Made to measure: Virginia Woolf in Good Housekeeping Magazine

Virginia Woolf welcomed not only the economic rewards of her 37-year career as book reviewer and critic but also the multiple opportunities journalism presented for traversing and challenging the cultural boundaries of the literary market. This article focuses on a series of six articles Woolf contributed to the British edition of Good Housekeeping in 1931. Inconsistencies in the social critique of these essays, posthumously collected as The London Scene, are often explained with the supposition that Woolf was forced to trivialize her writing in anticipation of her middlebrow Good Housekeeping audience. Careful examination of Good Housekeeping's origins, outlook and routine content in the 1920s and early 1930s reveals, however, that Woolf's feminist analysis of patriarchal London in this series was pertinently addressed to the predominantly female, middle-class readers of this popular women's magazine, whose interests and concerns were far more diverse than are often assumed.