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This closing chapter demonstrates the importance of women's writing, women readers, female portraiture, and the relationship of text and illustration in the serialized novels in shaping Conrad's later fiction. It draws attention to the re-emergence of Marguerite Poradowska's influence, and how, in the late work in particular, Conrad exploited the techniques of traditional forms in order to question the structures of romance which continued to confine and classify women.

This chapter focuses on the emergence of the figure of the ideal female reader in early and late ancient Christian ascetic literature, which quite clearly glorifies women who have taken up the ascetic life and, at least metaphorically, have chosen to read rather than to eat. After surveying some evidence from texts as disparate as the Shepherd of Hermas, a Greek papyrus fragment, and Sidonius Apollinarious, the chapter turns especially to the lives of holy women and to patristic writers such as Jerome and Gregory of Nyssa and to Gerontius’s Life of Melania the Younger.

This chapter examines the earliest French women’s journals during the Ancien Régime, before focussing specifically on Le Journal des dames. It introduces: the women writers and readers who produced and consumed the earliest women’s journals in France and the challenges facing women journalists; the main objectives sustaining their writing projects; and the rhetoric, forms and content employed by women’s journals in order to better achieve these. French women may have been less visible in public fora or the political arena in the latter half of the eighteenth century, yet their involvement with it in the form of wives and mothers – as citoyennes - was significant. The women’s press acted as a vital means of bringing the outside in through cultural and societal news, and of helping to bring the inside out by confirming French women’s moral and pedagogical contribution to constructing an evolving sense of French nationhood. These early journals also promoted the importance of the role played by female-authored literature and writing in valorising French’s women’s public value and contribution to the patrimoine and fought for its recognition by the Academies.

This chapter introduces the novel Chance as the current central focus of this book. Serialised in the New York Herald Sunday Magazine in 1912, and aimed at the women readers of the paper, the novel represented a turning point in Conrad's career, his first economically successful venture in reaching a wider audience and addressing the themes of gender and romance that would occupy later fiction. Conrad's creation of a central female protagonist has often been heralded as the moment when his artistic powers began to diminish. The novel has also received negative responses from those critics who see it as an unsuccessful attempt to emulate Henry James. This chapter demonstrates that Chance was a new direction in Conrad's fiction, one in which he engages in a theoretical debate with ‘The Master’ on the relationship of vision and epistemology in the presentation of women in romance.

This chapter takes issue with assumptions about gender and fiction in this period: novels were neither primarily written by women nor primarily, in the provinces, consumed by them — the word ‘consumed’ throughout this study is meant in a purely economic sense, not in the pejorative sense of mindless ‘consuming’ or devouring of fiction. The chapter begins by reviewing the buying and borrowing of two men with a strong interest in print, John Latimer of Warwick and Henry Bagshaw Harrison of Daventry. Figures for adult buying and borrowing of fiction taken from the Clay and Stevens records are summarized and tabulated, and this evidence of adult men's and women's consumption is placed in the context of their other purchases. Men are so numerous, however, that the chapter focuses upon a subgroup — men who subscribed to the Monthly and Critical Reviews — because their subscriptions allow the study of the possible effect of reviewing on purchases of new fiction and other works. The far fewer women customers for fiction is considered in detail, offering case studies of purchases and borrowings of women who were members of the gentry and the professional, trading, and servant classes. The chapter speculates first on why the novel was in 18th-century England so closely identified with women even though no empirical evidence seems to support this identification; and second on what men might gain by being culturally invisible as readers of fictions.

This chapter focuses on the various literate practices of women readers and how each of those practices helped empower them through the public speaking skills and analytical strategies promoted by clubs and through the confidence gained from mastering (and sometimes performing and adapting) Shakespeare, by and large in the period before women could even vote. Women engaged in elaborate and intellectually demanding work on Shakespeare: they read plays closely; researched unfamiliar words or phrases; contextualized the plays in history, contemporary literature, and art; memorized passages; wrote essays; read aloud and sometimes performed plays; often kept up with the latest Shakespeare criticism; and frequently expressed their enthusiasm for Shakespeare publicly, by sponsoring libraries, educational scholarships, public gardens, and parks: all lasting memorials to these grassroots readers and to their passion for Shakespeare.

This introductory chapter explores the transformative possibilities of reading Shakespeare for women, both collectively and individually, by combining work on women's clubs with recent work on the role of reading for individual and collective agency. It focuses on the variety of ways Shakespeare was read by American club women in order to suggest some of the repercussions of their literate practices for individual women, for groups, and for their communities in the decades around the fin de siècle. Women readers in large cities and small towns across America helped spread the idea that Shakespeare was for everyone, not just cultural elites in metropolitan areas. The efforts of club women to improve their communities also established Shakespeare as a local foundation of American culture and as a marker for learning, self-improvement, civilization, and entertainment for a broad array of populations.

This chapter shows how numerous black club women across the country claimed Shakespeare for their own educational and social agendas. These women saw knowledge of Shakespeare as a way to attain intellectual development and social progress and frequently included Shakespeare as part of their educational programs, but they usually read Shakespeare in ways very different from those employed by the white women's clubs already discussed. First, few black clubs read only Shakespeare. Rather, the most common practice was to read Shakespeare as part of a wider curriculum that included other classic authors, African American writers, women authors, and usually a substantial component of civic work, more so than for most white women's clubs. In this context, reading Shakespeare was not the only goal for most black women readers, but it was a significant step in their commitment to education as a component of racial progress.

WOMAN’S OUTLOOK was first published in 1919 as a magazine for the women of the co-operative movement. Despite extensive scholarship on the Women’s Co-operative Guild (WCG), both within the organisation and in relation to the British women’s movement, this publication has received only limited attention. This chapter examines Woman’s Outlook as part of the interwar co-operative women’s movement, arguing that it functioned at a variety of levels to bring women together into a co-operative community. Woman’s Outlook represented a group of women who were not captured in other publications, and who shared particular concerns as working class women committed to co-operative ideas and trading. While it promoted the co-operative movement more widely, within the movement it served as a means of sharing information with and from its readers on effective home management (thereby responding to women’s immediate lives and needs) and aimed to extend women’s interests beyond the home. In these ways, it proved both educational and aspirational, expanding women’s horizons at a time when opportunities for women were changing, by showing what other women had and could achieve. The most sustained analysis of Woman’s Outlook to date is Rachel Ritchie’s study of Woman’s Outlook and Home and Country, the magazine produced by the Women’s Institute (WI). While Ritchie focuses on the 1950s, the goal here is to revisit Woman’s Outlook and its place in informing and educating a community of co-operative women from its inception in the interwar years.

Drawing upon her command of Charlotte Lennox’s life and career, Susan Carlile presents the Lady’s Museum (1760–1) as an idealised educational attempt to offers its readers, particularly the women among them, a wider view of the world, its inhabitants, and its history. Focusing on the shorter ‘Trifler’ essays that headlined the long, miscellaneous numbers of the Lady’s Museum, Carlile shows how the magazine was seriously interested in encouraging intellectual ambition in women. Women authors and women readers are given particular attention and care throughout the periodical, which subversively, or perhaps ahead of its time, hopes that its educational content will spur readers on to intellectual and authorial action.

This chapter situates Clemence Dane’s literary criticism for Good Housekeeping within the context of interwar women’s literary journalism and discusses her program for the cultural, social, and civic empowerment of women readers. It argues that, as she modelled a holistic reading pleasure that encompassed sensuous and intellectual experience alike, and as she emphasised readers’ responsibility to bring about good books, Dane’s monthly essays both countered cultural images of indiscriminately consuming women readers and provided the structure for ongoing instruction in literary tradition. The chapter demonstrates that Dane’s middlebrow literary criticism engaged in dialogue with and challenged modernist and academic literary criticism, especially through its conception of a literary heritage that both enhanced enjoyment of literature and empowered ordinary readers to evaluate it. Finally, the chapter argues that Dane’s model of pleasurable reading as a gateway to cultural, social, and political benefits helped to shape a progressive modernity for women.

This chapter analyses the depiction of women in nineteenth-century Haskalah literature, demonstrating just how gender-specific this was. Haskalah literature was written by men for a male audience, and the maskilim were taken by surprise when women readers and writers began to appear in the 1860s. The chapter then outlines two extremes of the literary image of women. On the one hand is the idealized depiction of the goddess or angel. On the other hand is the critical depiction of the insensitive, crass, and domineering woman. Both of these images derive from literary conventions. The chapter examines the interplay of these conventions with the social experience and social agenda of the maskilim.

This essay surveys and analyzes the expansion of the nineteenth-century women’s press and discusses the evolving acceptance and response to women’s interests in the wider British press. Industrialization, cheaper printing processes, the growth of literacy, and new groups of middle-class women with pocket money, leisure time, and desire for social mobility created an increasingly diverse marketplace for women’s reading and writing during the nineteenth century. A few women’s periodicals emerged in Britain in the decades following the first women’s magazine in 1693, but not until the 1830s did women readers become a substantial commercial consideration for publishers. The basic offerings for women’s periodicals included fashion news, sentimental literature, needlework, court activities, and light feature essays and clippings about history, geography, nature, and religion. Throughout the century, articles debating the political, social, and economic problems of womanhood also appeared in the women’s press, and the discussion often filtered into more general newspapers and journals. Eventually, changing notions of what women should be, do, and think produced new opportunities. Publishers of newspapers and periodicals targeted toward men began to realize the financial potential in accommodating interests of new women readers.