Obstacles and Opportunities --
A Fifth Estate --
At our Library Table: Reviewers and Critics --
Something to Say, a Living to Earn: Periodical Contributors --
In the Editor's Chair --
A Niche in the Market --
Handmaids and Decorators --
A Press for a Purpose --
Jill of all Trades: Journalism and the Professional Writer --
Journalism and the Novelist.

To nineteenth-century writers the dynamic periodical press seemed both an influential medium and a means to pay the bills. A surprising number of women, despite limited education, parental opposition and the competitive nature of this developing profession, sought to earn a living through journalism. Others saw the press as a valuable mechanism for educating the masses or a powerful channel for influencing public opinion. How did these women fare in Grub Street? Could they harness the power of the press? Who were the 'lady journalists'? The women featured in this book range from Mary Russell Mitford editing an elegant annual from her Berkshire cottage to Flora Shaw sending her dispatches to The Times from the Africa of Cecil Rhodes; from Margaret Gatty and her children's magazine to Eliza Linton and her diatribes against 'The Girl of the Period' and 'The Shrieking Sisterhood'; from scholarly art historian to the fashion writer and the articulate suffragist to the gossip columnist. Drawing on varied contemporary sources - memoirs, letters, magazines, journals, newspapers, and contemporary fiction about journalism - and her own database covering hundreds of women, Barbara Onslow assesses their contribution to journalism and how it affected the careers of writers as diverse as George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anna Maria Hall, Mary Braddon and Charlotte Yonge. The volume includes reference biographies of one hundred nineteenth-century women journalists."--Jacket.