The Lady’s Magazine: Understanding the Emergence of a Genre

On this page you will find a fully annotated index to the just over 15000 text items in the Lady’s Magazine; or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex from its first series (1770 to 1818).

To find out more about the magazine’s history, contents and authors, please see this introduction or visit our project blog. The index is the work of Professor Jennie Batchelor, Dr Koenraad Claes and Dr Jenny DiPlacidi and was funded by a Leverhulme Research Project Grant (2014-2016).

The index is intended to be a complete research guide to the most popular and enduring monthly periodical for women of the long eighteenth century. The magazine ran for 13 issues of 50 to 60 twin-columned pages every year for many decades. Working with such a vast archive is logistically challenging even in the digital age. Titles in the magazine are often profoundly misleading, the magazine’s own editors often mistakenly paginated items and OCR is not always reliable. Our index helps readers navigate these and many other issues besides and provides a wealth of information on authors and sources not present in the magazine itself.

The index is presented in the form of an Excel spreadsheet, which can be downloaded by following the link below. In addition, we are delighted to announce that our index is also available (on open access) in web-format as part of Adam Matthew Digital’s Eighteenth-Century Journals website.

Once items of interest are identified you can locate them in the magazine, which can be accessed in a variety of ways. Sadly, no copyright library holds a complete run of the Lady’s Magazine, but there are significant runs of it at the British Library and at Birmingham Central Library. (For more details on holdings across the county please use COPAC.) Fortunately, many issues of the magazine have been digitised for the Hathi Trust Digital Library, where they can be read and downloaded free of charge. A complete digital facsimile of the entire run of the Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832) can be found in the Adam Matthew Digital subscription database Eighteenth-Century Journals V.

Download the index (4.4MB .xlsx).