Naomi Royde-Smith

Born in 1875, and surviving until 1964, Naomi Royde-Smith was the first woman literary editor – of the Saturday Westminster Gazette – in the first decade of the twentieth century, and also a champion of literary competitions. (The magazine had ceased to exist at the outset of 1928.) There is a very good and caustic recent blog about here. She supported many of the Georgians beloved by the Week-end Review writers, and she had the added cachet of being the very serious object of Walter de la Mare’s attention. A picture of her in the National Portrait Gallery can be seen here. There is something of the diva as well as the doyenne about her. Doubtless she laid down conditions before she agreed to be a judge for the first time. The second of her collections of Saturday Westminster competitions can be read here (1909).