Chawton House’s digital magazine The Female Spectator vol 5, no. 3.
The Female Spectator 5.3 (Winter 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:
- The Twelve Knits of Christmas: See a selection of Chawton House’s homemade decoration
- The Nall Ensemble: Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel
- Gothic Gardens: Find out more about the inspiration for Chawton House’s Gothic Garden trail
- Martin Caddick: Introducing Florence Knight
- Kim Simpson: Desperately Seeking Susan (Smythies): Women Writers in the 1750s
Full Contents
- The Twelve Knits of Christmas at Chawton House
- Homemade Christmas at Chawton House continued
- Curator’s Corner: Festive Displays
- The Glimmering Gardens
- The Nall Ensemble: Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel
- Introducing Florence Knight, Martin Caddick
- Notes from the Garden, Julia Weaver
- Recipes from the Old Kitchen Tea Room, Enya Nwaegbe
- Notes from the Reading Room: Chawton House Reading Group, Kim Simpson
- New publications
- Creating Chawton’s Gothic Gardens
- Gothic Landscapes
- Painting Chawton House
- Desperately Seeking Susan (Smythies), Kim Simpson
- Chawton House Portrait: Sarah Harriet Burney
- Forthcoming Events
- Poems & Puzzles
- Acknowledgements