Chawton House’s digital magazine The Female Spectator vol 5, no. 2.
The Female Spectator 5.2 (Autumn 2021 issue)
£3.00
Description
Paying tribute to pioneering women
Originally set up in 1995, Chawton House’s magazine The Female Spectator is a tribute to Eliza Haywood’s publication of the same name, published from April 1744-May 1746. Haywood’s magazine provides a fascinating insight into eighteenth-century life, with content including fiction, moral essays, social and political commentary, and topics as diverse as tea drinking, gambling, diplomacy and natural history. In the opening pages, we are introduced to the female spectator, a reformed coquet who, having spent her youth engaged in ‘a hurry of promiscuous diversions’, is now older, wiser, and ready to share ‘useful and entertaining’ insights with the public. Haywood’s female spectator stresses that her ‘ambition was to be as universally read as possible.’
Relaunched as a digital publication in 2020, our new Female Spectator continues Chawton House’s tradition of sharing both news from Chawton House itself and the fascinating and varied work done by researchers and scholars on its collections, and particularly on women writers in the long eighteenth century. Magazines in the eighteenth century were spaces in which amateur writers and professionals mingled, reviewing the latest novels or fashions, writing poetry or short stories, sharing riddles or recipes, and it is this spirit that we want to reflect.
In this issue:
- Visiting Fellowships: Reports from our August Visiting Fellows
- Nature strikes back: Plants and plagues for Chawton House’s Gothic season
- Man Up! The winners of this year’s creative writing competition
- Piozzi comes home: Find out more about our latest exciting acquisitions
- Martin Caddick: The final part of the four-part history of Chawton House
Full Contents
- Botanical Women in Focus: Celia Fiennes
- Curator’s Corner: The Traveller, the Editor & the Poet, Emma Yandle
- Visiting Fellowships: August, 2021, Alison Daniell, Charlotte Goodge & Sabina Akram
- Notes from the Reading Room: Chawton House Reading Group, Kim Simpson
- Chawton House Gothic Programme
- Gothic Shorthand: The Midnight Assassin, Sydnie O’Hara
- Notes from the Garden, Julia Weaver
- Recipes from the Old Kitchen Tea Room, Enya Nwaegbe
- Investingating Sarah Carr: ‘the mourning bride’, Margaret Wilson
- Ladies of Leisure at Chawton House, Srutokirti Basak & Lydia Smith
- Recently published
- The Secrets of Chawton House, Martin Caddick
- Forthcoming Events
- Man Up! Creative Writing Competition
- Acknowledgements