UnRomantic authorship: The Minerva Press and the Lady’s Magazine, 1770–1820

Batchelor, Jennie 2020. UnRomantic authorship: The Minerva Press and the Lady’s Magazine, 1770–1820. Romantic Textualities (23) , pp. 76-93. 10.18573/romtext.73

Preview

PDF - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download (4MB) | Preview

Abstract

This essay examines the rich and hitherto unexplored rivalries and connections between the Romantic periodical and the Minerva Press through the lens of the hugely popular Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex (1700–1832). Close attention to the points of contact outlined in this essay is multiply illuminating, I argue, not least because it forces us to challenge enduring but misleading associations about popular literary forms, professional authorship and women’s writing in the Romantic era. The Lady’s Magazine and the Minerva Press presented aspiring authors with competing, but complementary, mass-media outlets that were eagerly exploited by hundreds of Romantic-era writers, many of whom published energetically with both. These writers’ negotiations of the literary culture of the day—their movements between publishers at key moments in their lives and turn to different modes of publication as and when it suited them—were signs of their precarity, but also of their professionalism and persistence. Uncovering these writers’ stories enables us to uncover alternative, yet ubiquitous, stories of authorship in the Romantic period that merit the telling precisely because they recalibrate our sense of how Romantic authorship was experienced by some of the most popular writers of the era.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > D History (General) > D204 Modern History H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN0441 Literary History Z Bibliography. Library Science. Information Resources > Z004 Books. Writing. Paleography
Publisher:	Cardiff University Press
ISSN:	1748-0116
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	16 November 2020
Date of Acceptance:	9 January 2019
Last Modified:	10 Aug 2023 16:22
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/136388

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item