A Familiar Transition: Dinah Mulock Craik’s Early Career in Periodicals, 1841–5

This chapter considers the earliest publications of the novelist and poet Dinah Maria Mulock (1826-1887), latterly Craik, after her marriage to George Lillie Craik in 1865, situating several of them in the hitherto unrecognised context of nineteenth-century popular music. It contributes an intervention in the study of how writers made their entry into the professional sphere within the wider historical narrative of nineteenth-century literary studies, as well as providing new insights into the musical and linguistic influences of Mulock's early inroads into the periodical market. Exploring the ways in which Mulock launched her career in letters, I demonstrate that she did so by skilfully combining innovation with familiarity at a time when opportunities for women writers were still expanding but were necessarily circumscribed by a number of factors including education, access to literary networks and their individual circumstances that were often far more volatile and unpredictable than those of their male counterparts.