"Not for girls alone, but for anyone who can relish really good literature": L. T. Meade, Atalanta , and the Family Literary Magazine

Abstract

Although Atalanta (1887-98) published contributions by some of the most eminent late Victorian authors, the magazine has received limited consideration in modern critical studies. For the most part, references to Atalanta have focused on girls' magazines and an emerging girls' culture. This essay links the magazine and its editor to the family literary magazine and to the wider social and cultural context of the fin de siècle, showing how Atalanta promoted progressive views of women and showcased women's contributions to literary culture.

1 The ‘wire-puller’: L. T. Meade, Atalanta and the Development of the Short Story

“…As Janis Dawson asserts, 'Atalanta continued to attract notable writers…though not in the numbers represented under Meade's editorship', and this first and only volume to be co-edited by Meade and Symington is notable for a lack of literary interest. 33 Of the short stories featured in it there are few that illicit further commentary: Mrs. [Margaret] Oliphant's 'Mary's Brother' is a slight but well told conventional romance; E. Nesbit and Oswald Barron's 'A Mercy by the Way, 1685' is a grim story of soldiers and poachers; Nesbit's solo effort, the fairy story 'A Rose by the Way', is a highly sentimental tale that by and large avoids the serious social commentary of her earlier work for the magazine; and A. Hammond's 'A Justice of the Peace' features a female character who is gradually brought under the control of a male. The fiction in this volume perceptibly dilutes the magazine's earlier feminist themes, even as Meade's and Falconer's prescient advice about the potential inherent in the short story and the means by which to use that form to best advantage emerge alongside it, and serve to treat Atalanta's readers as nascent businesswomen and potential literary innovators.…”