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

Part of the York Georgian Society 2024/2025 Autumn Lecture Series.

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 and asks what the Georgian era looks like if we view it anew through the lens of one of its most popular and long-lived publications.

About the speaker: 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.

All York Georgian Society lectures take place on a Saturday afternoon in the Medical Society Rooms in Stonegate, starting at 2.30pm, followed by tea. They are free for members of the Society. They are also free for students at the university; we suggest that other non-members make a voluntary donation of £5 to attend any given lecture.