On February 7, 1938, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary about a walk through the Sussex countryside:

Woolf was in the final stages of her work on Three Guineas (1938), always a fraught time for her in the process of publication. This walk appears to have come as a welcome relief, a chance for her mind to wander freely after the focused mental work of writing and proofing. Consequently, it is hard to paint the ideas she records from this walk as anything other than flights of fancy. In spite of that, I propose that we take seriously the first idea she records in this entry, the “illustrated sheet to be called The Outsider,” and argue that this imagined Outsider paper reveals an association that is neither casual nor accidental between the figure of the Outsider and the periodical press.

That the workings of the press should have been on Woolf 's mind at this time is not surprising: as she mentions in the passage above, she was working on the notes to Three Guineas, which drew extensively on her scrapbooks of newspaper clippings. While she reminded herself of the problems and failings of the extant press, it makes sense that her mind would turn, if only in fancy, to reform. In her later correspondence with Lady Margaret Rhondda, the editor of the feminist weekly Time and Tide, Woolf wonders “if we could really do anything with the outsider idea?” (L6: 229) While this comment has most often been taken as a reference to a future non-society society or non-movement movement, I want to consider the possibility that this “anything” might be a periodical. In this paper, I argue that in Three Guineas Woolf constructs what amounts to a model for feminist periodical publication, exploring the relationship between a writer and her audience as she investigates the relationship between women and their society, culture, and nation.