This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book considers the gendered specificities of journalistic careers as they relate to women, and strategies of writing adopted by women. It presents three case studies: Alice Meynell, Florence Fenwick Miller and Elizabeth Robins Pennell. The book addresses the common themes shared by all three women: an interest in the debates around the Royal Academy and modernity and attitudes to women artists, to gender, to marriage and femininity. The lives of women art writers represent the history of the nineteenth-century women's movement, for newspapers and periodicals were cultural sites in which middle-class women made diverse contributions to the changing discourses about women's rights. New professional women had emerged who moved across genres, working as journalists and art critics, novelists, activists and philanthropists.