Jennie Baxter, Journalist was written by “Cottrel Hoe” and first appeared as a series in The Windsor Magazine beginning with “Number 1.–The Daily Bugle Misses ‘A Hit’” (The Windsor Magazine, Dec. 1897). “Cottrel Hoe” was the pseudonym of Robert Barr (1850-1912) was a noted humorist, author, and co-founder of the respected fiction magazine The Idler. Jennie Baxter, Journalist is not one of Barr's better-known works, and it is fair to call it a minor effort, but it is still entertaining. (Barr would have had to struggle to not be entertaining).

Jennie is a "handsome young woman," a beautiful, well-dressed blonde who is, when the novel begins, a journalist who writes articles on fashion and the social elite for the ladies' weeklies of London. She has higher ambitions than that, however, and desperately wants to be a salaried reporter for the Daily Bugle newspaper. The editor of the Bugle has no time or respect for female reporters and gives her the brush-off. She retaliates by breaking a story in another paper about a crooked city official. This sways the editor enough to hire her.

From there Jennie becomes involved in substantial matters. She solves a diamond robbery, and in the process makes a fool of noted detective Cadbury Taylor. Jennie involves herself in politics and averts a near war between England and Austria by having tea with a bunch of gossiping Viennese nobility and publicizing the information she learns. She meets the abrasive, elderly Austrian scientist and inventor, Professor Carl Siegfried, and learns about his new super-explosive disintegrator ray. (It was the cause of the near war between England and Austria, and the guilty Siegfried ends up destroying the ray himself). She befriends Princess von Steinheimer, an American heiress and wife of an Austrian prince, and then impersonates the Princess at a high society ball in order to get information on the ball for the Bugle. At the ball she meets a young man, Lord Donal Stirling of the Diplomatic Service, and they fall in love and eventually, after a few plot complications, marry.

Jennie Baxter, Journalist is slick, commercial prose. The novel is generally satisfying as light entertainment, although the many political subtexts of other New Woman novels are missing and several of the stories only barely qualify as mysteries. Still, simply as a female journalist triumphing in a male-dominated field, Jennie Baxter does qualify as a New Woman, and Jennie Baxter, Journalist is to be counted among the New Woman detective collections. The novel also is a fictional response to the rise of women entering London and the field of journalism in the 1890s, a dynamic to which some but not all male writers reacted badly.¹

The reader of 1899 (or the twenty-first century) could do far worse than spend a few hours reading Jennie Baxter.

Print: Robert Barr, Jennie Baxter, Journalist. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1899.

¹ Lorna Shelley, “Female Journalists and Journalism in fin-de-siecle Magazine Stories,” Nineteenth-Century Gender Stories 5, no. 2 (Summer, 2009), accessed Oct. 19, 2018, http://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue52/shelley.htm covers this well.