Women, Periodicals, and Print Culture in Britain, 1830s–1900s: The Victorian Period ed. by lexis Easley, Clare Gill, and Beth Rodgers

Abstract

Reviewed by: Women, Periodicals, and Print Culture in Britain, 1830s–1900s: The Victorian Period ed. by lexis Easley, Clare Gill, and Beth Rodgers Marysa Demoor (bio) Alexis Easley, Clare Gill, and Beth Rodgers, eds., Women, Periodicals, and Print Culture in Britain, 1830s–1900s: The Victorian Period (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), pp. xii + 580, $230/£150 cloth. There is a sisterhood in Victorian periodicals studies, with admittedly the odd brother member, that every so often comes together to compare notes and share research results. This active network has produced a series of books collecting almost everything there is to know about women and periodicals, published by Edinburgh University Press under the careful supervision of Jackie Jones and structured along traditional time spans. There are some overlaps, such as the 1890s, a decade dealt with in The Victorian Period and The Modernist Period (edited by Faith Binckes and Carey Snyder, 2019), and the years immediately following the First World War, which are covered in both The Interwar Period (edited by Catherine Clay, Maria DiCenzo, Barbara Green, and Fiona Hackney, 2017) and The Modernist Period. But the series editor and the individual editors of these volumes do not aspire to exhaustiveness; rather their aim is to present an overview and expert approaches to certain aspects of the printed press, individuals in journalism, and periodicals published in a specific era. With an effort of this kind, one anticipates that the usual suspects will contribute and the usual subjects will be addressed, but there is more to [End Page 165] this volume than even a specialist reader in the field might expect: there is surprise, innovation, and more information than the expert reader may be familiar with. This volume consists of six parts, each one preceded by an introduction that explores the themes, dominant issues, and strengths of the chapters. The thirty-five chapters are evenly divided over the six parts, creating a hefty volume of 580 pages. There is no way a reviewer can pay sufficient attention to each of the chapters, so I have opted to present my impressions of a highly personal selection. The six parts of the book deal with aspects of Victorian women's involvement in periodicals, such as visual culture, authorship, readership, and more surprisingly, political debates. The first part, "(Re)Imaging Domestic Life," opens with a chapter by the mother of domestic magazine research, Margaret Beetham. Predictably, Beetham's aims are ambitious—she wants to give a "general historical sweep" of the Victorian domestic magazine—but at the same time she displays her typical modesty when warning against oversimplification and generalization (19). This chapter provides a thorough introduction to the genre and a sharp and insightful focus on some of the main players in its survey of domestic periodicals. The unique Isabella Beeton features as the star of domestic magazines in spite of her very untimely death. Beetham's A Magazine of Her Own? (1996) blazed a trail for the next generation of periodical studies scholars, and nearly every chapter in the volume pays homage to her work. The chapters that follow in the first section and the rest of the volume illustrate the huge leap scholars have made in recent research on women journalists. In the wake of Beetham's book, scholars are clearly unafraid to investigate subjects that previously were not deemed serious enough for publication in top scholarly journals because they were too closely associated with stereotypical women's interests, such as sewing, fashion, or domestic chores. Part one of this volume presents some of that research. Kathryn Ledbetter focuses on print media's depiction of the complex issue of servants and their relationship with the lady of the house. Marianne Van Remoortel presents a transnational take on domestic periodicals, centering on the very female interest in fashion to uncover connections between British and French women shoppers. Other contributions to this section of the volume deal with health, another feminine subject generally subsumed under the "caring" adjective; the construction of Irish women's identity in print media; and a chapter on Welsh women and their printed press. Curiously, no chapter is dedicated to Scottish women. The book could have ended there and achieved the...