Representing the Professional Woman: The Celebrity Interviewing of Sarah Tooley

Sarah Tooley’s name is recognized today only, if at all, for her work establishing other women’s names, including those of Sarah Grand, Clementina Black, Beatrice Webb, Mary Kingsley, L. T. Meade, and Alice Meynell. Tooley’s biography of Florence Nightingale and history of nursing are also still cited in studies of that profession. But from the 1890s throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Tooley enjoyed recognition in her own right in Britain as a prominent and respected journalist. Frances E. Willard quotes a reviewer in the Sun of 1 March 1894 praising ‘another of Mrs. Tooley’s really clever interviews’.1 Reporting on a talk by W. T. Stead in 1909, the Times includes Tooley as one of only five audience members significant enough to be named.2 At the Golden Anniversary of the Society of Women Journalists in May, 1944, Tooley was honoured with a bouquet of flowers from Clemence Dane, the President of the Society.3 However, Tooley’s celebrity faded, possibly because her work, predominantly interviewing and writing biographical sketches and biographies, has seemed to late twentieth-century readers and scholars less significant than the work of other women writers of the period. Yet as Sally Mitchell has observed, seemingly ephemeral journalism indeed has its uses. Not only does it ‘illuminate social history’,4 but in the case of Tooley’s celebrity interviewing, it both participates in and allows critical assessment of the production of the female professional.