Provides the first major study of one of the most influential periodicals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Interrogates and revises critical commonplaces and narratives about form, authorship, reading and gender through rigorous archival research on the magazines authors, readers, printers and publishers.
Maps new directions in eighteenth-century and Romantic studies, womens writing, and media and cultural history by modelling innovative and interdisciplinary methodologies for historical periodical studies.
Moves the womens magazine from the periphery to the centre of eighteenth-century and Romantic print culture.
In December 1840, Charlotte Brontë 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 Ladys magazine. Nearly two centuries later, the cultural and literary importance of a monthly publication that for six decades championed womens reading and womens writing has yet to be documented. This book offers the first sustained account of The Ladys Magazine. Across six chapters devoted to the publications eclectic and evolving contents, as well as its readers and contributors, The Ladys Magazine (17701832) and the Making of Literary History illuminates the periodicals 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.
