This chapter examines a successful route to participation, the use of family connections and networks. Focusing on the journalist and author Margaret Lane, the biographer of Beatrix Potter and Edgar Wallace among others, this chapter argues that while parental influence can help, people who get their ‘breaks’ through this method need to work extra hard to retain their position and the respect of others. This chapter also examines the work of the committee of the Prix Femina, a novel prize awarded to promising new novelists during the interwar years, winners of which included Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster and Rose Macaulay. This chapter argues that Margaret Lane’s success not only relied on her family connections but her capacity for hard work and her embrace of transgressive behaviour.