New Book on Victorian Girls’ Manuscript Magazines
Lois Burke announces the publication of her new monograph, Late-Victorian Girls and their Manuscript Magazines: Girlhood and Textual Transformation in Britain, 1860-1900 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2025)!
This open access book presents new archival evidence that explores the under-examined manuscript cultures of girls living in Britain in the final four decades of the nineteenth century. Manuscript magazines were handmade magazines which were created and circulated amongst a small peer or familial group, in which the contributors were also the readers and subscribers. The book argues that girl writers were particularly prolific in the writing of manuscript magazines during this period, which witnessed Golden Ages of children’s literature and journalism, as well as major developments in proto feminism.
This book presents three case study chapters exploring manuscript magazines which were created and exchanged amongst girl-led writing groups and within families, and references many other examples of manuscript magazine cultures from the late-Victorian period. It argues that strategies of transformative writing — namely appropriating literary texts — often characterized girls’ contributions to manuscript magazines, which situates the manuscript magazine within a longer history of feminine manuscript creation.
Known figures represented in the chapters include Charlotte Yonge and her juvenile writing groups, and the manuscript magazines of the Save the Children founders, Eglantyne Jebb and Dorothy Buxton. Congratulations and thanks for sharing your news, Lois!
About the Author
Lois Burke is Assistant Professor of Critical Heritage, Innovation & Curation at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. In 2025 she will take up a British Academy Visiting Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh and in 2026 she will be a Marie Curie Fellow at Stirling University. Her second book on manuscript magazine cultures, co-authored with Charlotte Lauder, is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press.
