Chawton House’s magazine The Female Spectator returns, in a new digital format.
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The Female Spectator 4.2 (Winter 2020 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:
- New Acquisitions: Find out more about our latest acquisitions
- Tita Chico: On women, science and the enlightenment
- Austen’s Oceans, Austen’s Shores: Enjoy a sneak peek at our 2021 displays
- Sharon Wright: Maria Branwell: Mother of the Brontës
- Chawton House at Christmas: See the house as it is dressed for Christmas 2020
Full Contents
- Remembering Deirdre Le Faye
- The Long Read: The Stories We (Should) Tell Ourselves, Tita Chico
- New Acquisitions, Emma Yandle
- Brontë Goth Girls, Sharon Wright
- Witch Marks, Ellora Sutton
- Notes from the Reading Room: Chawton House Reading Group, Kim Simpson
- Austen’s Oceans; Austen’s Shores: 2021 Exhibitions at Chawton House
- I told the scrib’ling dame: Women’s Voices in Epilogues and Dialogues, Eva Lippold
- Notes from the Garden, Julia Weaver
- Recipes from the Old Kitchen Tea Room, Enya Nwaegbe
- Elizabeth Knight and Women’s Political Power, Alison Daniell
- The Secrets of Chawton House, Part II, Martin Caddick
- Anne Vane and the Prince: Discovering Secret History at Chawton House, Louise Bray
- Elizabeth Spence’s West Country Novels, Ruby Hawley-Sibbet
- The Perfect Disguise, Zoë-Joy Vangansewinkel
- Dressed for Christmas: Festive Chawton
- Online Treats
- Forthcoming Events
- Poems & Puzzles
- Acknowledgements
