Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690-1820s

Jennie Batchelor is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Kent. She has published widely on eighteenth-century women’s writing, material culture, gender, sexuality and the body and women’s periodicals. Her most recent books include Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690s–1820s, co-edited with Manushag N. Powell (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018) and Women’s Work: Labour, Gender, Authorship, 1750-1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). She also co-devised (with Alison Larkin) the popular history/craft book Jane Austen Embroidery (London: Pavilion 2020), which reprints and contextualises 15 needlework projects from the Lady’s Magazine for modern stitchers. Manushag N. Powell is Associate Professor of English and University Faculty Scholar at Purdue University. She is the author of Performing Authorship in 18th-Century English Periodicals (Bucknell University Press, 2014), and has published on periodical form and periodical studies – as well as on British literary pirates.

[This book] is simultaneously a key reference work and important collection of new scholarship. As the latter, it breaks new ground, both in its individual essays and the volume as a whole, which is more than just the sum of its parts.

• Introduction: Women and the Birth of Periodical Culture Jennie Batchelor and Nush PowellSection 1: Learning for the LadiesIntroductionPeriodicals and the Problem of Women’s Learning James Robert Wood Discontinuous Reading and Miscellaneous Instruction for British Ladies Eve Tavor Bannet Constructing Women’s History in the Lady’s Museum Anna K. SagalVindications and Reflections: The Lady’s Magazine during the Revolution Controversy (1789—95)Koenraad Claes Section 2: The Poetics of PeriodicalsIntroductionDunton and Singer after the Athenian Mercury: Two Plots of Platonic LoveDustin Stewart Women’s Poetry in the MagazinesJennifer Batt ‘A lasting wreath of various hue’: Hannah Cowley, the Della Cruscan Affair, and the Medium of the Periodical PoemTanya Marie Caldwell The Lady’s Poetical Magazine and the Fashioning of Women’s Literary SpaceOctavia Cox Section 3: Periodicals Nationally and InternationallyIntroductionProtesting the Exclusivity of the Public Sphere: Delarivier Manley’s Examiner Rachel Carnell ‘A moral paper! And how do you expect to get money by it?’: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and JournalismIsobel Grundy Eliza Haywood’s Periodicals in WartimeCatherine Ingrassia German Women’s Writing in British Magazines, 1760-1820Alessa Johns Travel Writing and Mediation in the Lady’s Magazine: Charting ‘the meridian of female reading’JoEllen Delucia Section 4: Print Media and Print Culture Introduction‘[L]et a girl read’: Periodicals and Women’s Literary Canon FormationRachel Scarborough King Reviewing Women: Women Reviewers on Women NovelistsMegan Peiser Reviewing Femininity: Gender and Genre in the Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Periodical PressPam Perkins ‘Full of pretty stories’: Fiction in the Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832)Jenny DiPlacidi 18) ‘This Lady is Descended from a Good Family’: Women and Biography in British Magazines, 1770-1798 Hannah Hudson 19) Suitable Reading Material: Fandom and Female Pleasure in Women’s Engagement with Romantic PeriodicalsEvan Hayles Gledshill 　Section 5: Theorising the Periodical in Text and PracticeIntroduction20) The Ladies’ Mercury (1693)Nicola Parsons21) John Dunton’s Ladies Mercury and the Eighteenth-Century Female Subject Slaney Chadwick Ross 22) Frances Brooke, Editor, and the Making of The Old Maid (1755–6)Kathryn R. King 23) Eyes that Eagerly ‘Bear the Steady Ray of Reason’: Eidolon as Activist in Charlotte Lennox’s Lady’s MuseumSusan Carlile 24) ‘[T]o cherish Female ingenuity and to conduce to Female improvement’: The Birth of the Woman’s MagazineJennie Batchelor 25) The Woman behind the Man behind the World: Mary Wells and the Feminisation of the Late Eighteenth-Century NewspaperClaire Knowles Section 6: Fashion, Theatre, and CelebrityIntroduction26) Advertising Women: Gender and the Vendor in the Print Culture of the Medical Marketplace, 1660 to 1830Barbara Benedict 27) Theatrical, Periodical, Authorial: Frances Brooke’s Old MaidNush Powell 28) Fast Fashion: Style, Text, and Image in Late-Eighteenth Century Women’s PeriodicalsChloe Wigston　Smith 29) Magazine Miniatures: Portraits of Actresses, Proncesses, and Queens in Late Eighteenth-Century PeriodicalsLaura Engel 30) Fashioning　Consumers: Ackerman’s Repository of Arts and the Cultivation of the Female　ConsumerSerena Dyer Appendix