Eliza Haywood’s Periodicals in Wartime

Abstract

Eliza Haywood’s index The Female Spectator (1744–6) does not include an entry for ‘war’. Yet that periodical like The Parrot (1746), published in the middle of a tumultuous decade in which Britain was involved in global military conflicts as well as a violent domestic rebellion, clearly engages the discourse of war. Catherine Ingrassia’s essay explores the role of war – and its attendant political dimensions – in the Female Spectator and the Parrot and reveals how each periodical engages the subject in distinctly different ways. The Female Spectator, which discusses the complex events known War of the Austrian Succession (1740–8) and many specific incidents that received extensive publicity, often seamlessly weaves descriptions of soldiers, military commanders, military equipment, battles, and political events into broader discussions of cultural, social, and political events. By contrast, the Parrot discusses global and domestic military events. Reading the war in both these periodicals, Ingrassia contends, enriches our understanding of Haywood and her strategic structuring of her periodicals, and also complicates women’s periodicals of this time.