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This chapter discusses Time and Tide’s early feminist identity through an exploration of its close interdependence, and competition, within the feminist and women’s press. The magazine drew extensively on the networks associated with suffrage media and professional women’s magazines to build its early reader and contributor base, but from the beginning was also working to establish itself as a paper with a much broader reach. Through an analysis of Time and Tide’s editorial and self-marketing strategies, its relationship with male readers, and the staging in and outside its columns of a public debate about the ‘modern woman’, the chapter grapples with the paradoxical idea that the ‘new’ thing Time and Tide was doing was to disavow identification with the ‘feminist’ or ‘women’s periodical’ category at the same time as it remained both of these things.

This chapter examines a key period in the growth and development of Time and Tide highlighted by its size and price increase in 1928. Exploring Time and Tide’s increased use of illustration, the relationships it developed with a new set of advertisers, and a strategic alliance it forged with the Nation and Athenaeum, the chapter shows how this modern magazine capitalised on contemporary debates about the future of the press and successfully rebranded itself as a leading general-audience weekly review competitive with the New Statesman. The chapter further argues that Time and Tide’s increased emphasis on books following its ‘literary turn’ in 1928 was a key strategy in moving the magazine out of the ‘women’s paper’ category and into the ranks of the intellectual weeklies. At the same, its participation in the cultures of literary celebrity continued to serve a feminist agenda in its promotion of women writers (modernist and middlebrow) as well as the work of female critics such as the periodical’s own director and contributor Rebecca West.

This chapter examines another key element in Time and Tide’s rebranding as a more general-audience weekly review: the increase of male writers within its contributor base. Early accounts of the periodical suggest that this shift in the early 1930s represents a weakening of Time and Tide’s feminism. However, this chapter argues that the signatures of male contributors including George Bernard Shaw, St John Ervine and Wyndham Lewis were strategically deployed to advertise the paper beyond its core readership; it also considers the uses of anonymity for women who continued to occupy key editorial and staff positions. Discussing the contributions of Time and Tide’s youngest director, Winifred Holtby, as well as parodies by E. Delafield and short stories by Naomi Mitchison, the chapter explores the strategies by which Time and Tide sustained its commitment to female culture and through cross-gender collaboration created a ‘common platform’ for both thinking women and men.

This chapter picks up and extends arguments advanced earlier in the book regarding the status of women’s writing and criticism during the years of modernism’s cultural ascendancy and academic institutionalisation. In the contexts of (1) a newly configured ‘University English’ which took an authoritative new role in the cultural field against an earlier belle-lettres tradition, and (2) the unprecedented prestige of middlebrow fiction in the 1930s, the chapter explores how Time and Tide navigated increasing tensions between ‘highbrow’ and ‘middlebrow’ spheres and succeeded in straddling both. First the chapter discusses the introduction in 1927 of a new ‘Miscellany’ section of the paper – home to E. M. Delafield’s popular serial ‘The Diary of a Provincial Lady’ – and argues that these columns created and legitimised a place for the ‘feminine middlebrow’ and amateur writer as the periodical increased its orientation towards the highbrow sphere. Second, with reference to the appointment of Time and Tide’s first two literary editors, the chapter discusses how the periodical negotiated a widening gap in this period between intellectual and general readers, and between amateur and professional modes of criticism.

This chapter presents two case studies which explore how in the years leading up to the Second World War Time and Tide’s seemingly non-feminist veneer is disrupted. First, the chapter discusses Time and Tide’s book reviews section and argues that the surface appearance of a less feminist engagement with literature and the arts is called into question by the archive of Theodora Bosanquet’s automatic writing. This unpublished material resituates her public reviews and – in the context of a perceived crisis in book reviewing – reveals a mode of feminism that Barbara Green has theorised as ‘a form of attention’ (2017) and evidences Bosanquet’s ambivalence about the male professionalisation of literary criticism. Second, the chapter shows how Time and Tide’s seemingly non-feminist veneer is disrupted much more overtly when all the leading feminists of the period emerge publicly in the paper at the outbreak of the Second World War. Through an analysis of Time and Tide’s correspondence columns the chapter explores the contribution this magazine made to public debates about war and peace, and its sustained commitment to the ordinary woman reader.

This chapter examines one of Time and Tide’s long-running features – ‘The Weekly Crowd’ contributed pseudonymously by the poet and children’s writer Eleanor Farjeon – and explores the magazine’s relationship to the labour movement and networks associated with the socialist press. Inflected by Farjeon’s socialism and pacifism the topical commentary in ‘The Weekly Crowd’ frequently subverted Time and Tide’s editorial position on such issues as Ireland, British foreign policy and the General Strike, and offered a radically different perspective on debates about work and leisure in the periodical. At the same time, close analysis of this feature shows that Farjeon’s radical voice became an integral part of the paper, and that the subversive energies of her verses became a resource for strengthening the collective identities offered by Time and Tide across socialist as well as feminist audiences.

This chapter gives an account of Time and Tide’s origins, founders and goals, paying particular attention to the energy and vision of its owner and editor from 1926 Lady Margaret Rhondda. Providing an overview of the chapters that follow it also introduces the book’s central argument that – contrary to early assessments of the periodical which suggest that in the 1930s its feminism ‘faded away’ (Doughan & Sanchez 1987) – feminism remained a central motivating and shaping force on Time and Tide’s editorial policy and content throughout the interwar years.

This chapter examines Time and Tide’s early music, theatre, film and book reviews – a treasure-trove for exploring trends in interwar literature and the arts as well as debates about the nature and function of criticism itself. Focusing on the contributions of regular columnists including Christopher St John (née Christabel Marshall) and Sylvia Lynd the chapter discusses Time and Tide’s mediation of culture ranging from the modernist and ‘avant-garde’ to the ‘middlebrow’ and popular and posits that its position is identifiably feminist both in terms of its promotion of women in the cultural sphere and in its responses to developments in criticism in the interwar years. Engaging with such topics as the well-known ‘romanticism versus classicism’ debate and modernism’s ‘problem with pleasure’ (Frost 2013), the chapter demonstrates Time and Tide’s commitment both to educating the woman reader in a higher culture and defending traditional reading pleasures.

This chapter begins by identifying marked changes in the appearance and content of Time and Tide from the mid-1930s, including a decrease in female signatures, more masculine-coded advertisements, and a distancing from cultures associated with the ‘feminine middlebrow’. In early accounts of the periodical such changes have been interpreted as representing a dilution of Time and Tide’s feminism and a move away from its female readership. However, here and in the following chapter it is argued that while Time and Tide gradually distanced itself from the feminist label it did not abandon its feminist commitment. This chapter considers the significance of the new partnership formed between Time and Tide’s political editor, Lady Rhondda, and the religious and highbrow intellectual Theodora Bosanquet, whose appointment as literary editor in 1935 brought both ends of the paper under female control. Exploring a conversation about art, money and religion between these two women in and outside the pages of the magazine and noting a new emphasis on class in the paper’s columns, the chapter argues that Rhondda’s materialist feminist and professional interests and the more mystical and spiritual interests of its new literary editor are not as oppositional as they seem.

This chapter examines the short fiction content of the feminist weekly Time and Tide alongside readers’ letters printed in the periodical’s correspondence columns. A basic unit of magazine production the short story is also ‘definitional to modernism’ (Armstrong 2005: 52), and during the interwar period its status as commodity or art became the subject of increasing scrutiny and debate. Drawing on examples from amateur writers and well-known figures such as E. M. Delafield, the chapter explores how Time and Tide negotiated readers’ expectations for short fiction amongst its core target audience of women readers. Building on Fionnuala Dillane’s application of affect theory to periodical studies (2016), the chapter uses her concept of ‘discursive disruption’ to consider moments of conflict between Time and Tide and its readers over the short stories it published as moments of opportunity for the periodical to expand its scope, readership and brow, and renegotiate its position in the literary marketplace.

This chapter considers the ways in which the feminist periodical, Time and Tide, founded by Lady Margaret Rhondda along with the Six Point Group, used the adaptable journalistic device of the essay series to engage its readers in current and pressing debates about women. In the uncertainties and upheavals of postwar Britain, roles for women were unclear and undetermined, and the capacious form of the essay series, combined with skilful editorship, facilitated a range of experts and varied voices to discuss sometimes contentious issues of women's leisure, education, motherhood and working lives. Time and Tide made full use of the journal's periodicity to ensure that it became a forum for debate about women's domestic and professional occupations, and determinedly engaged its readers by printing extensive reader and expert correspondence and then providing editorial responses to those letters and interventions. There was even a staged public meeting, broadcast on BBC radio.

This chapter provides a brief account of Time and Tide during and after the Second World War, including the succession of mergers and transitions it passed through after the death of its editor, Lady Margaret Rhondda, in 1958. Still appearing weekly on news-stands in Britain during the height of the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s, the publication bearing Time and Tide’s name was nothing like its former incarnations discussed in this book. The chapter concludes that the two decades between the two world wars are indisputably the richest years of this periodical in terms of its energetic commitment to women’s participation in public life, and the prominence it gave to women writers and critics.

This chapter discusses Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas in relation to feminist periodicals of her time. Drawing on Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the public sphere, it considers The Freewoman (edited by Dora Marsden) and Time and Tide (edited by Lady Margaret Rhondda) alongside Woolf’s imagined Outsiders’ Society. The chapter finds numerous shared concerns and strategies between these feminist periodicals and Woolf’s writings in and about Three Guineas, including questions of distribution, cost, allegiance to official movements, and relationship to readers. Critics have often interpreted Three Guineas as advocating a withdrawal from the public sphere; however, this chapter argues that implicit in Woolf’s discussion of women and the potential for political action is a model of feminist periodical publication, oriented towards rather than turning away from a Habermasian public sphere.