Margaret Beetham, Kate Flint, and Barbara Onslow, among many others, have all documented particular aspects of the relationship between gender and the Victorian periodical press. What Hilary Fraser, Stephanie Green, and Judith Johnston contribute to this ongoing conversation is a comprehensive assessment of how the periodical writ large shaped prevailing gender attitudes and ideologies. Analyzing roughly one hundred publications ranging from the feminist Victoria Magazine (1863–80) to the imperialist Boy's Own Paper (1879–1967), the authors of Gender and the Victorian Periodical aim for synthesis. Here they study the ways in which gender was represented across different journals, reviews, and magazines from the 1830s to the fin de siècle.

Their conclusion? There is not a straightforward one. As the authors announce at the outset of their book, which draws heavily on insights from the fields of cultural studies, media studies, and women's studies, the Victorian periodical press did not yield single ideals of Victorian manhood and womanhood. What their broad investigation reveals instead is that periodical journalism offered competing models of masculinity and femininity. Yes, the periodicals were frequently prescriptive, but what they prescribed varied from writer to writer, article to article, editor to editor, and ultimately from reader to reader. In this sense, the periodicals’ representations of gender were as multifaceted and open-ended as the genre in which they circulated. “Gender,” the authors write, “like the periodical press itself, refuses determination” (25).

Sometimes, in fact, a single journalist experienced difficulty communicating a consistent vision. As the authors indicate in one of their strongest readings of the successful polemicist Eliza Lynn Linton, the “binaried gender model … continually and demonstrably deconstruct[ed] itself” even at the most personal level (9). Linton laid out a highly contradictory set of expectations for her readership. On the one hand, an adamant subscriber to the theory of separate spheres, she repeatedly adopted an “ambiguously gendered subject position” in her own periodical pieces. “I could not accept the doctrine that no such thing as natural limitation of sphere is included in the fact of sex,” Linton announces in The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland (1885), writing in that very moment from the subject position of a male (11).

In demonstrating the “multiplicity” of gender representations within and across periodicals, the authors make some substantial contributions to nineteenth-century literary and cultural studies. Not the least of these contributions is their recovery of some of the forgotten voices of the Victorian press (even though the authors emphatically state that theirs is not a “recuperative” project [14]). Here we are introduced both to familiar characters like George Eliot, Leslie Stephen, and Millicent Garrett Fawcett and to Eliza Meteyard, Geraldine Jewsbury, and Frederick A. Atkins, far from household names today but nonetheless vigorous participants in the nineteenth-century journalistic profession. The authors should also be commended for the scope of their inquiry—in 255 pages they manage to touch on subjects as diverse as “the gendered reader,” “editorship and gender,” “gender and cultural imperialism,” and “feminism and the press.” An appendix, which provides key publication information for the periodicals discussed, serves as a useful guide to what might otherwise have been an overwhelming number of names and titles.

Given the range of this book, it might be uncharitable to suggest that the authors should have added other periodicals. Fraser, Green, and Johnston themselves, after all, are the first to admit that theirs is not an “exhaustive” account (xi). Nevertheless, their decision to examine periodicals published primarily in the metropolitan centers of Edinburgh and London pushes important questions of regionalism to the sidelines. This seems particularly strange in a study devoted to highlighting diversity of opinion. Another concern—although perhaps one that suggests more about my orientation than that of the authors of the book under review—is that the issue of inheritance is almost entirely neglected. Yet as Roy Porter, Kathryn Shevelow, and others have shown, periodicals were already rich sites for cultural, political, and especially gender debate in the eighteenth century. Addison and Steele's Spectator, Eliza Haywood's Female Spectator, and Charlotte Lennox's Lady's Museum were filled with competing anecdotes and exchanges about men and women. Later in the century, outspoken writers like Mary Hays regularly contributed pro-Woman pieces to the more progressive periodicals. Mary Wollstonecraft, meanwhile, launched her career as a book reviewer for Joseph Johnson's Analytical Review. In light of these phenomena, what was “Victorian” about the Victorian periodical's relationship to gender?

The limitations of this study extend beyond framing, for the very emphasis on the instability of gender categories itself never amounts to more than an insistence on the “contested” nature of Victorian masculinity and femininity. This, however, is not a revelation, especially given that Mary Poovey came to this same conclusion in her pioneering 1988 Uneven Developments, when she noted that the “middle-class ideology we most often associate with the Victorian period was both contested and always under construction” (Chicago, 1988, 3). In their introduction, the authors readily acknowledge this debt and explain their own project as an attempt to make visible Poovey's claims through a systematic analysis of periodicals, the “medium that most readily articulates the unevennesses and reciprocities of evolving gender ideologies” (2). In this respect, the authors are less interested in breaking new theoretical ground than in providing the quantitative and qualitative data to support existing scholarship.

While empirical research has many rewards, and the authors have done an impressive amount of homework, this study's insistence on substantiating earlier antiessentialist arguments, rather than on using such arguments as the launching point for a new scholarly investigation, makes at times for a frustrating read. That an intensive examination of Victorian periodicals “discloses the instability of the concept of gender as a binary category” (7) does not seem quite enough of a hook to warrant a book-length undertaking. Since the publication of Uneven Developments, we have all come to appreciate the far more messy and complex state of nineteenth-century gender relations. The “separate spheres” narrative for the Victorian period will no longer do. Yet what “post-separate spheres” historical and literary studies looks like is still very much in the process of being worked out. What is certain, particularly in light of this wide-ranging but tired study, is that we are sorely in need of new kinds of interventions.