Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing, 1900–2020

Women's creative labour in publishing has often been overlooked. This book draws on dynamic new work in feminist book history and publishing studies to offer the first comparative collection exploring women's diverse, deeply embedded work in modern publishing. Highlighting the value of networks, collaboration, and archives, the companion sets out new ways of reading women's contributions to the production and circulation of global print cultures. With an international, intergenerational set of contributors using diverse methodologies, essays explore women working in publishing transatlantically, on the continent, and beyond the Anglosphere. The book combines new work on high-profile women publishers and editors alongside analysis of women's work as translators, illustrators, booksellers, advertisers, patrons, and publisher's readers; complemented by new oral histories and interviews with leading women in publishing today. The first collection of its kind, the companion helps establish and shape a thriving new research field.

Nicola Wilson is Associate Professor of Book and Publishing Studies at the University of Reading and co-director of the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing. She is author of Home in British Working-Class Fiction (2015), co-author of Scholarly Adventures in the Digital Humanities: Making the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (2017), and editor of The Book World: Selling and Distributing British Literature, 1900–40 (2016). She is a co-founder of the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (www.modernistarchives.com) and is currently writing a mongraph on the Book Society, Britain’s first subscription book club. Claire Battershill is an Assistant Professor cross-appointed in the Faculty of Information and the Department of English at the University of Toronto. Her most recent book is Women and Letterpress 1920–2020: Gendered Impressions (CUP Elements in Book and Publishing Culture, 2022). She is co-founder of the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (www.modernistarchives.com). Sophie Heywood is Associate Professor in French at the University of Reading, and Co-Director of the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing. She is the author of Catholicism and children’s literature in France: the comtesse de Ségur (1799–1874) (2011), and is currently writing a monograph on children’s publishing in Cold War France. Marrisa Joseph is Associate Professor of Organisation Studies and Business History at the Henley Business School, University of Reading and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Marrisa was the recipient of the Journal of Management History Award for her paper Members Only: the Victorian Gentlemen’s Club as a Space for Doing Business 1843–1900 (2017). She is the author of Victorian Literary Businesses (2019). Daniela La Penna is Professor of Modern Italian Culture at the University of Reading. She has edited several collections of essays and special issues of journals on translation, most recently a special issue of The Italianist (2021) entitled Literary Exchanges between the Italian and Anglo-American Publishing Markets: Readers, Translators, Mediators (1945–1970) with Sara Sullam. She is the author of La promessa d’un semplice linguaggio: lingua e stile nella poesia di Amelia Rosselli (2013). Her work has appeared in Italian Studies, Translation Studies, The Italianist, Testo and other journals. Helen Southworth is Professor of English at the University of Oregon. Recent publications include ‘Virginia Woolf and Literary London’, in The Oxford Handbook to Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne E. Fernald (2021), and, with Nicola Wilson, ‘Early Women Workers at the Hogarth Press (c.1917–1925)’ in Women in Print, eds Archer-Parré, Moog and Hinks (2022). Her most recent books include Fresca, A Life in the Making (2017) and the co-authored Scholarly Adventures in Digital Humanities: Making the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (2017). She is co-founder of the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (www.modernistarchives.com). Alice Staveley is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at Stanford University and Director of the Honors program and the Minor in Digital Humanities. She is co-founder of the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (www.modernistarchives.com) and co-author of Scholarly Adventures in Digital Humanities: Making the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (2017), and has published numerous book and journal articles on Virginia Woolf, modernist marketing and feminist narratology. She is at work on a book about Woolf, publishing and new feminist formalisms, and has led a team of Stanford undergraduates in a collaborative DH project to transcribe and interpret Woolf’s book sales records. Her most recent article is ‘Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press’ in The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne E. Fernald (2021). Elizabeth Willson Gordon is an Associate Professor of English and Canada Research Chair in Modern Literature and Print Culture at King’s University, Edmonton, Canada. She is a founding member and co-director of the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (www.modernistarchives.com) and co-author of Scholarly Adventures in Digital Humanities: Making the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (2017). She is currently writing a monograph on the history and legacy of the Hogarth Press.