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In chapter 7, Dale Bauer charts the innovations in transitional modernism that turn-of-the-century popular novelist Laura Jean Libbey created in her novels devoted to women’s romance and independence. While little-known today, Libbey’s serialized novels were highly popular and often translated into film. Libbey’s fictions bridged the divide between late nineteenth-century feminism and modern fictions of the New Woman. These novels often end with immediate brain surgeries and near-instant recoveries, with marriages into higher social classes, with rivals for suitors defeated by these women’s pain and bitterness and their transcendence. Many of Libbey’s novels chart women’s social recovery from “brain fever” and brain traumatic injury through brain surgery. As they are almost-instantly transformed to “modern women,” they are often robbed of their resistance. Libbey’s fictions emphasize the uneven development of the New Woman across the century’s turn.

This chapter focuses on the history of story papers in the United States and their critical reception, with particular emphasis on their significance for working women and the latter’s place as characters within this literature. Citing Louisa May Alcott’s work of fiction Little Women, it considers the moral aspects of ‘bad books’ and the danger they posed to young women. It also examines the professional opportunities that story papers afforded women writers such as Alcott and Laura Jean Libbey, along with the importance of story papers for working-class female readers. The chapter concludes by discussing story papers within the contexts of social subjectivity and modern urban life.