Chawton House’s magazine The Female Spectator returns, in a new digital format.
The Female Spectator 4.1 (Summer 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:
- Man Up! Find out more about our 2020 exhibition from its curator
- Gillian Dow: On researching during the Coronavirus pandemic
- Poetry Challenge: Read the best entries to our Spring Poetry Challenge
- Lockdown Resources: Free online materials to keep you busy
- The Secrets of Chawton House: The first part of a serialised history of the estate
Full Contents
- Man Up! • Clio O’ Sullivan
- ‘Untethered’ and ‘Hyena in Petticoats’ • Ellora Sutton
- Creating a new visitor journey at Chawton House • Louisa Carpenter
- Sickness, Productivity and the Archive • Gillian Dow
- Vital Resources for the Locked Down Lit Lover •
- Jane Austen in a Time of Coronavirus • Alison Daniell
- Notes from the Reading Room: Chawton House Reading Group • Kim Simpson
- Chawton House Lockdown Literary Festival •
- Curator’s Corner: The Face of Frances Kemble • Emma Yandle
- The Pen Has Been in Their Hands: Jane Austen & the Art of Revision • Amy Franklin-Willis
- Notes from the Garden • Julia Weaver
- Virtual Garden Festival •
- The Secrets of Chawton House, Part I • Martin Caddick
- Of the Mouths (and Noses) of Babes • Emily Cock
- Notes from the Old Kitchen Tea Room • Enya Nwaegbe
- Jane Austen’s Men • Sarah Ailwood
- Truly, Madly, Deeply • Elizabeth Hopkinson
- Forthcoming Events •
- Review: My Dearest Heart • Miriam Al Jamil
- Chawton House Poetry Challenge •