Covering a wide range of magazine work by women, including editing, illustration, poetry, needlework instruction and typesetting, this book provides fresh insights into the participation of women in the nineteenth-century magazine industry. The common thread running through the chapters is the question of how women negotiated the relationship between their public and private selves. Quite often, that relationship turns out to be one of tension and contrast. In order to generate an income, women constructed fictional identities and voiced norms and ideals to which they themselves did not always adhere. Restoring a voice to overlooked authors and adopting new perspectives towards canonical figures, this book traces the different ways in which these women reinvented themselves in the press and addresses the various circumstances that led them to do so.