Feminist Networks Connecting Dublin and London: Sarah Atkinson, Bessie Rayner Parkes, and the Power of the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press

Abstract:Sarah Atkinson's significant friendship with Bessie Rayner Parkes becomes visible only by tracing it through letters, memoirs, and articles published in a range of nineteenth-century periodicals. These archival excavations reveal a complex and empowering transnational network forged across apparently conservative, often male-dominated, and mainly Catholic publications as well as publications edited and managed by women writers and philanthropists. Demonstrating the nineteenth-century periodical to be both an enabling space for professional women writers and an important historical archive, this article tracks intersections in Atkinson's and Parkes's social, philanthropic, literary, and ultimately feminist activism.