“I’m really going to kill him this time”: Olive Schreiner, W. T. Stead, and the Politics of Publicity in the Review of Reviews

W. T. Stead’s popular six-penny periodical, the Review of Reviews, fully embraced the cult of personality of the New Journalism of the late nineteenth century. Through an analysis of the periodical’s innovative use of both text and image, this article will explore Stead’s representation of one of the key personalities of his flagship publication: the South African writer Olive Schreiner. For Stead, the enigmatic yet divisive New Journalist, Schreiner, the celebrated yet contentious New Woman, fully embodied the spirit of his publication. By tracing their relationship through the channels of both private letters and public discourse, this article provides insight into the level of collaboration that existed between newspaper editors and the artists they chose to feature in their publications, and points to the dialogic and often performative nature of the relationship between writers and editors in fin de siècle periodicals.