Women in Journalism at the Fin de Siècle: Making a Name for Herself ed. by F. Elizabeth Gray (review)

This admirable collection of essays brings to the fore twelve British women journalists writing at the fin de siècle: Eliza Lynn Linton, Frances Power Cobbe, Edith Simcox, Alice Meynell, Lady Isabella Somerset, Flora Shaw, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, Hulda Friederichs, Sarah Tooley, Ella Hep-worth Dixon, Rosamund Marriott Watson (“Graham R. Tomson”), and Frances Low. Together, the essays make a compelling case for the challenges women confronted when journalism was still guarded as a male preserve and women were suspect if they sought professional status. Individually, the separate essays highlight a series of strategies for working in a marketplace that variously required anonymity, pseudonymity, and celebrity. Admitting to the goal of recuperating these women journalists for present-day critics, editor F. Elizabeth Gray also acknowledges in her introductory chapter that the essays provide an opportunity “to examine how the cultural currents of the unique time period contributed to women’s various literary and identity constructions” (2). Ultimately, Gray argues, these essays can help us deconstruct the “ways the periodical press itself enabled, generated, constrained, and shaped what women wrote” at the fin de siècle (2).

Some of these journalists are more familiar than others; by setting them in chronological sequence, Gray ensures that readers of her collection can incorporate fresh readings of well-known subjects with new information about the lesser-known ones, thus envisioning a more complete history of women’s contributions to journalism. We can recognize how antifeminist Lynn Linton, whose transgendered novel The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland (1885) contrasts with her posthumous My Literary Life (1899), prefigures some of the self-contradictions in Low’s anti-suffragist stance, while at the same time seeing how both of them end up supporting women as professional journalists by their very example.

As Lee Anne Bache points out, Lynn Linton creatively apportioned her private and public selves among her anonymous, fictional, and signed selves, illustrating the continuity of concerns faced by women writers throughout the nineteenth century and into the next. Cobbe, in contrast, openly embraced feminism, and Susan Hamilton, whose Frances Power Cobbe and Victorian Feminism (2006) develops that thesis at length, here demonstrates how Cobbe’s writing as a women’s rights activist and anti-vivisectionist for the London daily Echo launched her into the celebrity that later translated into extensive publicity for The Life of Frances Power Cobbe, by Herself (1894) in the editorial pages of the Englishwoman’s Review, the Woman’s Journal, and the Woman’s Signal.

Several of the subjects of these essays are better known to Victorianists for their contributions outside the field of journalism. Edith Simcox, delimited to her association with George Eliot by too many scholars, despite (or perhaps because of) the publication of Autobiography of a Shirtmaker (1998), emerges from Brenda Ayres’s essay as an intellectual and social force in her own right. Whether publishing reviews under her pseudonym “H. Lawrenny” for the North British Review or a series of short stories from Fraser’s under her full name as Episodes in the Lives of Men, Women, and Lovers (1882), Simcox displays an impressive range of topics that underscores her polyglot expertise. Meynell’s reputation today rests on her work as poet, yet during her four-decade career she co-edited two periodicals and contributed to over two dozen more, developing and perfecting literary criticism in what Gray calls a style of “elevated scorn” in contrast to the unrestrained “slashing” style of many of her contemporaries (72–73). As her transatlantic standing grew, Meynell used her celebrity to extend support for women’s suffrage, especially after she was elected president of the Society of Women Journalists in 1897. Pennell, too, experienced success in one genre at the expense of recognition in another. While she is rightfully admired for her biography of James McNeill Whistler (co-written with her husband in 1911), she...