The Lady’s Museum Project
The Lady’s Museum was among the most important early periodicals largely written by one of the most important authors of the eighteenth century, Charlotte Lennox, whose proto-feminist, multi-genre writing is beginning to receive the critical and pedagogical attention it deserves. Yet despite the historical, literary, and cultural significance of the Lady’s Museum and Lennox, no authoritative critical edition has existed—until now. This critical edition serves as a starting point for filling the gap in Lennox and periodical scholarship and teaching, even as it presents the magazine to new audiences—especially nonspecialists and undergraduate students.
This website presents the first critical edition of the Lady’s Museum in two formats: a nonspecialist edition intended for a public and undergraduate audience, and a specialist edition intended for scholars.
In phase 1 of the project schedule (2021–2023), we created the platform for the teaching edition and activities for teachers, students, and volunteers to begin reading and participating in our vision of a social edition. In phase 2 (2022-2023), we are implementing improvements to complete the modernized version aimed at non-specialists, including undergraduates, and working with libraries and special collections to make all Lady’s Museum images available freely on this site. In phase 3 (2024–25), we intend to lead a transnational and transdisciplinary team of scholars to improve the unmodernized version of the text, intended for scholars to read alongside and compare to the modernized and original versions of the text, by providing contextual apparatus including minimal glosses, and essays.
Significance
In the past ten years, literary critics and historians began focusing on women-penned periodicals after years of favoring male writers and fiction and poetry. Long overdue, Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690-1820s, edited by Jennie Batchelor and Manushag N. Powell (2018), was the first comprehensive study of women’s periodicals in the eighteenth-century field. Susan Carlile’s biography of Charlotte Lennox, Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind (2018) has inspired scholars to dig deeper into the literary works of the author who penned The Female Quixote (1752). However, Lennox’s periodicals remain behind the paywalls of libraries, universities, and digital databases. The goal of this digital edition is to familiarize a diverse audience—composed of non-specialists, advanced undergraduates, and scholars—with Lennox’s periodical. Besides providing a reliable edition of Lennox’s Ladies Museum (1760-61), this edition maintains Lennox’s textual authority while supplying a basis for including Lennox’s periodical in the canon of English literature.
Open-access digital projects such as this edition give scholars, students, and instructors access to eighteenth-century texts and pedagogical tools in ways that are more cost-effective and more conducive to online, interactive modes of learning than the traditional, printed book. This edition participates in this tradition by providing open access to Lennox’s periodical including scholarly and pedagogical contextual apparatus and resources. It builds on Oxford University’s Text Creation Partnership (TCP), transposing of the periodical’s text from the Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) editions to contextualize the periodical by categorizing and tagging articles for increased navigability, adding images from this visually stunning publication, modernizing the text for a non-specialist audience, and adding explanatory footnotes and introductory, contextual and scholarly essays. The site also includes sample lesson plans and other teaching materials for teachers including suggested assignments that ask students to critically annotate articles or images from the periodical.
Who is responsible for this edition?
Editors
This edition is a collaboration between Co-editors Karenza Sutton-Bennett and Kelly Plante with pedagogical material contributed by Susan Carlile (Professor of English, California State University, Long Beach). Over the 2021–22 academic year, Karenza and Kelly conceived of the scope and aims of the edition and received the 2021 Canadian Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies (CSECS) D. W. Smith Fellowship. This funding enabled us to purchase the site’s domain and server and assists our development and maintenance of the site as a scholarly and pedagogical community devoted toLennox, the Lady’s Museum, and eighteenth-century women writers and periodicals. Kelly and Karenza produced drafts of the articles for the edition, and composed the framework and basis for the critical introductions, leaving ideas for students to sign up to write and publish their work on the site. Kelly and Karenza serve as general editors, checking the edition against manuscript copies, producing pedagogical and other content, and teaching and presenting the Lady’s Museum and the Lady’s Museum Project in classrooms internationally.
Kelly received her PhD at Wayne State University in Detroit in Spring/Summer 2023 semester. Her dissertation, Death Writing: Gender and Necropolitics in the Atlantic World (1660–1840), posits that the eighteenth-century newsprint obituary consolidated various life-writing forms’ functions into one: the instant biography and timely notification of death we know it as today, capitalizing on the power of the recently deceased. In 2021 the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies awarded the Graduate Research Paper Prize for her research on Eliza Haywood’s periodical, the Female Spectator (an important precursor to Lennox’s Lady’s Museum).
Karenza received her PhD at the University of Ottawa. Her thesis is titled The Female Guise: the Untold Story of Female Education in English Periodicals. She co-wrote “Teaching Sophia and The Lady’s Museum at an HSI” for Aphra Behn Online (ABO) with Carlile as part of a pedagogical series on teaching eighteenth-century women writers in the classroom, published in Fall 2021.
Contributors
We thank Susan Carlile for her co-creation of the course reader and curriculum with Karenza and for her support, generosity, and guidance. In 2020, Sutton-Bennett and Carlile began co-writing an article on teaching Charlotte Lennox and the Lady’s Museum to undergraduates and creating a reader for classroom use. While working together in a writing group spinoff of the Write with Aphra Summer Writing Program offered in 2020 by ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830, Karenza shared with Kelly her enthusiasm for Charlotte Lennox through her dissertation research and collaborative article with Susan, and Kelly shared her enthusiasm for creating digital critical editions of early-modern works by and about women including mini-editions of Lennox’s predecessor Eliza Haywood. Thus, the project is a culmination of Karenza and Kelly’s work together in the present-day coterie co-created by Kirsten Saxton (Professor of English, Mills College) and Bethany Qualls, PhD (University of California, Davis).
In fall 2021, Jenny Factor (doctoral student in English, Brandeis University) kindly welcomed us into her introductory literature class in fall 2021 to guest-lecture on the Lady’s Museum Project, digital humanities, and the History of Harriot and Sophia. Brandeis University funded Jenny to work as an intern to work with us to record the Trifler essays for the Lady’s Librivox in summer 2022. (For more on Jenny’s experience interning, see Brandeis’s Selected PhD internships page and Inside HigherEd’s coverage of the program.)
Lisa Maruca (associate professor of English, Wayne State University) kindly welcomed us into her fall 2021 “Mediating the Global Eighteenth Century” advanced undergraduate- and graduate-level class, to present draft versions of the Lady’s Geography series and beta-test our glossing exercise.
In fall 2022, Ashley Bender invited us into her class at Texas Woman’s University to lecture on audiobook production and the digital humanities.
In winter 2022, Karenza taught History of Harriot and Sophia and Kelly guest-lectured in her literature class, and Victoria E. Burke (Professor of English, University of Ottawa) kindly welcomed us to guest-teach the Trifler essays in her book history class.
In winter 2023, Karen Griscom taught with the Lady’s Museum Project in her class at Community College of Rhode Island. Her class glossed the History of Princess Padmani article, and their annotations are now available in our course reader. the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) Women’s Caucus generously awarded the Editing and Translation Prize to the Lady’s Museum Project. We thank the Women’s Caucus for their generous support of this work.
In summer 2023, Wayne State University Internship Coordinator Jared Grogan (associate professor of teaching, Wayne State University) added the project to the list of available internships for WSU students. Luckily for us, Bailey Meyerhoff (MA student, Wayne State University) was interested and the Wayne State University College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) generously funded 10 hours per week for Meyerhoff to write critical introductions and record for the Lady’s LibriVox. Bailey had previously worked with Kelly and Jaime Goodrich (Director of Humanities Center and professor of English at Wayne State University) on the feminist digital humanities project Gertrude More: Piety and Politics in a Benedictine Convent, and she brought significant expertise to both feminist editing theory and praxis and early modern women’s literature and history. We thank Jared and the CLAS for enabling our vision and mission of funding editorial and digital student labor, and Bailey for her dedication and collegiality in learning, reading, and writing with us this summer.
Kelly would also like to thank Simone Chess (Director of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies (GSW) and associate professor at Wayne State University) and Jaime for their guidance and formative mentorship on the creation and editing of critical editions. For more information on these projects, see the WSU CLAS Article “From Warrior Women to Benedictine Nuns: Two New Digital Humanities Projects.”
Learn More
For further historical and scholarly context into the Lady’s Museum—and insight on the value of teaching it—see Susan Carlile and Karenza Sutton-Bennett’s 2022 Aphra Behn Online (ABO) article: “Teaching the Lady’s Museum and Sophia: Imperialism, Early Feminism, and Beyond.”
For our schedule for updating the teaching and scholarly editions on this site, see Kelly Plante’s 2022 Aphra Behn Online (ABO) article: “The Lady’s Museum Project: A Digital Critical Edition in Phase 1 of Its Development, Now Available for Teachers and Students to Learn Collaboratively through Charlotte Lennox’s Lady’s Museum (1761-62).”
For the principles governing our editing of the Lady’s Museum text, see Editing Protocols.
For how to browse, download, and cite articles in this edition, see How to Use this Edition.
For an idea of the kind of the flexibility offered to our interns to tailor the work to their professionalization needs and interests, see Reflections on Interning with the Lady’s Museum Project by Spring/Summer 2023 intern Bailey Meyerhoff.