2. Regulating Servants in Victorian Women's Print Media - Kathryn Ledbetter

3. Women Editors' Transnational Networks in the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine and Myra's Journal - Marianne Van Remoortel

4. Women and Family Health in the Mid-Victorian Family Magazine - Claire Furlong

5. Negotiating Female Identity in Nineteenth-Century Ireland - Elizabeth Tilley

6. Women and the Welsh Newspaper Press: The Cambrian News and the Western Mail, 1870-95 - Tom O'Malley

Part II: Constructing Modern Girls and Young Women

Introduction

7. Promoting a Do-It-Yourself Spirit: Samuel Beeton's Young Englishwoman - Jennifer Phegley

8. Claiming Medicine as a Profession for Women: The English Woman's Journal's Campaign for Female Doctors - Teja Varma Pusapati

9. Encouraging Charitable Work and Membership in the Girls' Friendly Society through British Girls' Periodicals - Kristine Moruzi

10. 'Welcome and Appeal for the "Maid of Dundee"': Constructing the Female Working-Class Bard in Ellen Johnston's Correspondent Poetry, 1862-7 - Suz Garrard

11. The Editor of the Period: Alice Corkran, the Girl's Realm, and the Woman Editor - Beth Rodgers

12. The 'Most-Talked-Of Creature in the World': The 'American Girl' in Victorian Print Culture - Bob Nicholson

Part III: Women and Visual Culture

Introduction

13. Vicarious Pleasures: Photography, Modernity, and Mid-Victorian Domestic Journalism - Charlotte Boman

14. Beauty Advertising and Advice in the Queen and Woman - Michelle J. Smith

15. Women of the World: The Lady's Pictorial and Its Sister Papers - Gerry Beegan

16. Rewriting Fairyland: Isabella Bird and the Spectacle of Nineteenth-Century Japan - Andrea Kaston Tange

17. Victorian Women Wood Engravers: The Case of Clemence Housman - Lorraine Janzen Kooistra

Part IV: Making Space for Women

Introduction

18. Women Journalists and Periodical Spaces - Joanne Shattock

19. Making Space for Women's Work in the Leisure Hour: From Variety to 'Verity' - Katherine Malone

20. Avatars, Pseudonyms, and the Regulation of Affect: Performing and Occluding Gender in the Pall Mall Gazette - Fionnuala Dillane

21. Gender, Anonymity, and Humour in Women's Writing for Punch - Katy Birch

22. Making Space for Women: The Labour Leader, the Clarion, and the Women's Column - Deborah Mutch

23. By the Fireside: Margaret Oliphant's Armchair Commentaries - Valerie Sanders

Part V: Constructing Women Readers and Writers

Introduction

24. 'Afford[ing] me a Place': Recovering Women Poets in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1827-35 - Lindsy Lawrence

25. Constructing the Mass-Market Woman Reader and Writer: Eliza Cook and the Weekly Dispatch, 1836-50 - Alexis Easley

26. Elizabeth Gaskell and the Habit of Serialisation - Catherine Delafield

27. Gender and Genre in Reviews of the Theological Novel - Anne DeWitt

28. Reading Poet Amy Levy through Victorian Newspapers - Linda K. Hughes

29. 'I simply write it to order': L. T. Meade, Sisters of Sherlock, and the Strand Magazine - Clare Clarke

Part VI: Intervening in Political Debates

Introduction

30. Brewing Storms of War, Slavery, and Imperialism: Harriet Martineau's Engagement with the Periodical Press - Lesa Scholl

31. Mary Smith (1822-89): A Radical Journalist under Many Guises - Florence Boos

32. In Time of Disturbance: Political Dissonance and Subversion in Violet Fane's Contributions to the Lady's Realm - Ceylan Kosker

33. 'Our Women in Journalism': African-American Women Journalists and the Circulation of News - Caroline Bressey

34. The Late Victorian Feminist Press' Response to Same-Sex Desire Controversies - Molly Youngkin

35. Wings and the Woman's Signal: Reputation and Respectability in Women's Temperance Periodicals, 1892-9 - Gemma Outen

About the author

Alexis Easley is Professor of English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. She is the author of First-Person Anonymous: Women Writers and Victorian Print Media, 1830-70 (2004) and Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship, 1850-1914 (2011). She has also co-edited four books, most recently Women, Periodicals, and Print Culture in Britain, 1830s-1900s, with Clare Gill and Beth Rodgers (2019). Her most recent book publication is New Media and the Rise of the Popular Woman Writer, 1832-60 (2021). This project was a 2019 recipient of the Linda H. Peterson Prize awarded by the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. She is currently at work on a biography of Eliza Cook. Clare Gill is Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of St Andrews. She is the author of Olive Schreiner and the Politics of Print (forthcoming, Edinburgh University Press), General Editor of The Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Olive Schreiner (forthcoming, Edinburgh University Press) and volume editor of Olive Schreiner's Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland and Selected Journalism (forthcoming, Edinburgh University Press). Beth Rodgers is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at Aberystwyth University, Wales, UK. She is the author of Adolescent Girlhood and Literary Culture at the Fin de Siècle: Daughters of Today (Palgrave, 2016), which received Special Mention in the University English Book Prize in 2017, and co-editor of Women, Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1830s-1900s (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) and Children's Literature on the Move: Nations, Translations, Migrations (Four Courts, 2013). She has also published widely on the Irish author, L.T. Meade.

Summary

Presents 35 thematically organised, research-led essays on women, periodicals and print culture in Victorian Britain.

Product details

• Authors: Alexis Easley, Alexis Gill Easley, Easley Alexis
• Assisted by: Alexis Easley (Editor), Clare Gill (Editor), Beth Rodgers (Editor)
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.01.2019
• EAN: 9781474433907
• ISBN: 978-1-4744-3390-7
• No. of pages: 572
• Series: The Edinburgh History of Women's Periodical Culture in Britain; The Edinburgh History of Women's Periodical Culture in Britain; The Edinburgh History of Women
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies; Non-fiction book > Politics, society, business > Society; Social sciences, law, business > Media, communication > Media science