ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the emergence of mainstream political journalism as an employment avenue for women by offering a comparative account of the early careers of Eliza Meteyard (1816–1879) and Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904). At the start of their careers, both writers earned a substantial portion of their income by writing on social and political issues in periodicals whose mixed-gender audience did not inherently grant women the right to address serious topics. I begin by examining Meteyard’s articles in Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine, Howitt’s Journal, and Eliza Cook’s Journal, and demonstrating how she built a formidable reputation as a writer who could address a wide range of social and political subjects, including tabooed topics like prostitution. Drawing on unpublished letters from editor and mentor Mary Howitt to Meteyard and Meteyard’s applications to the Royal Literary Fund in the early 1850s, I bring to light crucial but hitherto unknown aspects of her journalism: her painful awareness of the rift between her self-fashioning as a high-minded writer and the hack-like conditions of her journalism, her gradual acculturation into the rhythms of weekly publication, and the transformation of her pseudonym into an alias. I then discuss how the mid-century expansion of ‘high-repute’ periodicals inaugurated a new phase of women’s journalism, which is best exemplified by the career of Frances Power Cobbe. I examine her writing in the first two high-repute journals that published her, Macmillan’s Magazine and Fraser’s Magazine, and demonstrate how she fashioned a new public image of the women writer as a self-sustaining and influential political journalist.
