As a journalist, Oscar Wilde took a special interest in women’s issues:
[I]t is revealing to see just how many of Wilde’s journalistic writings are for and about women. This activity peaks when Wilde takes over the editorship of the Lady’s World, an illustrated monthly that advertised itself as a “high-class magazine for ladies”. Famously, the first thing Wilde did when he took charge of the journal was to change its title: Lady’s World became Woman’s World – a shift that signals a different target audience and different political ambitions. The revamped journal was to provide high-quality journalism aimed at modern middle-class female readers who did not think of themselves as “ladies”. These women were keen to read about culture, education and employment, and Wilde catered for their advanced tastes. Wilde’s editorship of Woman’s World from 1887 to 1889 was a crucial step not only in his career as a journalist but in his development as a writer in a broader sense. It was the only period in his life in which Wilde received a regular salary. More importantly, though, he was now in charge of commissioning essays and reviews, which he did by recruiting an impressive array of women contributors ranging from successful novelists to graduates of the new women’s colleges in Cambridge and Oxford.
In a review of the volumes of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde that cover the writer’s journalism, Stefano Evangelista observes that the genre proved a good training grounds for Wilde’s later literary experiments:
It is in the journalism that Wilde comes up for the first time with many of the ideas and phrases that he would reuse in critical essays such as “The Decay of Lying” or “The Critic as Artist”. The traffic between his journalism and criticism makes us realize that to draw a sharp divide between these two fields in the Victorian age is a rather arbitrary affair. It is also in the journalism that Wilde learns to play with the epigram – a literary device that he would perfect in his society comedies. He learns to cultivate an effortless style, which mixes critical acumen with silliness, balances learning with superficiality, and tempers natural donnishness by means of studied flippancy. He learns to master that characteristic blend of praise and ridicule. He learns, in other words, to establish that easy, direct contact with the audience that made him a successful dramatist in his own time and that still makes him, on the stage and in print, so appealing to many today.
The Dish 