Travel Writing and Mediation in the Lady’s Magazine: Charting ‘the meridian of female reading’

Abstract

A regular feature of eighteenth-century periodicals, travel narratives allowed magazine readers to imagine their relationship to the world outside of Britain. Via detailed accounts of a range of serialised, excerpted and abridged travel writings in the Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832), JoEllen DeLucia’s essay reveals the role mediation and magazine culture played in producing readers’ sense of women as both self-interested members of the British Empire. Reading texts such as the magazine’s serialisation of Cook’s voyages and the Embassy of Lord Macartney alongside oriental tales and exotic fashion plates, the chapter argues that, on the one hand, travel writing made the world a smaller place, while on the other, its discussions of global politics and theories of good governance, extended the parameters of the feminine sphere. In examining the complex horizontal identifications that magazine travel narratives fostered, DeLucia concludes that women’s magazines present an alternative to the well-worn scripts we have developed about women readers that revolve around the domestic and often very English novel.