Not that her male customers were averse to purchasing the weekly magazines that published her books in serial chapters. Mr. Edding’s Facts and Fantasy was a typical example of the cheap serial fiction that boomed after the abolition of the Newspaper Stamp Tax in 1855. But what increased the volume of her readership so remarkably was the additional female audience.

Perhaps it shouldn’t have been so surprising. It was, after all, an era of sweeping social changes, many of them specifically directed toward women’s rights. There was increasing ferment for women’s suffrage, and reforms in marriage, divorce, and inheritance laws had over the past fifty years broadened the scope of female self-determination. Women could now sue for divorce, gain custody of their children, retain control over their own property-not easily, but it could be done. Women were, on the whole, leading much more complex and productive lives.

Female artists were coming to prominence as well in exhibitions previously closed to them. Sexual issues, unrelated to chauvinist bias, were being researched for the first time, and the studies were being published in the burgeoning field of psychology both in England and on the Continent. Radicals, socialists, and feminists had come together in the Men and Women’s Club to debate, dispute, converse, and expound upon the sexual issues of the day even while the vast public barely noticed. The government’s policies directed at mass education had given rise to unprecedented numbers of readers hungry for knowledge and entertainment. And with the advent of the typewriter, more and more women were entering the workforce, domestic service no longer the sole occupation open to females of lesser rank. Also, universities had begun enrolling women, albeit in limited numbers, and those pioneering females were unprecedentedly taking firsts at Oxford and Cambridge.