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This chapter examines a variety of ways in which correspondence columns of the childcare magazine Nursery World and two in-house nursery nursing college magazines were used by readers during the interwar years. The columns offered editors useful ways to communicate with readers and discover what aspects of the magazine they preferred. Publishing letters where readers shared views and answered one another’s problems kept debates over maternal authority, nannies’ class and education, and social isolation alive and relevant to readers. However, letters to the college magazines tended to be more uncontroversial, most commonly featuring letters from abroad often commissioned by the editor. Overall, ways in which editors responded to complaints and praise mediated between warring factions and encouraged their ‘imagined community’ of readers to feel less isolated are clear both in the selection of letters published and the responses given to them.

This chapter considers domestic management in the family magazine, particularly representations of women’s roles in the treatment of health. Echoing the class-based tensions present in the rest of the essays in this section, Furlong demonstrates how working- and lower-middle-class readers were still encouraged to buy into middle-class ideals of womanhood. She also considers how these magazines worked to accommodate both the ideal and the reality of looking after the mental and physical health of the family. In functioning as dispensaries of health advice, correspondence columns emphasised the importance of practical nursing skills as part of women’s lives, which was not necessarily the case in all depictions of the feminine domestic ideal. Indeed, these magazines also contained more conventional representations of sickroom scenes and female care-givers, for example in the form of sentimentalised depictions in escapist romantic fiction. Yet, as Furlong notes, these two models were not necessarily mutually exclusive.

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 This unpublished material resituates her public reviews and – in the context of a perceived crisis in book reviewing – reveals a mode of feminism that Barbara Green has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 considers the use of satire in newspaper poetry columns and correspondence columns, and editorial interventions in relation to poetic critique. It shows how newspapers became a site for the exploration of poetic norms and standards, and how the rise of a culture of deliberately ‘bad’ comic poetry both reinforced and questioned these standards. The first subsection examines correspondence columns and their commentary on poetic standards. The second shows how poets responded to these columns by producing fake bad poems, and how these became a popular genre across the press. It focuses particularly on the work of Alexander Burgess under the pseudonym ‘Poute’. The final section of this chapter demonstrates that William McGonagall was part of this culture of bad verse and drew on it in his own self-representations.

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 explores the significant role of the press in the cultivation of class-based networks of female readers. The essay takes for its focus the Scottish poet Ellen Johnston’s (c.1830–74) ‘conversations in verse,’ conducted with her working-class correspondents within the letters page of a Glasgow newspaper, the Penny Post (153). Writing under the pseudonym ‘The Factory Girl,’ Johnston was in fact a woman writing in her late twenties and thirties, which once again indicates the malleability of ‘the girl’ as a site of identification for female authors and readers alike. The poetic exchanges between ‘The Factory Girl’ and her working-class female correspondents demonstrate the radical potential of the letters page. As a space co-opted by female readers and writers for the development of ‘their own system of writing and mentoring,’ the letters page is here shown to have destabilised the ‘material and social limitations of class by enabling conversations between marginalised authors that would not have otherwise occurred’ (158-59). These intimate poetic exchanges in the public space of the newspaper are read as a political intervention through which women sought to ‘achieve upward social and cultural–if not economic–mobility’ (154).

In this essay, Florence S. Boos examines the career of Mary Smith, a writer who used the correspondence columns of the Carlisle Journal and other periodicals to write on religious pluralism, women’s enfranchisement, Liberal party politics, Irish Home Rule, and British imperialism. The extent of her contributions will probably never be fully known since her letters were signed with initials or with pseudonyms such as ‘Burns Redivivus’ or ‘Sigma.’ Anonymity was crucial for a lower-middle-class woman writer who could not vote but yearned to influence public debate. ‘If men knew who the writer was,’ she acknowledged, ‘they would say, “What does a woman know about politics?”’ (p. 510). When adopting various signatures, she shifted her tone and persona accordingly, reserving her most strident voice for the letters she published on Liberal party politics, styling herself as ‘Sigma’ or ‘Z.’ ‘Periodical journalism,’ Boos concludes, ‘provided Smith with the opportunity to explore a range of personae, topics, and rhetorical approaches over several decades, and to influence public opinion in favour of her chosen causes while retaining her cherished mental independence and broadly critical stance’ (p. 513).