Work that Influences the World: Journalism

Abstract

In chapter 3 of Charlotte Yonge’s novel The Clever Woman of the Family the heroine, Rachel Curtis, writes an article on ‘Curatolatry’ (curate worship), which she intends as ‘the beginning of a series, exposing the fallacies of woman’s life as at present conducted’ (p. 51), thus anticipating by three years the launch of Eliza Lynn Linton’s similar, and notorious, ‘Girl of the Period’ series in the Saturday Review. The difference is that Rachel means her articles to be pro-feminist, while attacking the emptiness and foolishness of many women’s lives as they were forced to live them, without meaningful employment. She shows the article to her friend Ermine Williams, who is later revealed to be a very different kind of journalist, the mysterious ‘Invalid’ of the Traveller’s Magazine. While the editor is away, he leaves the ‘Invalid’ in charge, though she keeps back some letters for him to answer because her own hand ‘betrays womanhood’ (p. 95). When Colonel Keith admires her important position, she tells him, in a significant sentence: ‘If you had been in England all this time, you would see how easy the step is into the literary world.’ Charlotte Yonge appears to have found it so. She was the editor of the Monthly Packet before she was quite thirty, and remained at the helm until 1890, when a change of approach was somewhat overdue.