Overview

In December 1840, Charlotte Bront� wrote in a letter to Hartley Coleridge that she wished 'with all [her] heart' that she 'had been born in time to contribute to the Lady's magazine'. Nearly two centuries later, the cultural and literary importance of a monthly publication that for six decades championed women's reading and women's writing has yet to be documented. This book offers the first sustained account of The Lady's Magazine. Across six chapters devoted to the publication's eclectic and evolving contents, as well as its readers and contributors, The Lady's Magazine (1770-1832) and the Making of Literary History illuminates the periodical's achievements and influence, and reveals what this vital period of literary history looks like when we see it anew through the lens of one of its most long-lived and popular publications.

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9781474487658

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Reviews

"[...] this is an exemplary work of scholarship which certainly enriches our understanding of women's writing and literary history.--Jock Macleod, Griffith University ""Review19"" Jennie Batchelor's tour de force scholarship on this crucial Anglophone women's periodical upends critical assumptions about genre, readership and meaning. Batchelor's expertise in the ""unRomantic"" Lady's Magazine - a vast literary collection in and of itself - is unrivalled. This is a level of periodical scholarship not seen for decades; a triumph. --Manushag N. Powell, Purdue University Jennie Batchelor's The Lady's Magazine (1770-1832) and the Making of Literary History is a consistently insightful, beautifully researched book that reminds us that what we know as literary history is a revisionist history that valorizes professional writing and the masculinized notion of literary genius at the expense of other, more collaborative types of writing and the accomplishments of women writers. One of the great achievements of this book is that it pinpoints precisely when this took place (in the early nineteenth century) and where (in the reviews in periodicals), and then uses the remarkable history and legacy of the Lady's Magazine to set the record straight.--Orianne Smith, University of Maryland ""Wordsworth Circle"""

Author Information

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.

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