Awards

• Commended for Bibliographical Society of America: William L. Mitchell Prize 2020

Overview

Provides new perspectives on women's print media in the long eighteenth century This innovative volume presents for the first time collective expertise on women's magazines and periodicals of the long eighteenth century. While this period witnessed the birth of modern periodical culture and its ability to shape aspects of society from the popular to the political, most studies have traditionally obscured the very active role women's voices and women readers played in shaping the periodicals that in turn shaped Britain. The 30 essays here demonstrate the importance of periodicals to women, the importance of women to periodicals, and, crucially, they correct the destructive misconception that the more canonized periodicals and popular magazines were enemy or discontinuous forms. This collection shows how both periodicals and women drove debates on politics, education, theatre, celebrity, social practice, popular reading and everyday life itself. Divided into 6 thematic parts, the book uses innovative methodologies for historical periodical studies, thereby mapping new directions in eighteenth-century and Romantic studies, women's writing as well as media and cultural history. While our period witnessed the birth of modern periodical culture, most studies have obscured the active role women's voices and women readers played in shaping the periodicals that in turn shaped Britain. Key Features Presents the first major study of the key role women played as authors, editors, and readers of periodicals and magazines in the long eighteenth centuryFeatures cutting-edge and interdisciplinary research by senior and early career specialists in the fields of periodical studies, material culture studies, theatre history, and cultural historyIn its exposition of innovative methodologies for historical periodical studies, the book maps new directions in eighteenth-century and Romantic studies, women's writing, and media and cultural historyMoves British women's print media to the centre of long eighteenth-century print culture

Full Product Details

Author:   Jennie Batchelor (Reader in Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of Kent) ,  Manushag N. Powell (Chair of English, Arizona State University)
Publisher:   Edinburgh University Press
Imprint:   Edinburgh University Press
ISBN:  

9781399546812

ISBN 10:   1399546813
Pages:   520
Publication Date:   28 February 2025
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Temporarily unavailable  
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Table of Contents

Introduction: Women and the Birth of Periodical Culture Jennie Batchelor and Nush Powell Section 1: Learning for the Ladies Introduction Periodicals 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. Sagal Vindications and Reflections: The Lady’s Magazine during the Revolution Controversy (1789—95) Koenraad Claes Section 2: The Poetics of Periodicals Introduction Dunton and Singer after the Athenian Mercury: Two Plots of Platonic Love Dustin Stewart Women’s Poetry in the Magazines Jennifer Batt ‘A lasting wreath of various hue’: Hannah Cowley, the Della Cruscan Affair, and the Medium of the Periodical Poem Tanya Marie Caldwell The Lady’s Poetical Magazine and the Fashioning of Women’s Literary Space Octavia Cox Section 3: Periodicals Nationally and Internationally Introduction Protesting 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 Journalism Isobel Grundy Eliza Haywood’s Periodicals in Wartime Catherine Ingrassia German Women’s Writing in British Magazines, 1760-1820 Alessa 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 Formation Rachel Scarborough King Reviewing Women: Women Reviewers on Women Novelists Megan Peiser Reviewing Femininity: Gender and Genre in the Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press Pam 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 Periodicals Evan Hayles Gledshill 　 Section 5: Theorising the Periodical in Text and Practice Introduction 20) The Ladies’ Mercury (1693) Nicola Parsons 21) 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 Museum Susan Carlile 24) ‘[T]o cherish Female ingenuity and to conduce to Female improvement’: The Birth of the Woman’s Magazine Jennie Batchelor 25) The Woman behind the Man behind the World: Mary Wells and the Feminisation of the Late Eighteenth-Century Newspaper Claire Knowles Section 6: Fashion, Theatre, and Celebrity Introduction 26) Advertising Women: Gender and the Vendor in the Print Culture of the Medical Marketplace, 1660 to 1830 Barbara Benedict 27) Theatrical, Periodical, Authorial: Frances Brooke’s Old Maid Nush Powell 28) Fast Fashion: Style, Text, and Image in Late-Eighteenth Century Women’s Periodicals Chloe Wigston　Smith 29) Magazine Miniatures: Portraits of Actresses, Proncesses, and Queens in Late Eighteenth- Century Periodicals Laura Engel 30) Fashioning　Consumers: Ackerman’s Repository of Arts and the Cultivation of the Female　Consumer Serena Dyer Appendix

Reviews

"[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.--Lisa Maruca, Wayne State University ""ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830: Vol. 10, Iss. 1"" This book comprehensively overturns assumptions about women's exclusion from the business of eighteenth-century periodical print. From fan fiction to fashion design, from literary reviewing to pedagogic theory -- female creativity is evident everywhere. Batchelor and Powell's collection is as visually and verbally rich as their subject.-- ""Ros Ballaster, Mansfield College, University of Oxford"" This volume will remain a valuable resource for scholars interested in gender studies and in periodical studies. In its entirety, the work is an unprecedented anthology of women's presence not simply in the periodical sphere, but in early print culture as a whole.--Marguerite Happe, UCLA ""Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Volume 32, no. 4 (Summer 2020)"""

[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.--Lisa Maruca, Wayne State University ""ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830: Vol. 10, Iss. 1"" This book comprehensively overturns assumptions about women's exclusion from the business of eighteenth-century periodical print. From fan fiction to fashion design, from literary reviewing to pedagogic theory -- female creativity is evident everywhere. Batchelor and Powell's collection is as visually and verbally rich as their subject.-- ""Ros Ballaster, Mansfield College, University of Oxford"" This volume will remain a valuable resource for scholars interested in gender studies and in periodical studies. In its entirety, the work is an unprecedented anthology of women's presence not simply in the periodical sphere, but in early print culture as a whole.--Marguerite Happe, UCLA ""Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Volume 32, no. 4 (Summer 2020)""

[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. -- Lisa Maruca, Wayne State University * ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830: Vol. 10, Iss. 1 * This volume will remain a valuable resource for scholars interested in gender studies and in periodical studies. In its entirety, the work is an unprecedented anthology of women’s presence not simply in the periodical sphere, but in early print culture as a whole. -- Marguerite Happe, UCLA * Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Volume 32, no. 4 (Summer 2020) * This book comprehensively overturns assumptions about women’s exclusion from the business of eighteenth-century periodical print. From fan fiction to fashion design, from literary reviewing to pedagogic theory -- female creativity is evident everywhere. Batchelor and Powell’s collection is as visually and verbally rich as their subject. * Ros Ballaster, Mansfield College, University of Oxford *

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. 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.

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