EDMUND YATES AND WOMEN WRITERS OF THE WORLD

This essay investigates the professional careers of a group of women writers associated with Edmund Yates in his role as editor and owner of various Victorian periodicals, including Temple Bar, Time, and his most important achievement, the weekly society paper established in 1874 titled The World. He valued women who could articulate the interests of middle- to upper-class readers in concise, unsentimental prose or verse and maintained close control over production. These women authors found it necessary to write quickly, and sometimes on demand, in a variety of genres, such as poetry, short fiction, serial novels, travel narratives, columns, and feature essays, as well as paragraphs for Yates's witty and often controversial column in The World, "What the World Says". This article expands our knowledge of the woman writer's intense literary activity writing for Yates in the traditionally masculine profession of Victorian journalism.