‘A fair field and no favour’: Hulda Friederichs, the Interview, and the New Woman

Abstract

‘I asked for nothing but “a fair field and no favour”’, Hulda Friederichs once explained of her working life as a full-time staff journalist at the Pall Mall Gazette.1 The Prussian-born Friederichs did seem to overcome the challenges of gender and national biases in her professional career: she was one of the first women journalists in Britain to be employed on the same terms and conditions as her male colleagues under W.T. Stead at the Pall Mall Gazette in the early 1880s, and from 1896, as editor of George Newnes’ Westminster Budget, she was left ‘entirely free’ to dictate the content and form of that illustrated family weekly.2 In what has been called a ‘landmark appointment’,3 Friederichs capitalized fully on the opportunity to set the agenda of the Budget for almost nine years. Little is known of Friederichs’ personal history, however: details of her Prussian origins and her education in Cologne are obscure and to this day she remains a marginal figure in accounts of fin-de-siècle literary history. If Friederichs’ name is recognized at all it is usually because of her association with leading newspaper men: namely Newnes, whose biography she wrote in 1911, and Stead, for whom she worked at the Pall Mall Gazette (henceforth, PMG) from around the time of his early association with the paper in 1882. By the late 1880s she was the paper’s ‘chief interviewer’.4 The PMG has secured its place in literary history for Stead’s championing of reforming new journalism; not just for the controversial content Stead sought out for its pages but also for its innovative use of new journalistic forms.