Finding a Transatlantic Audience: Reading Dinah Mulock Craik’s Mistress and Maid in Good Words and Harper’s Magazine

While scholars have long assumed that success came to bestselling novelist Dinah Craik with the publication of John Halifax, Gentleman in 1856, this article uses new archival evidence to show that the watershed moment of her career was actually the publication of a lesser-known novel, Mistress and Maid (1862), in serial form on both sides of the Atlantic. Craik developed a long and lucrative relationship with one of the new illustrated family magazines, Good Words, in Great Britain, and with Harper’s Magazine in the United States. The emphasis of Mistress and Maid underwent a subtle thematic shift in these two national contexts, foregrounding the Christian value of women’s labor in Good Words and the significance of class-based aspirations in Harper’s.