ABSTRACT
This chapter offers the first in-depth account of the figure of the female journalist in novels from the 1840s to the 1880s, some of which have received no critical attention so far. Written by practising female journalists such as Eliza Meteyard, Camilla Newton Crosland, Charlotte Yonge and Eliza Lynn Linton, these novels show women writing reviews, leader articles, and even commanding a newspaper office full of men. They move away from the dominant Victorian myth of authorship as the creative outpouring of a solitary agent to project writing as a mediated and collaborative exercise. Unlike fiction about domesticated women writers, these novels present the female author as working in close proximity with men, often under the gaze of a male editor. They formulate new codes of feminine behaviour to make women’s co-operative, remunerative work with men in such mixed-gender spaces as newspaper offices seem respectable. They also voice anxieties about the uncertain copyright provisions for journalists and demand better pay and recognition for women journalists. Crucially, they show the woman writer as turning out the better for her encounter with the press: better fitted for wifehood, or book writing, or both, and in some cases, finding that nothing suited her better than the life of a single and successful journalist. As part of Victorian cultural discourse, these novels not only put positive evaluations of women’s journalism into circulation but also affirmed the authority of the woman novelist to represent the field of professional journalism.
