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UnRomantic Authorship: The Minerva Press and the Lady's Magazine, 1770-1820

Batchelor, Jennie (2020) UnRomantic Authorship: The Minerva Press and the Lady's Magazine, 1770-1820. Romantic Textualities, 23 . pp. 76-93. E-ISSN 1748-0116. (KAR id:84248)

Abstract

This essay examines the rich and hitherto unexplored rivalries and connections between the Romantic periodical and the Minerva Press through the lens of the hugely popular Lady's Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex (1770-1832). Close attention to the points of contact in this essay is multiply illuminating, I argue, not least because it forces us to challenge enduing but misleading associations about popular literary forms, professional authorship and women's writing in the Romantic era. The Lady's Magazine and the Minerva Press presented aspiring authors with competing, but complementary, mass-media outlets that were eagerly exploited by hundreds of Romantic-era writers, many of whom published energetically with both. These writers' negotiations of the literary culture of the day - their movements between publishers at key moments in their lives and turn to different modes of publication as and when it suited them - were signs of their precarity, but also of their professionalism and persistence. Uncovering these writers' stories enables us to uncover alternative, yet ubiquitous, stories of authorship in the Romantic period that merit the telling precisely because they recalibrate our sense of how Romantic authorship was experienced by some of the most popular writers of the era.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled keywords: A. K. Newman, anonymity, authorship, book trade, C. D. Haynes Golland, circulating libraries, fiction, Lady's Magazine, magazines, Mary Pilkington, Minerva Press, periodicals, print culture, publishing, Romanticism, serialisation, William Lane, women's wr
Subjects: P Language and Literature
P Language and Literature > PR English literature
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Arts and Humanities > School of English
Depositing User: Jennie Batchelor
Date Deposited: 18 Nov 2020 10:03 UTC
Last Modified: 08 Dec 2022 20:59 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/84248 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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