Milady's Boudoir is a fictional weekly newspaper for women, of which Aunt Dahlia is the proprietor. It is probably based on The Lady(Britain's oldest weekly women's magazine; The Lady was managed by David Freeman-Mitford, whose family supplied the original for another Wodehouse character, Roderick Spode). Milady's Boudoir (and not "Madame's Nightshirt", as Tom Travers insists on calling it) never sold well and only stayed in business because of the reluctant largesse of Dahlia's husband. It lasted for three (according to Bertie) or four (according to Dahlia and Bertie) years before being sold to Mr Trotter.
- Backstory
- In Right Ho, Jeeves (1934), Dahlia lost at baccarat the money to pay the printers and had Bertie and Jeeves help her squeeze it out of her tax-burdened husband.
- In Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit (1954), Dahlia commissioned a high-priced serial from bestselling novelist Daphne Dolores Morehead in order to give instant credibility to her journal and make it an easier sell, or "salt the mine" as she put it; after being repeatedly foiled, and an attempted blackmail to make her surrender Anatole to the scheming Mrs Trotter, she eventually sold it off with Jeeves's help to newspaper owner Mr Trotter.
- In Jeeves in the Offing (1960), chapter XVII, the paper "had recently been sold to a mug up Liverpool way", and Dahlia underlined how most issues featured a short story where "the hero won the heroine's heart by saving her dog or her cat or her canary or whatever foul animal she happened to possess."
- In "Jeeves Makes an Omelette" (1958, written later but necessarily happening before the sale) Dahlia asked Bertie to steal a painting to get a story for her magazine.
- In "Jeeves and the Greasy Bird" (1965, written later but necessarily happening before the sale), a man too timid to talk to his love is writing articles about girls for the paper.
- Contributors include
- Bertie Wooster once contributed an article, titled "What the Well-Dressed Man is Wearing". (Written in "Clustering Round Young Bingo", 1925, proudly mentioned in some later stories.)
- Rosie M. Banks (Mrs Bingo Little) once submitted an article, "How I Keep the Love of my Husband-Baby". Fortunately for her husband, it hasn't been published. And after Dahlia poached Rosie's chef Anatole, Rosie is unlikely to further write for Mrs Travers. (In "Clustering Round Young Bingo", 1925.)
- Daphne Dolores Morehead, the famous novelist, was once commissioned a serial; it wasn't published but announced in the journal in order to make it more saleable. (In Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, 1954.)
- Blair Eggleston has written a series of articles on the Modern Girl, though he is too timid around them. (In "Jeeves and the Greasy Bird", 1965.)
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