“Independent in Thought and Expression, Kindly and Tolerant in Tone”:Henrietta Stannard, Golden Gates, and Gender Controversies in Fin-de-Siècle Periodicals Molly Youngkin (bio) In recent years, the recovery of late-Victorian women writers, such as Sarah Grand and Mona Caird, and the analysis of feminist periodicals of the period, such as Shafts and The Woman's Herald, have provided scholars with a better understanding of gender controversies at the fin-de-siècle.1 Generally, study of this topic has confirmed among periodicals of the 1890s a liberal feminist agenda, in which political and social equality for women was the foremost goal. Evidence of the influence of this liberal feminist agenda in fiction of the period, as in Grand's The Heavenly Twins (1893), has increased our awareness about the degree to which literary technique and cultural conditions of production are intertwined. Scholarly work shows that it is nearly impossible to separate the form of the novel from the conditions in which it was produced, and the liberal feminist perspective seen in 1890s fiction can be attributed in part to the presence of a feminist press at the fin de siècle. Still, the complexities of gender controversies during this period and how they influenced literary representation still need to be explored fully; one significant yet overlooked figure who can help illuminate these complexities is Henrietta Stannard, who wrote under the pseudonyms "Violet Whyte" and "John Strange Winter" and who edited her own periodical, Golden Gates. Examining Stannard's editorship of Golden Gates, which also was published under the titles Winter's Weekly and Winter's Magazine, reveals multiple perspectives about women's rights, and these perspectives cannot be summed up according to the binary of liberal versus conservative. While Stannard does not take the strong liberal feminist line found in the writings of Grand or Caird or in the periodicals Shafts and The Woman's Herald, she also does not adopt the strongly reactionary and conservative stance, most readily associated with writers such as Eliza Lynn Linton. Stannard's more moderate view, expressed in the pages of [End Page 307] Golden Gates, indicates that gender controversies of the 1890s are oversimplified when considered through only a select number of writers and periodicals. By looking at the evolution of Golden Gates between its founding in mid-1891 and the end of its run in mid-1895, we can see that Stannard contributes yet another important perspective, one that was informed by discussions about gender ideals published in other periodicals, especially the Society of Authors' journal, The Author. John Ruskin once wrote that Henrietta Stannard was the author to whom Victorians "owe the most finished and faithful rendering ever yet given of the character of the British soldier" (Sutherland 601; Bainbridge 80), a comment that does not suggest that Stannard might be influential in the gender controversies of the fin de siècle, and, in fact, Stannard did establish her literary reputation on novels that were far from the feminism of the 1890s. In the 15 years leading up to the fin de siècle, Stannard wrote realistic sketches of military life, such as Cavalry Life (1881), and sentimental stories that often took place in a military setting, such as Bootles' Baby (1885). Together, Cavalry Life and Bootles' Baby sum up well Stan-nard's approach to fiction in her early career: a sentimental realism that appealed to a popular audience and brought Stannard commercial success. Bootles' Baby, probably the most successful of Stannard's novels, sold two million copies between 1885 and 1895 (Sutherland 601). Yet Stannard's publication of A Blameless Woman (1894), which features a strong heroine, bears the influence of a different kind of realism – what I like to call "feminist realism" – which insists on the realistic representation of women, especially their attempts to assert agency and resist cultural norms that support their subordination. This variation on realism was shaped by the burgeoning feminist movement and its ideals about equality for women, and the publication of A Blameless Woman, which seems to depart significantly from Stannard's more sentimental work, raises the issue of feminist influence in Stannard's work. Why did she produce...