The Feminist New Age

Beatrice Hastings, Katherine Mansfield and Modernist-Era Periodical Culture

Carey Snyder
Edited by Lise Shapiro Sanders
Contributions by Barbara Green, Lee Garver

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Contextualises modernist-era feminist writings of Beatrice Hastings and Katherine Mansfield in The New Age magazine

Establishes that The New Age was an important forum for feminist fiction and debate, overturning the consensus view of the magazine as “anti-feminist” or “anti-suffragist” and placing feminism alongside an emerging modernism in readings of this anchor magazine
Contributes to the field of feminist modernist studies an exploration of the neglected writings of Beatrice Hastings, Katherine Mansfield, and other modern women writers, illuminating prewar debates concerning sexual life and reproduction
Offers new methods to feminist periodical studies by examining the gendered implications of understudied periodical genres and forms, including pseudonymous authorship, correspondence, polemical fiction, and satire

Perhaps the best-known among modernist-era magazines, the British socialist weekly The New Age (edited by A. R. Orage from 1907 to 1922) is often mischaracterised as 'anti-feminist' or 'anti-suffragist'. Yet in its early years, this book argues, The New Age served as a crucial forum for feminist fiction and debate – largely thanks to the contributions of Beatrice Hastings and Katherine Mansfield. Too often, Hastings is relegated to a biographical footnote, and Mansfield’s early fiction, if read at all, is divorced from its periodical context. As the first book-length examination of the feminist content of The New Age and of these two writers, this study establishes Hastings’ importance to early twentieth-century women’s history and literary culture, while enriching our understanding of the feminist debates that shaped Mansfield’s writings. Recovering periodical debates concerning marriage, motherhood, citizenship and sexuality, this book expands our sense of pre-war modern feminism.

Contents

List of Figures
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Editor’s Note

Introduction
Part One: Debating Feminism in The New Age, by Carey Snyder
Part Two: The New Age and Modern Periodical Studies, by Lee Garver
Part Three: Feminism and Modern Periodical Studies, by Barbara Green
1. Pseudonyms, Feminism, and Gendered Self-Fashioning
2. Courting Controversy with Correspondence: Hastings’s Engagement with the Feminist Press
3. Fiction as Polemic: Blasting the Outrage of Sexual Ignorance and Compulsory Maternity
4. Mansfield and the New Age School of Satire
5. White Slave Narratives and Women in the Public Sphere
Afterword

Appendix
Bibliography

Reviews

This study of Beatrice Hastings’s and Katherine Mansfield’s writings in The New Age and in feminist magazines like The Freewoman is state-of-the-art and truly brilliant. Authored by Carey Snyder, with contributions by Lee Garver and Barbara Green and edited by Lise Shapiro Sanders, 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.
– Ann Ardis, George Mason University

About the Author

Carey Snyder (1968–2025) was Professor of English at Ohio University from 2001
to 2025. She was co-editor, with Faith Binckes, of Women, Periodicals, and Print Culture
in Britain, 1890s–1920s: The Modernist Period (2019); editor 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 studies and periodical studies.

Lise Shapiro Sanders is Professor of English Literature and Cultural Studies at Hampshire College. She is the author of books and articles on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British literature, print media, silent cinema, and women's history, including Consuming Fantasies: Labor, Leisure, and the London Shopgirl, 1880–1920 and Reading for Pleasure: Working Women and the Popular Romance in Early Twentieth-Century Britain. She is a member of the Feminist Theory editorial collective.

Barbara Green is Professor of English and Concurrent Faculty in 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.