This two-day event will commemorate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832). Part symposium, part study day, part celebration of the first recognisably modern women’s magazine, this event will reflect on and explore the diverse content, broad readership and multiple legacies of this influential periodical.
Day one will host a programme of talks on the magazine and a keynote lecture. Day two focuses on fashion, material culture and the Lady’s Magazine through a combined offering of academic talks and hands-on workshops. After a panel and morning keynote lecture, participants can view copies of the magazine and other items of interest in the Templeman Library’s Special Collections and Archives. They can also take part in an embroidery workshop led by Alison Larkin using one of the magazine’s original patterns (materials are provided and no prior skill is necessary!). The second day concludes with a wine reception and the launch of the book Jane Austen Embroidery by Jennie Batchelor and Alison Larkin.
Register Here
Friday 24/4/20
Day One: Symposium
- 8:45 – 9:15 Registration and Coffee
- 9:15 – 9:30 Welcome by Jennie Batchelor
- 9:30 – 11:15 Panel I: Form and the magazine
- Alastair Dawson – The Lady’s Magazine: A Publication Without Borders
- Freya Gowrley – Between Generic Terminologies and Creative Technologies: The Fragment in Eighteenth-Century Periodical Culture
- Hannah Hudson – Miscellany and Meaning in the Lady’s Magazine
- Danielle Menge – Intertext/Interdisciplinarity: the Lady’s Magazine in Literary Tradition
- 11:15 – 11:30 Coffee
- 11:30 – 13:15 Panel II: Writers, Influence, Genealogy
- Gillian Dow – Translation and the Lady’s Magazine: Publishing and the literary marketplace c. 1810
- Yvonne Noble – Anne Finch in Magazines
- Maddy Pelling – Queens of History: Women’s Historiography, Matriarchal Genealogy and the Lady’s Magazine
- Rosemary Wake – ‘The Contributions of B. G. we have ever found replete with literature, morality and amusement’: tracking the correspondent/magazine relationship through Beatrice Grant.’
- 13:15 – 14:15 Lunch
- 14:15 – 15:45 Panel III: Politics and the Lady’s Magazine
- Susan Carlile The Lady’s Magazine and the British Empire
- Koenraad Claes The Lady’s Magazine and the Politicisation of Female Readers
- Alison Daniell ‘…by conducting themselves with propriety under great sufferings, [wives] should be always sure of redress’: marital breakdown, divorce and the construction of a virtuous self in The Lady’s Magazine
- Jenny DiPlacidi Transatlantic Tales: Lady’s Magazine Fiction in American Periodicals
- 15:45 – 16:00 Tea
- 16:00 – 17:00 Keynote Lecture: Manushag N Powell (Purdue)
- 18:30 – Conference dinner (optional, pre-booked)
Saturday 25/4/20
Day Two: Fashion and Embroidery Study Day
Including capsule exhibition in Special Collections
- 9:00 – 10:45 Panel IV: Fashion, Consumption and Theatre
- Hilary Davidson – Title tbc
- Serena Dyer – A Nation in Microcosm: Patriotic Consumption in Rudolph Ackermann’s Repository of Arts
- Alison Larkin – ‘Most elegant patterns for the Tambour’: the embroidery patterns in the Lady’s Magazine
- Elaine McGirr – Mary Ann Yates and periodical biography
- 10:45 – 11:00 Coffee
- 11:00 – 12:00 Keynote Lecture: Chloe Wigston Smith (York)
- 12:00 – 13:00 Lunch
- 13:00 – 14:30 Embroidery workshop 1 or library exhibit
- 14:30 – 16:00 Embroidery workshop 2 or library exhibit
- 16:15 – 17:30 Book launch and wine reception to celebrate the publication of Jane Austen Embroidery by Jennie Batchelor and Alison Larkin
For more information and to register, please see the University of Kent Online Store