Marie Corelli wrote bestselling supernatural romances and detested the New Woman, while George Paston wrote realistic New Woman novels that cultivated a small, intellectual readership. Yet in the wake of the three-volume novel, both authors produced fiction about the writing life that makes the case for the codex book and the single-volume novel as bulwarks against the circular, self-contained system of other media—a system maintained by men. Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan (1895) puts forward the bestselling novel as a means of direct, sanctified connection between celebrity author and adoring audience. Paston’s A Writer of Books (1898) looks to the future work, the novel unwritten, as a repository of truth and meaning. Together, they suggest that in the wake of the three-volume novel, the problem of the novel’s relationship to media systems could be approached as a problem of how and whether the novel mediates.

Although Alexander Graham Bell introduced the electric telephone to Britain soon after its invention, it was not quickly adopted there and remained less than ubiquitous in Victorian daily life and literature. But in the 1890s, three fictional tales of young writers—Rudyard Kipling’s “The Finest Story in the World” (1891), Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman (1894), and George Paston’s A Writer of Books (1898)—all invoke the telephone as they treat the obstacles to literary production. These texts highlight not the device’s technical properties so much as its unexpected ability to embody a new concept: the idea of a media system that fused new communication technologies with print forms created for a mass audience—a version of what would later be called mass media.