 Frontispiece to The Female Spectator (London, 1746) | |
| Editor | Eliza Haywood |
|---|---|
| Categories | Women's periodical |
| Frequency | monthly |
| Format | book |
| Publisher | T. Gardner, at Cowley's Head opposite St. Clement's Church in the Strand |
| First issue | April 24, 1744 |
| Final issue Number | May 31, 1746 24 |
The Female Spectator, published by Eliza Haywood between 1744 and 1746, is generally considered to be the first periodical in English written by women for women. [1]
The Female Spectator was launched anonymously in April 1744 and was published on a monthly basis. [2] It eventually ran for 24 numbers, [1] a longer run than most periodicals of the time. [3] Eliza Haywood has long been identified as the author, though she never acknowledged her involvement. Thomas Gardner was the publisher and printer. [4]
The primary audience for Haywood's journal was women – the newly affluent middle classes, and the upper strata with leisure time and money. She wrote that she wanted the periodical to be "as universally read as possible", and a poem by an anonymous male author in The Gentleman's Magazine in December 1944 praising The Female Spectator suggests that it was indeed read by at least some men. [1]
The Female Spectator is loosely modelled on The Spectator by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. [1] The new publication differs from its inspiration principally in that it speaks exclusively from a female viewpoint. To do this it employs four characters: the eponymous "Female Spectator," who shares the benefits of her lifetime experience, and her three assistants, each of whom represents an idealized woman at a different stage of life: Euphrosine, the beautiful unmarried daughter of a wealthy merchant; the happily married and sophisticated Mira; and a "Widow of Quality." [3]
Each issue of the journal was originally published in book format and usually covers a single topic or narrative in the form of essays or stories [1] which frequently revolve around "love and marriage", [5] with an emphasis on moral attitudes. The essays use a straightforward structure of premise, development, and conclusion, with few digressions. The sentences are leisurely and well-balanced, with simple but forceful language. [3]
The explicit moral instruction is bolstered with exemplary or cautionary anecdotes [1] that demonstrate an "appropriate" point of view of different situations and warn of the consequences of risky behaviours. [3] One such anecdote features a young woman who disguises herself as a boy in order to follow her lover into the army; another tells of a young woman, raised in ignorance, who elopes with the first man to court her; and a third describes a woman, dissatisfied with marriage, whose love affair yields an illegitimate child. [3] Over the run of the journal such stories numbered sixty, some detailed enough to be likened to "miniature novels". [1]
Haywood defended the omission of current affairs by pointing out these were adequately represented in the newspapers of the day. She also argued the need for women to be more widely educated. [3] She devoted one series of issues, for example, to the study of Baconian empiricism and the natural world [5] and by so doing is said to have fostered women's interest in the microscope. [6]
Henry Fielding was an English writer and magistrate known for the use of humour and satire in his works. His 1749 comic novel The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling was a seminal work in the genre. Along with Samuel Richardson, Fielding is seen as the founder of the traditional English novel. He also played an important role in the history of law enforcement in the United Kingdom, using his authority as a magistrate to found the Bow Street Runners, London's first professional police force.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1744.
Eliza Haywood, born Elizabeth Fowler, was an English writer, actress and publisher. An increase in interest and recognition of Haywood's literary works began in the 1980s. Described as "prolific even by the standards of a prolific age", Haywood wrote and published over 70 works in her lifetime, including fiction, drama, translations, poetry, conduct literature and periodicals. Haywood today is studied primarily as one of the 18th-century founders of the novel in English.
Love in Excess (1719–20) is Eliza Haywood's best known novel. It details the amorous escapades of Count D'Elmont, a rake who becomes reformed over the course of the novel. Love in Excess was a huge bestseller in its time, going through multiple reissues in the four years following its initial publication. It was once compared in terms of book sales with Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe. This information was later shown to be incorrect; the novel selling only about 6000 copies over 23 years.
The Coquette or, The History of Eliza Wharton is an epistolary novel by Hannah Webster Foster. It was published anonymously in 1797, and did not appear under the author's real name until 1856, 16 years after Foster's death. It was one of the best-selling novels of its time and was reprinted eight times between 1824 and 1828. A fictionalized account of the much-publicized death of a socially elite Connecticut woman after giving birth to a stillborn, illegitimate child at a roadside tavern, Foster's novel highlights the social conditions that lead to the downfall of an otherwise well-educated and socially adept woman.
The Spectator was a daily publication founded by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in England, lasting from 1711 to 1712. Each "paper", or "number", was approximately 2,500 words long, and the original run consisted of 555 numbers, beginning on 1 March 1711. These were collected into seven volumes. The paper was revived without the involvement of Steele in 1714, appearing thrice weekly for six months, and these papers when collected formed the eighth volume. Eustace Budgell, a cousin of Addison's, and the poet John Hughes also contributed to the publication.
Elizabeth Griffith was an 18th-century Welsh-born dramatist, fiction writer, essayist and actress, who lived and worked in Ireland.
The academic discipline of women's writing is a discrete area of literary studies which is based on the notion that the experience of women, historically, has been shaped by their sex, and so women writers by definition are a group worthy of separate study: "Their texts emerge from and intervene in conditions usually very different from those which produced most writing by men." It is not a question of the subject matter or political stance of a particular author, but of her sex, i.e. her position as a woman within the literary world.
Elizabeth Singer Rowe was an English poet, essayist and fiction writer called "the ornament of her sex and age" and the "Heavenly Singer". She was among 18th-century England's most widely read authors. She wrote mainly religious poetry, but her best-known work, Friendship in Death (1728), is a Jansenist miscellany of imaginary letters from the dead to the living. Despite a posthumous reputation as a pious, bereaved recluse, Rowe corresponded widely and was involved in local concerns at Frome in her native Somerset. She remained popular into the 19th century on both sides of the Atlantic and in translation. Though little read today, scholars have called her stylistically and thematically radical for her time.
The Ladies' Mercury was a periodical published in London by the Athenian Society notable for being the first periodical in English published and specifically designed for women readers.
The Anti-Pamela; or Feign'd Innocence Detected is a 1741 novel written by Eliza Haywood as a satire of the 1740 novel Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded by Samuel Richardson. It has also been presented with the subtitle "Mock-Modesty Display'd and Punish'd."
Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze is a novel by Eliza Haywood published in 1725. In it, the protagonist disguises herself as four different women in her efforts to understand how a man may interact with each individual persona. Part of the tradition of amatory fiction is to rewrite the story of the persecuted maiden into a story of feminine power and sexual desire.
The Tatler was a British literary and society journal begun by Richard Steele in 1709 and published for two years. It represented a new approach to journalism, featuring cultivated essays on contemporary manners, and established the pattern that would be copied in such British classics as Addison and Steele's The Spectator, Samuel Johnson's The Rambler and The Idler, and Goldsmith's Citizen of the World. The Tatler would also influence essayists as late as Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt. Addison and Steele liquidated The Tatler in order to make a fresh start with the similar Spectator, and the collected issues of Tatler are usually published in the same volume as the collected Spectator.
Matilda Mary Hays was a 19th-century English writer, journalist and part-time actress. With Eliza Ashurst, Hays translated several of George Sand's works into English. She co-founded the English Woman's Journal. Her love interests included the actress Charlotte Cushman, with whom she had a 10-year relationship, and the poet Adelaide Anne Procter.
The Lady's Museum was a monthly magazine published in the United Kingdom between 1760 and 1761.
The Shakespeare Ladies Club refers to a group of upper class and aristocratic women who petitioned the London theatres to produce William Shakespeare's plays during the 1730s. In the 1700s they were referred to as "the Ladies of the Shakespear’s Club," or even more simply as "Ladies of Quality," or "the Ladies." Known members of the Shakespeare Ladies Club include Susanna Ashley-Cooper, Elizabeth Boyd, and Mary Cowper. The Shakespeare Ladies Club was responsible for getting the highest percentage of Shakespeare plays produced in London during a single season in the eighteenth century; as a result they were celebrated by their contemporaries as being responsible for making Shakespeare popular again.
Kirsten Saxton is a professor of English at Mills College in Oakland, California where she is also the director of the MA of English.
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"Sophia, a Person of Quality" was a pen name used by the author of two English protofeminist treatises published in the mid-18th century, following a period trend of women's histories and political tracts arguing in favor of equal rights known as the querelle des femmes. The first tract under the Sophia name, Woman Not Inferior to Man, was published in 1739. Largely adapting François Poullain de la Barre's 1676 De l'Égalité des deux sexes, Sophia expands on the text using Cartesian rhetoric to attack male superiority, with a focus on establishing the equality of women's abilities with men, as well as stating that women hold an inherent moral superiority. Following the publication in 1739 of an anonymous rebuttal tract, Man Superior to Woman, Sophia wrote a follow-up tract titled Woman's Superior Excellence Over Man. Published in 1740, the text accepts the rebuttal's challenge to prove the moral superiority of women in order to justify women's rights. All three of these tracts were later compiled and published as a single volume in 1751, entitled Beauty's Triumph.