Magazine women
Gillian Freeman
Women in Print Alison Adburgham (Allen and Unwin £5.95) The literary world is divided by men into writers and women writers. Sometimes I think that only Richmal Crompton has bridged the gap, with a name as asexual as Acton or Ellis or Currer Bell; that William is the only fictional male created by a woman who has been completely accepted without patronage by men. Alison Adburgham has exhumed and examined a collection of writing women who had to contend with all the prejudices against their sex in order to earn their livings, beginning with Mrs Aphra Behn, the first Englishwoman to do so. Mrs Behn made it in one way — she was buried in Westminster Abbey in 1689; but she has since been called the female Wycherley and Wycherley has never been called the male Aphra Behn. Until this outrageous lady proved otherwise, prostitution was the only profession open to women. Some wrote, of course, but not for money. Alison Adburgham is a notable journalist, being fashion editor of the Guardian and author of the fascinating Shops and Shopping, 1800-1914. She has carefully researched the growth of periodical publications for women, from the Ladies' Mercury in 1693 to Arnold Bennett's editorship of Woman in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The structure of the book allows her to link the magazines with the women who wrote for them, and sometimes edited them. Editorship was a professional plum generally reserved for males, and any women who achieved the heights found that their positions brought disrespect, often infamy, because their social lives were under microscopic scrutiny.
Envy, malice and alt uncharitableness — these are the fruits of successful literary career for women Those bitter words were written privately by Laetitia Landon who, as L.E.1edited The Book of Beauty in 1833 and wrote the entire first issue for the sum of three hundred pounds. She died in bizarre fashion, poisoned by prussic acid only four months after her marriage. She had been particularly vulnerable to savage gossip, having the disadvantage (in a snobbish age) of no " background " to commend her to society. She was also the sole supporter of her widowed mother. Flamboyant Lady Blessington who succeeded her also needed money — to pay debts — but she was able to cope with the pressures. She not only lived openly in a menage a trois, with her stepdaughter but, varying her means of seduction, persuaded Thackeray, Wordsworth, Bulwer Lytton and Scott to write for her.
There is a direct line of tradition from The Ladies' Magazine in 1770 to the Marjorie Proops syndrome. A male correspondent wrote to The Ladies' Magazine in despair because the parents of my lovely La/age objected to the marriage: I am in love . . . deeply absorbed . . . a mutual affection possesses both our bosoms . . . yet her father will not grant her to me because I want the sum of £1,000 more to add to my little stock.
Designing men, fallen women, the Honour and Reputation of the Fair appear and reappear in the pages of the periodicals, together With fashion, receipts and other domestic features. The only oddity was the short spell when The Ladies' Diary dropped everything ostensibly " female " for poetical enigmas and mathematical problems, incurring an astonishing rise in circulation — 7,000 at a time, when the population of England and Wales was only about 54 million, including illiterates, babies, the insane and the blind — and men. The Editor pronounced: . . its usefulness is conspicuous considering it is profitable, commendable, and diverting, and has excited and won the Fair Sex to a love of Mathematical Learning.
There is no doubt that the success of The Ladies' Diary contributed to enlightened thought concerning the education of women — temporarily at least. I wonder what would happen to the circulation of, say, Cosmopolitan, if it devoted itself to the geometrical, arithmetical, astronomical and philosophical enigmas which so stimulated the eighteenth century readers of the women's magazines?
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