Audience and goal

The goal of this edition is to familiarize a diverse audience—composed of non-specialists, advanced undergraduates, and scholars—with this remarkable periodical “by the Author of The Female Quixote.” Besides providing the first critical edition of the text in full, this edition offers modernized and unmodernized versions of the articles as a basis for including Lennox’s literary nonfiction into the canon of English literature. In order to provide the fullest possible representation of Lennox’s prose, we edited all articles as individual entities and in their original context—the sequence they initially appeared to readers in 1761-62. In doing so, we aim to preserve textual integrity and to enable users’ appreciation of this early magazine’s innovative juxtaposition of genres and stunning visual elements. Finally, a series of critical introductions aimed at non-specialists offers a range of different contexts for reading, and appreciating, The Lady’s Museum in its rightful place in the history of literature, women’s writing, and journalism.

Because The Lady’s Museum was not revised after its two-volume edition, and because copies of the original issues are (sadly) not available for public nor scholarly perusal, we used the edition held at the British Library, digitized on Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) and transcribed by the Text Creation Partnership (TCP) (vol. 1 and vol. 2) as the base text for this edition.

Source texts

Modernization

This edition will provide two separate versions of each article.

Teaching Edition

The first edition will offer a modernized version of the articles, updating the spelling and punctuation of the original text. (Forthcoming) These modernized versions, however, are not translations. Archaic words are retained and glossed for modern readers.

Scholarly Edition (Forthcoming)

The second edition will offer a transcription of the articles without any regularization of spelling or punctuation. For corrections silently made to transcription and printing errors in the Scholarly Edition, please consult the Lemma.

Glosses

Our annotations offer brief definitions of unusual words, translations of non-English languages, and citations for literary and eighteenth-century cultural references. For definitions, we cite Johnson’s Dictionary Online; for entries not present in Johnson’s dictionary, we cite the most relevant Oxford English Dictionary entry for 1760–61.

Format and page setup

Article series in the teaching edition are offered as printable PDFs, oriented in portrait mode. Page numbers are placed in the right margin.