This monthly publication was a popular source for fashion and high society news in the 19th century. It featured articles on art, literature, and music, as well as serialized stories and poems. Today, The Court Magazine and Belle Assemblée is a fascinating glimpse into the social and cultural world of Victorian England. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

With the growth of popular literary forms, particularly the periodical, during the eighteenth century, women began to assume an unprecedented place in print culture as readers and writers. Yet at the same time the very textual practices of that culture inscribed women within an increasingly restrictive and oppressive set of representations. First published in 1989, this title examines the emergence and dramatic growth of periodical literature, showing how the journals solicited women as subscribers and contributors, whilst also attempting to regulate their conduct through the promotion of exemplary feminine types. By enclosing its female readership within a discourse that defined women in terms of love, matrimony, the family, and the home, the English periodical became one of the main linguistic sites for the construction of the eighteenth-century ideology of domestic womanhood. Based on the close scrutiny of the popular periodical press between 1690 and 1760, including journals such as the Athenian Mercury, the Tatler, and the Spectator, this study will be of particular value to any student of the relationship between women and print culture, the development of women’s magazines, and the study of literary audiences.

'This book should be regarded as rescue work. It salvages from pre-Victorian periodicals from the limbo of forgotten publications, and exhumes from long undisturbed sources a curious collection of women who, at a time when it was considered humiliating for a gentlewoman to earn money, contrived to support themselves by writing, editing, or publishing... sometimes even supporting husbands and children as well... The women who emerge make a motley gallery; but over the years that I have been getting to know them, they have won my respectful affection. More, indeed. To me they are all heroines...' Alison Adburgham, from her Foreword Magazines addressed to women have a long history in English, and have been subject to condescension for just as long. Alison Adburgham's groundbreaking volume, first published in 1972, rescues the so-called 'scribbling female' from such scorn, not least by documenting just how hard was the struggle for women writers to live by the pen.