The Feminist New Age

Carey Snyder is Professor of English at Ohio University. She is the co-editor, with Faith Binckes, of the EUP collection, Women, Periodicals, and Print Culture in Britain, 1890s-1920s: The Modernist Period (2019), editor of the Broadview Press edition of H. G. Wells’s Ann Veronica (2015), and author of British Fiction and Cross-Cultural Encounters: Ethnographic Modernism from Wells to Woolf (2008), as well as numerous articles and essays in the fields of feminist-modernist and periodical studies. Lise Shapiro Sanders is Professor of English Literature and Cultural Studies at Hampshire College. Her books include Consuming Fantasies: Labor, Leisure, and the London Shopgirl, 1880-1920; Bodies and Lives in Victorian England: Science, Sexuality, and the Affliction of Being Female, co-authored with Pamela K. Stone; Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social Change, and the Modern Metropolis, co-edited with Amy Bingaman and Rebecca Zorach; and a critical edition of Millicent Garrett Fawcett’s 1875 novel Janet Doncaster. She is a member of the Feminist Theory editorial collective. Barbara Green is Professor of English and Director of Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Feminist Periodicals and Daily Life: Women and Modernity in British Culture, Spectacular Confessions: Autobiography, Performative Activism, and the Sites of Suffrage, 1905-1938, and a co-editor of Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918-1939. She was the co-editor of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies from 2015 through 2022. Lee Garver is Associate Professor of English at Butler University. He is the author of introductions to Volumes 8 and 19 of the Modernist Journals Project edition of The New Age and has published articles on a variety of modernists who wrote for the magazine, including Katherine Mansfield, Ezra Pound, T.E. Hulme, Edith Nesbit, and Florence Farr.

• List of FiguresForewordAcknowledgmentsEditor’s NoteIntroductionPart One: Debating Feminism in The New Age, by Carey SnyderPart Two: The New Age and Modern Periodical Studies, by Lee GarverPart Three: Feminism and Modern Periodical Studies, by Barbara Green1. Pseudonyms, Feminism, and Gendered Self-Fashioning2. Courting Controversy with Correspondence: Hastings’s Engagement with the Feminist Press3. Fiction as Polemic: Blasting the Outrage of Sexual Ignorance and Compulsory Maternity4. Mansfield and the New Age School of Satire5. White Slave Narratives and Women in the Public SphereAfterwordAppendixBibliography

Even if the circumstances for this collaboration between Carey Snyder, Lee Garver, and Barbara Green are tragic, this study of Beatrice Hastings’ and Katherine Mansfield’s writings in The New Age and in feminist magazines like The Freewoman is state-of-the-art and truly brilliant. This is revisionary literary history at its best, not only because it is informed by attention to under-studied archival resources but also because it involves coming to terms with highly experimental practices of authorship in both the feminist and the socialist periodical press in Britain in the early twentieth century.