A ‘Window on the World’: Introducing The Lady’s Magazine

Professor Jennie Batchelor

A ‘Window on the World’: Introducing The Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832)

Summary:

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 Lady’s magazine’. Nearly two centuries later, we have only just begun to understand the cultural and literary importance of this monthly periodical for women, that ran from 1770-1832. In this talk Jennie Batchelor introduces us to The Lady’s Magazine’s contents, readers and contributors, asking what the Georgian era looks like if we view it anew through the lens of one of its most popular and long-lived publications.

Biography:

Jennie Batchelor joined the University of York in 2023 as Professor and Head of English and Related Literature after nearly 20 years at the University of Kent. She has published widely on eighteenth-century women’s writing, periodicals and material culture (especially needlework, which she also practises). In 2020 she published (with Alison Larkin) the popular history-craft book Jane Austen Embroidery (Pavilion). Her most recent monograph, The Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832) and the Making of Literary History (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), won the 2023 Colby Scholarly Book Prize awarded by the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals.

Image:

Frontispiece from The Lady’s Magazine, 1789

All lectures are held at 2.30pm at  York Medical Society, Stonegate, YO1 8AW.

Free for YGS members and students, and a suggested  donation of £5 for non-members.