Women of the Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain (review)

Abstract

Barbara Onslow's study of Victorian women journalists endeavors to fill a longstanding need in the scholarship of nineteenth-century literary labor: an overview of how women fit into what Onslow and other historians have presumed was the "very masculine world" of journalism (xi). Onslow, a lecturer in English at the University of Reading, notes that several studies in recent years have illuminated women's literary work in particular areas (for example, Margaret Beetham's excellent 1996 examination of women's periodicals, A Magazine of Her Own?) or have focused on individual women writers (most notably Margaret Oliphant and Eliza Lynn Linton, who are experiencing something of a revival). There have also been a number of overviews of Victorian journalism (Onslow mentions Laurel Brake's 1994 Subjugated Knowledges; Brake's most recent work, Print in Transition, 1850-1910 [2001], was not yet in print). No one has attempted, however, to combine these fields of study in a systematic way. Onslow's book admirably covers the field, setting nineteenth-century British women journalists in the contexts both of women's writing and of journalistic practice. Onslow makes readily accessible a vast amount of scholarship by pulling it together in one volume, and she lays the groundwork for future scholarship to fill in the remaining gaps and further expand our knowledge of this emerging field.