Kristine Moruzi Research Articles

Young Adult Gothic Fiction: Monstrous Selves/Monstrous Others ed. by Michelle J. Smith and Kristine Moruzi

Young Adult Gothic Fiction: Monstrous Selves/Monstrous Others ed. by Michelle J. Smith and Kristine Moruzi

Sexuality in Literature for Children and Young Adults ed. by Paul Venzo and Kristine Moruzi

Sexuality in Literature for Children and Young Adults ed. by Paul Venzo and Kristine Moruzi

Young Adult Gothic Fiction: Monstrous Selves/Monstrous Others ed. by Michelle J. Smith and Kristine Moruzi

Young Adult Gothic Fiction: Monstrous Selves/Monstrous Others ed. by Michelle J. Smith and Kristine Moruzi

Young Adult Gothic Fiction: Monstrous Selves/Monstrous Others, Michelle J. Smith and Kristine Moruzi (eds) (2021)

Review of: Young Adult Gothic Fiction: Monstrous Selves/Monstrous Others, Michelle J. Smith and Kristine Moruzi (eds) (2021) Cardiff, Wales, UK: University of Wales Press, 320 pp., ISBN 978-1-78683-750-9, hardback, £70 GBP eISBN 978-1-78683-751-6, e-book, £70 GBP

From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children's Literature, 1840-1940 by Michelle J. Smith, Kristine Moruzi, and Clare Bradford

Reviewed by: From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children's Literature, 1840-1940 by Michelle J. Smith, Kristine Moruzi, and Clare Bradford Felicia Bevel From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children's Literature, 1840-1940. By Michelle J. Smith, Kristine Moruzi, and Clare Bradford. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. x + 263 pp. Cloth $56.25, e-book $56.25. The construction of colonial girlhood in British settler societies emerges front and center in Michelle J. Smith, Kristine Moruzi, and Clare Bradford's From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children's Literature, 1840-1940. Drawing from magazines, periodicals, novels, advertisements, and other print culture from the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, this analytically robust text brings together the growth of white settler societies and the emergence of girls' print culture to examine the ways that white girlhood was central to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand's emergence as modern nations. Age, as the authors show, is a critical analytic for understanding the culture of empire. This book is not only concerned with the construction of colonial (white) girlhood but also with the idea of childhood itself—how it was used, for example, to define indigenous people as childlike and thus inferior. This book therefore follows in the footsteps of Caroline Levander, Anna Mae Duane, and [End Page 163] Margaret Jacobs, who have each explored how racialized and gendered constructions of children and the category of childhood have been used to support various political projects. By arguing that age is an important lens alongside race and gender in unpacking the ideological work of settler colonialism, it is also in dialogue with texts such as Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds's Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality. Organized into three sections, From Colonial to Modern also provides a useful model for doing transnational work, striking a careful balance between the national and transnational while also giving equal weight to each of the three societies under review. While the first section, "Empire and Transnational Flows," emphasizes the transnational in its overview of the circulation and consumption of girls' print culture, the next section, "National and Transnational Dynamics," turns to national differences in the construction of colonial girlhood shaped by family formation, the environment, and racial dynamics in each country. Finally, the third section, "Modernity and Transnational Femininities," draws out the tensions between national and imperial belongings as it turns to the role of girlhood in each society's development as a modern, consumerist nation. This transnational lens, however, does not blur national differences but instead considers nation-specific meaning making, which "incorporates national distinctiveness within a shared network based on imperial belonging" (69). The strength of From Colonial to Modern lies in its intersectional approach, particularly in its careful attention to race, age, and gender throughout the book. From a close reading in chapter 3 of a 1907 song called "The British Empire Girl," which imagined the colonial girl as having pearly white skin, to a discussion in chapter 9 of a 1925 photograph of a Maori girl that relegates her to an uncivilized past, the authors consistently present an intersectional analysis of the layered relationship between whiteness and national identity, as the title indicates, from the colonial period to the age of modernity. This analysis surfaces most clearly in chapter 5, "Race and Texts for Girls," which expertly illustrates how indigenous girls were frequently characterized in colonial books as tragic victims of failed interracial relationships and/or receivers of white girls' civilizing care. By discussing the relationship between white and indigenous girls in colonial fiction, Smith, Moruzi, and Bradford also effectively illustrate how racial ideology was at the heart of white girls' gendered role in settler colonialism—to not only reproduce the settler colonial state by giving birth to future white citizens but also to mother supposedly childlike indigenous peoples. This emphasis on the racialized and gendered construction of girlhood, however, is at times at the expense of examining the influence of real girls on [End Page 164] their own representation in...

From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children's Literature, 1840–1940. Michelle J. Smith, Kristine Moruzi, and Clare Bradford

<i>From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children's Literature, 1840–1940.</i> Michelle J. Smith, Kristine Moruzi, and Clare Bradford

From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children’s Literature, 1840–1940 by Michelle J. Smith, Kristine Moruzi, and Clare Bradford

Reviewed by: From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children’s Literature, 1840–1940 by Michelle J. Smith, Kristine Moruzi, and Clare Bradford Maya Zakrzewska-Pim (bio) From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children’s Literature, 1840–1940. By Michelle J. Smith, Kristine Moruzi, and Clare Bradford. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. Michelle J. Smith, Kristine Moruzi, and Clare Bradford’s From Colonial to Modern sheds light on the development [End Page 124] of colonial girlhoods between 1840 and 1940 in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The authors’ argument centers on the notion of “transnational girlhood,” which offers a more flexible and inclusive way than does “imperial girlhood” of talking about the contemporary models of girlhood offered to both British and colonial girls through literature and periodicals. This approach allows “narratives from different nations [to be] placed alongside one another and examined both for their distinct depictions of colonial conditions for girls and for their similarities” (11), rather than focusing exclusively on texts from Britain. The authors “propose a model of transnationalism in which the production, distribution, and consumption of girls’ texts is situated within the global processes of print culture and book history” (13). This research will be of interest to scholars working in children’s literature, gender studies, and imperialism, as well as on Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand literature. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction, outlining existing work on girlhood in the period, introducing the notion of “transnationalism,” and providing a summary of the following chapters, which are divided into three sections. The first, “Empire and Transnational Flows,” focuses on how a universalized model of girlhood emerged and what this model was. Section 2, “National and Transnational Dynamics,” examines the influence on this model of ideas about family, the environment, and race. Section 3, “Modernity and Transnational Femininities,” discusses how modern views on work, education, and the First World War affected notions of girlhood and literature for girls. In the first section, chapter 2, “Colonial Girls’ Print Culture,” examines “how, when, and where books from British, American, and colonial writers were referenced—particularly in advertisements, book reviews, and correspondence columns” (23) to illustrate how texts were distributed in Britain and its colonies, and between the colonies themselves. Chapter 3, “Girlhood in the British Empire,” compares the representations of girls in texts produced in Britain with those written and published in the colonies. It concludes that while colonial publications demonstrate anxieties about the colonial girl’s future in terms of her femininity and how this might affect her ability to fulfill necessary roles, both British and colonial texts represent characters who see themselves as simultaneously colonial and imperial. The second section opens with chapter 4, “The Colonial and Imperial Family,” which draws attention to the existence of two distinct plot types focused on family. Both involve (usually orphaned) girls moving either to or away from the imperial center. In doing so, they often form unconventional families, which allows family to function as a metaphor for colonialism itself. The colonial girls in these texts “operate much like paper dolls” (96), interchangeable with one another. Chapter 5, “Environment and the Natural World,” addresses the representation of girls’ relationships with the natural environments in the colonies, and how these attitudes changed between the late nineteenth [End Page 125] and early twentieth centuries. Early texts were written by English writers who had little or no familiarity with the landscapes of the colonies and presented them mostly as threatening and dangerous; however, the start of the twentieth century saw representations by writers who had grown up in the colonies and saw their surroundings as integral parts of their national identity, resulting in far more positive depictions. The final chapter of this section, “Race and Texts for Girls,” examines the incorporation—or lack thereof—of Indigenous girls into texts for girls. The transnational commonalities of colonial girls “are most evident in their treatment of white girls who act in quasi-maternal roles towards Indigenous girls, who are universally depicted as childlike, exemplifying the inferiority of non-white cultures” (143). The different colonial histories of each state contributed to these variations. Section 3...

Affect, Emotion, and Children's Literature: Representation and Socialization in Texts for Children and Young Adults ed. by Kristine Moruzi, Michelle J. Smith, and Elizabeth Bullen

Reviewed by: Affect, Emotion, and Children's Literature: Representation and Socialization in Texts for Children and Young Adults ed. by Kristine Moruzi, Michelle J. Smith, and Elizabeth Bullen Frances Bottenberg AFFECT, EMOTION, AND CHILDREN'S LITERATURE: Representation and Socialization in Texts for Children and Young Adults Edited by Kristine Moruzi, Michelle J. Smith, and Elizabeth Bullen. Series: Children's Literature and Culture. Routledge, 2018. 215 pages. ISBN: 978-1-138-24467-2 Since the 1990s, scholars across diverse fields have turned their attention to the central role that affect, emotion, and the pre-personal body play in shaping subjective and embodied identities, steering socialization processes, and supporting ideologies. It is only recently that the "affective turn" has been taken up in the critical analysis of children's literature, though. This volume of collected essays contributes solidly to this emerging field of discourse, leaving no doubt as to the benefit of attending to the affective and emotional dimensions of narrative representation and impact in works written for young audiences. As the coeditors propose, such attending can reveal "how texts for children and young adults are used as tools for emotional socialisation, enculturation, political persuasion, and moral or ethical education" (Bullen et al. 2). The included essays consider texts produced across diverse European epochs and genres—from medieval advice literature and nineteenth-century waif novels, to children's literature classics such as Black Beauty and A Secret Garden, and on to recent mainstream YA fiction and films, including Chaos Walking, Delirium, and Frozen. What the contributions collectively uncover is that no text is innocent when it comes to enlisting young readers' affective or emotional responses for the transmission of meanings, messages, and lessons. Some such cases, as when a reader's empathic imagination is developed through contact with a likeable protagonist who nonetheless is importantly unlike the reader, will not strike us as troubling. Other cases are not so easy: for instance, as several authors in the collection note, recent YA dystopian writing tends toward a trope wherein a lead character commits a morally ambiguous, or even obviously wrong, act for ostensibly selfish or preferentialist reasons, as when many innocents are sacrificed to save the life of a single or a few loved ones. What meanings are young hearts and minds making from such narratives? The volume is divided into four sections. The essays featured in the first section, "Affect and the Historical Child Reader," take up cases of historical children's literature intentionally crafted to co-opt readers' affective responses for socialization purposes or for the sake of moral education. Emotions such as shame, pity, empathy, and self-confidence are particularly in the spotlight. The second section, "Theory of Mind," contains three essays that delve into works aiming to build young readers' "mind-reading" abilities, that is, the act of modeling another's state of mind for the sake of understanding their intentions and action motivations. Concerns are justly raised regarding the moral risks involved in creating characters whom teens identify affectively with, since these characters become quasi-role models. As fictional characters, though, they often remain psychologically oversimplified and behaviorally constrained by storytelling artifices. The third section, "Place and Space," features essays that show how affect and emotion must be localized to be most effective on young readers—that is, embedded into specific spatiotemporal, existentially weighted, and socially meaningful scenes. [End Page 68] The fourth section of the volume, "Emotions of Belonging," contains chapters that examine cases where particular emotions crystallize into markers of identity and relationship, as in the case where love becomes a symbol of rebellion in a society that seeks to repress expressions of individual choice. As noted by the authors in this section, texts featuring protagonists whose identities remain marginalized in the real world deserve particular critical scrutiny, since both the perceived maladaptation and eventual adaptation of these individuals to dominant norms may be narratively constrained or prescribed by other characters' affective appraisals of them. The range of contributions to this volume is impressive. Some incoherence across authors' accounts of cognitive development, as well as the distinction of emotion from affect, prove somewhat distracting at times. For instance, at least one author works from the assumption...

Kristine Moruzi, Michelle J. Smith &amp; Elizabeth Bullen (red), Affect, Emotion, and Children's Literature: Representation and Socialisation in Texts for Children and Young Adults

Kristine Moruzi, Michelle J. Smith & Elizabeth Bullen (red), Affect, Emotion, and Children's Literature: Representation and Socialisation in Texts for Children and Young Adults

From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children's Literature, 1840–1940 by Michelle J. Smith, Kristine Moruzi, and Clare Bradford

From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children's Literature, 1840–1940 by Michelle J. Smith, Kristine Moruzi, and Clare Bradford

Affect, Emotion, and Children's Literature: Representation and Socialisation in Texts for Children and Young Adults ed. by Kristine Moruzi, Michelle J. Smith, and Elizabeth Bullen

Affect, Emotion, and Children's Literature: Representation and Socialisation in Texts for Children and Young Adults ed. by Kristine Moruzi, Michelle J. Smith, and Elizabeth Bullen

Girls, Texts, Cultures ed. by Clare Bradford and Mavis Reimer (review)

Reviewed by: Girls, Texts, Cultures ed. by Clare Bradford and Mavis Reimer Sara K. Day (bio) Girls, Texts, Cultures. Edited by Clare Bradford and Mavis Reimer. Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2015. As an emerging field, girlhood studies draws on—but does not always bring together—a number of disciplines and critical frameworks, perhaps none more obviously than girls’ studies and children’s literature. In this exciting new collection, editors Clare Bradford and Mavis Reimer emphasize [End Page 99] these latter two discourses in order to highlight their shared interests and mutual usefulness, and the twelve essays gathered here largely succeed in illustrating the intersections, parallels, and connections that can be drawn. Combining clear methodologies, persuasive analysis, and useful considerations of the very nature of the research being done in girlhood studies, these essays ultimately present a strong argument in favor of embracing the field’s multidisciplinary and global nature. Children’s literature scholars, particularly those whose work spans disciplines and/or cultures, will find much of value here. In a brief but thorough introduction, Bradford and Reimer outline the many contexts that inform this collection, tracing the development of both girls’ studies and children’s literature in ways that effectively highlight their shared qualities. In particular, the point that both of these fields have been marginalized due to their affiliations with young women is well taken and one with which many readers will identify. The editors also concisely but effectively articulate their titular focus on girls, texts, and cultures, including the important assertion that the collected authors “resist the idea that girlhood is merely a preliminary or transitional phase antecedent to womanhood” (8). Instead, as they ruminate on the ways in which texts and cultures interact to construct experiences and expectations of girlhood, the essays treat girls as worthy of investigation in their own right. The collection’s first section, “Contemporary Girlhoods and Subjectivities,” focuses on the question of how texts (academic and literary alike) reinforce or challenge ideas about girlhood. Dawn H. Currie’s essay “From Girlhood, Girls, to Girls’ Studies: The Power of the Text” proves to be a powerful opener, as Currie’s own contributions to the field of girlhood studies play an important role in much of the work that has been done in the past few decades. Notably, Currie reviews and reflects upon her evolving ideas about and treatments of girls and girlhood, using her own work to consider the ways in which academic texts reify some versions of girlhood while obscuring others. The three essays that follow engage more explicitly with fictional texts but approach many of the same concerns and considerations. Both Kerry Mallan and Elizabeth Bullen offer intriguing and insightful readings of contemporary novels, though both essays could benefit from more thorough engagement with recent criticism in young adult literature, especially that relating to narrative theory. Pamela Knights’s “Still Centre Stage? Reframing Girls’ Cultures in New Generation Fictions of Performance” is a particularly impressive study, examining ballet novels as “significant symbolic holding space[s] for managing the conflicts” between conflicting versions of girlhood (77). While the topic of ballet stories seems a narrow one, Knights extends the conversation to consider subjectivity, contradiction, and girls’ experiences of their body, speech, and class identities more broadly. In the second section, “The Politics of Girlhood,” global and transnational concerns are examined through a variety of lenses; while its four essays [End Page 100] employ a wide selection of critical frameworks, they generally share an interest in participatory research that understands girls as researchers who are themselves able to analyze their own and others’ words, images, and other media. This section is perhaps most notable for its consideration of girls from so many different cultures: Sandrina de Finney and Johanne Sara-ceno investigate Indigenous girlhoods in Canada; Claudia Mitchell discusses her work with African girls and visual media; Kristine Moruzi examines post–WWI fiction from England, the US, Canada, and Australia; and Kabita Chakraborty details the impact of Bollywood film on the romantic ideals of girls living in Indian slums. In this section in particular, the collection illustrates its investment in a view of girlhood that troubles assumptions and stereotypes about what it...

Discourses of Postcolonialism in Contemporary British Children’s Literature by Blanka Grzegorczyk (review)

Reviewed by: Discourses of Postcolonialism in Contemporary British Children’s Literature by Blanka Grzegorczyk Clare Bradford (bio) Discourses of Postcolonialism in Contemporary British Children’s Literature. By Blanka Grzegorczyk. New York: Routledge, 2015. As Blanka Grzegorczyk notes, scholarly work on the postcolonial significances of contemporary British literature for children and young people has lagged behind postcolonial investigations of the literatures of other Anglophone nations, notably Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. [End Page 422] Instead, research has focused, in the main, on texts of imperialism, particularly studies of adventure novels for boys (see works by critics Joseph Bristow, Martin Green, and Jeffrey Richards, for example). More recently, Michelle Smith, Kristine Moruzi, and others have published books focusing on the extent to which canonical and popular texts for girls during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rehearse and reproduce colonial discourses. Karen Sands-O’Connor’s Soon Come Home to This Island: West Indians in British Children’s Literature (2008), one of the few book-length studies of discourses of race in British literature, covers the long history of representations of West Indians in texts for the young but does not draw upon postcolonial studies in its approach and methodology. Grzegorczyk’s study promises, then, to address an important and neglected topic: how contemporary texts published in what was formerly the center of British imperialism represent the historical and the cultural legacies of the colonial past as well as new forms of imperialism. If Discourses of Postcolonialism does not quite live up to the ambition articulated at the end of chapter 1—to “recognize the general trend that the criticism of children’s literature is now failing to address” (32)—it offers thought-provoking readings of some key British texts of the last two decades. Chapter 2 addresses novels thematizing migration and the subject-formation of protagonists from ethnic minorities, drawing attention to reformulations of ethnic and national identities. In chapters 3 to 5 Grzegorczyk turns, respectively, to historical fiction, fantasy, and adventure novels, employing a genre-based division of texts that results in a somewhat patchy coverage of ideas; for instance, tropes of exoticization are discussed in three of the book’s five chapters, but a definition is not offered until the final chapter. Nevertheless, Grzegorczyk’s analysis of texts is lively and engaging, focusing to good effect on telling instances of the narrative strategies and implications of texts. In particular, the third chapter (while too brief for the topic it addresses) offers a nuanced account of the complex relationships between history and fiction as modes of truth-telling. A shortcoming of the book is that its scope (by my calculations, less than seventy thousand words) is quite simply insufficient to address the complex theoretical and analytical questions it raises; another is that it presents as a series of essays rather than a coherently argued whole. Each of its five chapters is followed by a Works Cited list, rather than the consolidated list usual in monographs, and the chapters rarely refer to ideas or texts discussed elsewhere in the book. Further, Grzegorczyk never elucidates her approach to postcolonial studies, explaining that she prefers that “the texts, rather than a predetermined critical framework . . . take center stage” (2). This approach to the writing of Discourses of Postcolonialism has two effects. First, by referring to theorists and critics merely to bolster her readings of texts (and often to prosecute her argument) Grzegorczyk does not develop a sense of the larger concepts that frame her approach, so [End Page 423] that key terms and ideas (including postcolonialism, transnationalism, and globalization) float in something of a vacuum; thus phrases such as “the dominant tropes and formal characteristics of postcolonial fiction” (38) have no referent in the absence of a systematic discussion of such tropes and characteristics. Secondly, Grzegorczyk’s approach affords little scope for any explication of the debates and tensions that characterize postcolonial studies, which, in Graham Huggan’s words, is “not a field one is likely to look to for methodological coherence or consensual politics” (Huggan 22). Instead, Grzegorczyk too often provides a reductive account of postcolonialism; for instance, she compares her study of British postcolonialism to a list of scholarly works on children...

Constructing Girlhood through the Periodical Press, 1850–1915 by Kristine Moruzi (review)

Constructing Girlhood through the Periodical Press, 1850–1915 by Kristine Moruzi (review)

Constructing Girlhood through the Periodical Press, 1850-1915 by Kristine Moruzi (review)

Constructing Girlhood through the Periodical Press, 1850-1915 by Kristine Moruzi (review)

Kristine Moruzi, Constructing Girlhood through the Periodical Press, 1850-1915

The second half of the nineteenth century was a time of radical changes in society, and in particular the place and role of the young woman. Writing a book on a much-debated topic such as girlhood is no easy task and a challenge for any researcher. Kristine Moruzi has chosen to explore the development of this notion through a detailed study of the periodical press which targeted the young middle-class girl reader. The choice was a good one, for her work contributes to our understanding of an ...

Constructing Girlhood through the Periodical Press, 1850–1915 by Kristine Moruzi (review)

Constructing Girlhood through the Periodical Press, 1850–1915 by Kristine Moruzi (review)

From Toddlers to Teens: The Colonization of Childhood the Disney Way

As I read both Kristine Moruzi’s and Kristine Alexander’s articles on girlhood, I am struck by some of the similarities that underlie their work and mine. It seems to me that our understanding of children and youth is grounded in the same theoretical logic, particularly a poststructuralist approach that appreciates the power of discourse to produce rather than reflect reality. Poststructuralist epistemologies recognize that categories of being such as girlhood are socially constructed by a complex interweaving of dynamic forces. In each of our essays, we attempt to unpack these dynamic forces in three very different sets of texts and practices. Moruzi’s essay focuses on British and Canadian girls’ periodicals and novels, while Alexander looks at the Girl Guide movement. My work is essentially about the relationship children have to the media marketplace. I am particularly interested in how the media and market research build their sense of children as consumers. My scholarship is based in the discipline of communication studies, which is itself partly grounded in political economy. The purpose of political economy is to understand the complex, synergistic processes that take place between the various sectors of the marketplace as each sector works to produce economic value. In my work, these two theoretical perspectives intersect in an analysis of the market segmentation of young people into categories that meet the logic and needs of the marketplace in late capitalism.As a parent of young children, I am continually reminded of the corporate power of the Walt Disney Company as it seeps into virtually all facets of my children’s lives: from the birthday parties they attend to the clothes they wear to the books they read at night, Disney is there. Children can immerse themselves in the Disney brand and move through it as they age,

“I am content with Canada”: Canadian Girls at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Kristine Moruzi is a Grant Notley Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Her book, Constructing Girlhood through the Periodical Press, 1850–1915, is forthcoming from Ashgate and is based on the doctoral work she completed at the University of Melbourne. In her current research, she is examining representations of girlhood in Canadian children’s literature between 1840 and 1940. This work is also part of a collaborative project funded by the Australian Research Council with Dr. Michelle J. Smith (Melbourne) and Prof. Clare Bradford (Deakin) on colonial femininity between 1840 and 1940.

“Learning What Real Work . . . Means”: Ambivalent Attitudes Towards Employment in the Girl’s Own Paper

“Learning What Real Work . . . Means”:Ambivalent Attitudes Towards Employment in the Girl’s Own Paper Kristine Moruzi (bio) and Michelle Smith (bio) Under Charles Peters’s editorship until his death in 1907, the Girl’s Own Paper (GOP, 1880–1956) reflected and responded to its readers’ needs for practical information about employment opportunities. Articles such as “On Earning One’s Living,” “Female Clerks and Book-Keepers,” and “Nursing as a Profession” all appeared in the magazine’s first year. The correspondence sections likewise discussed issues of employment. For example, in response to her letter, “Isolated Hetty” is asked whether her elderly relatives would be inconvenienced by her seeking employment and, if not, she is advised “to apply to some hospital for nursing” and directed towards other numbers of the GOP, where “much has been said about”1 nursing as a profession. Alongside these informational articles and advice columns were fictional stories depicting working girls in their struggles to support themselves and their families while also remaining virtuous and pure. Despite this overt support for working girls, however, the popular Girl’s Own Paper contains a curious ambivalence towards girls’ employment. Although it was ostensibly targeted towards working- and lower middle-class girls, most of whom would have worked, the GOP reinforces a traditional feminine ideal discouraging middle-class girls from working outside the home, while also reaffirming the necessity for working-class girls to earn income through paid labour. The magazine presents middle-class girls’ employment as admirable and acceptable only when such work is inspired by necessity and only when it remains within the bounds of respectable femininity. This idea of girls’ employment is complicated by the GOP’s fiction, which attempts to contain working girls by portraying them as victims of circumstance with few opportunities to express themselves. The freedoms of employment emerge most obviously in the frequent first-person evidence in the correspondence [End Page 429] sections, which suggests girl readers are more concerned with the practicalities of employment than with perceived notions of femininity. Mediated by the middle-class editor and contributors to the magazine, working-class voices appear as novelties, enabling the presentation of urban working girls as needing middle-class intervention. By including articles and stories about the lives of working-class girls, the GOP allows middle-class readers to gain vicarious insight into the world of employment beyond the home, yet the magazine’s depiction of urban work is narrowly defined, and the frequently negative renderings of such work not only promote an outlet for middle-class girls to channel benevolent impulses but also form part of the editorial strategies that contain middle-class girls’ work within the home. When the Religious Tract Society first began publishing the Girl’s Own Paper in 1880, it was responding to two troubling trends it perceived in the publishing industry. The first was the popularity of inexpensive, weekly penny dreadful magazines full of lurid stories of murder and intrigue. The second was the frequency with which girls were reading magazines intended for their brothers including, but certainly not limited to, the Boy’s Own Paper, which the RTS started in 1879. Flora Klickmann, editor of the GOP from 1908, describes how the GOP was originally intended “to foster and develop that which was highest and noblest in the girlhood and womanhood of England,”2 highlighting the magazine’s focus on femininity and morality. As a weekly one penny magazine the GOP was intended to compete with the penny dreadfuls. It was aimed at working- and lower-middle-class girls, and it tried to hide its evangelical origins by publishing the magazine under the auspices of “The Leisure Hour Office,” a popular family magazine, rather than explicitly identifying its RTS origins. As Aileen Fyfe explains, a magazine published by the RTS would have been viewed with suspicion by working-class readers, for many of whom “the name ‘RTS’ would be more likely to suggest patronising middle-class interference than trustworthy information”3 because of its long history of publishing and distributing improving evangelical religious tracts to the working classes. Situating Work in the Girl’s Own Paper While the GOP’s purpose was to instruct readers presumed...