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In the conclusion, I reflect on the resonances of early and mid-Victorian popular media practices in our own time—the questions they raise as we consider the ways our experience of Victorian women’s writing is mediated, remediated, and cross-marketed in digital formats. My case studies for this investigation are Eliza Meteyard and Rose Ellen Hendriks. Writers like Meteyard and Hendriks were able to take advantage of changing media technologies—e.g., the expansion of cheap newspapers and transnational press networks—to promote the recirculation of their work in ways that made it seem continually fresh and relevant. For some, subsequent changes in media practices led to de-canonization, yet an exploration of their afterlife in new media of our own time demonstrates the temporary, contingent nature of any writer’s or textual object’s disappearance from the historical record or from public view. The recirculation and serendipitous recovery of Victorian women writers’ texts, portraits, book covers, and ephemera in social media de-contextualize and repurpose these materials for a variety of social, commercial, and artistic ends. An investigation of the afterlife of early and mid-Victorian women’s writing reminds us of the mobile, shifting relationship between popular writing and new media, both past and present.

This chapter argues that Victorian feminist and women’s magazines contravened the gender dynamics of mainstream settler emigration discourses by producing positive visions of female emigrant mobility and by appropriating settler domesticity to empowering effects. The first half of the chapter focuses upon settler emigration literature in Eliza Cook’s Journal, arguing that it engaged with a range of domestic, artisanal, sentimental, and radical affiliations in order to open up powerfully feminized new vistas in the colonial imagination. It presents a close analysis of Eliza Meteyard’s ‘Lucy Dean: The Noble Needlewomen’ in this context. The second half focuses upon the writings of emigration promoter and journalist Maria Rye for the English Woman’s Journal and Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine. It argues that Rye’s work elucidates a broader moment of overlap in the histories of settler emigration and liberal feminism, when emigration became implicated in attempts to expand narrow conceptions of feminine work and mobility.

In this essay, Joanne Shattock discusses Margaret Oliphant’s mid-century work at Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine alongside the work of two lesser-known journalists: Mary Howitt (1799–1888) and Eliza Meteyard (1816–79). All three contributed copy to ‘mainstream publications on a range of subjects far beyond those often assumed to be the preserve of women journalists in the period,’ with each woman also making her own distinctive contribution to Victorian journalism: Howitt as an editor, Meteyard as a pioneering figure in the nascent field of investigative journalism, and Oliphant as one of the most prolific reviewers of the period (p. 303). Shattock’s analysis of their careers demonstrates the productive and individuated ways in which female journalists carved out a space for their work and their voices in the masculine sphere of journalism.