Working Girls

Working Girls offers a cultural and literary history of telegraphists, typists, shop-girls, and barmaids. It argues that these occupations helped to shape a distinctively new identity for emancipated young women, and explores how authors used this to navigate a precarious literary landscape.

Katherine Mullin lectures in Victorian and Modern Literature at the University of Leeds. She is the author of James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity (Cambridge University Press, 2003), and articles on Modernism, late-Victorian fiction, and censorship. She is currently working on an edition of George Gissing's New Grub Street for Oxford World's Classics.

Introducing the Working Girl
Part I: Typists and Telegraphists
1: 'Work they could do so adroitly': competent or compromised?
2: Authorial integrity and the threat of mechanical writing
Part II: Shop-girls
3: 'The ubiquitous shop-girl': the thrills and perils of selling
4: The literary marketplace and rebellions against commerce
Part III: Barmaids
5: 'Essentially a modern institution': framing the New Barmaid
6: Censorship and the challenge to the Young Person
Afterword
Works Cited