Alice Meynell: Production, Reproduction, and the World of Work in the 1890s

Alice Meynell’s long and acclaimed career as journalist, essayist, and poet was built on a complex relationship with the print marketplace on which her livelihood depended. The 1890s was a watershed decade for Meynell, a period in which her ceaseless journalistic and editorial activity elevated her to a household name. The ways in which she produced and capitalized on that name, through multiply mediated publications and republications, reveal how she battled simultaneously supportive and constraining market imperatives. They also illuminate the political underpinnings of a woman writer’s efforts to manage a voracious late-nineteenth-century readership.