Professionalizing the Modern Girl: Ella Hepworth Dixon, W. T. Stead and Journalism for Girls

Abstract

The final chapter turns from representations of girls as readers to those of girls as writers. I contrast rather different portrayals of the girl journalist—in Ella Hepworth Dixon’s sombre novel, The Story of a Modern Woman (1894) and in a range of articles promoting journalism as a career for girls in girls’ magazines—in order to explore less positive aspects of this ‘new’ stage of a woman’s life. Correspondence from readers of girls’ magazines suggests that many girls aspired to careers as journalists or writers. Prominent journalists such as W. T. Stead responded to requests for advice in a number of revealing articles about the ongoing struggle of women in the world of journalism. These articles and the responses from readers tell us much about how girls who had grown up in this era, consuming fiction and magazines that had directly targeted them for the first time, imagined what their adult lives may be like. Though the editor of Girl’s Realm, for one, posited that readers desired the literary life because of heroines such as Jane Austen, I explore how their correspondence rather suggests that readers wished to emulate the journalists and editors of magazines and periodicals themselves.

In contrast to such girlhood fantasies, Dixon’s novel explores the realities of the working journalist life. The novel can be read as a work of social realism that exploits popular stereotypes about girlhood to make many serious didactic points. By comparing her representation of the girl journalist to those found in books targeting girl readers, I argue that Dixon harnesses the tensions and contradictions that characterize constructions of girlhood elsewhere in the literary marketplace—including what actually constitutes a ‘girl’ in terms of age—in order to comment upon a variety of social hypocrisies. In doing so, this final chapter offers insight into a different side of late girlhood in the late nineteenth century.