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Nicola Parsons’ essay explores at length importance of the Ladies Mercury (1693), the first periodical addressed specifically to women, insisting upon its independence from Dunton’s Athenian Mercury (1690–7) that was its inspiration. Soliciting queries from both female and male readers on all matters of particular interest to women, the paper devoted equal space to readers’ questions as to its own advice, giving pride of place not just to women but to those who find their interests interesting. It also frequently differs from the Athenian: in Parsons’ reading, the Ladies Mercury emerges as an alternative, and not a lesser offshoot, of Dunton’s famous paper. The Ladies Mercury thus establishes the rising interest in a feminocentric epistolary practice in the periodical press, and expands the space available to serious treatments of suchcrucial matters as private life, domesticity, and courtship.

This chapter examines how John Dunton, editor and publisher of the Athenian Mercury, and his colleagues advanced the notion of the feminine private sphere in the 1690s. The Athenian Mercury filled a unique niche in the late seventeenth century, a time of political turmoil and cultural transition. Traditional notions of gendered identities were in flux, necessitating a reconceptualization of male and female roles. After the turn of the century, that reconceptualization was supplied by Dunton explicitly. This chapter first provides a background on the Athenian Mercury before discussing Dunton's decision to open the pages of his publication to inquiries from women amid complaints from some male readers. It then considers the questions and answers on gendered topics that appeared in the Athenian Mercury and how Dunton addressed the public/private distinction with regard to women's sphere.

Highlighting the role that surveillance culture and rhetoric plays in early periodical writing, Slaney Chadwick Ross argues that women’s surveillance activities and the contributions of female correspondents were a crucial element to the periodical eidolon’s emergent authority. Through the provocative pairing of John Dunton’s Ladies Mercury (1693) with Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s Spectator (1711–12), Ross unspools how conventions of which forms of female representation would come to be championed in periodical culture, arguing in the process that Dunton’s venture was the more radical of the twain. In the Mercury, women are allowed to testify to their own experiences, and they are believed when they do so: this was not at all in keeping with the broader the legal or literary trends that would emerge in the decades that followed.

Dustin Stewart revisits the well-known but poorly understood relationship between John Dunton and Elizabeth Singer Rowe, the ‘Pindarick Lady’ whose poetry became a major feature of Dunton’s game-changing Athenian Mercury (1691–7). Rowe’s periodical verse, often downplayed by modern critics, was pivotal in shaping her future fame and career, argues Stewart, as she and Dunton, as well as contemporary figures such as John Norris and Mary Astell, navigated differing views on the theme of ‘Platonick Love.’ Through Dunton, Rowe evolved from reader to periodicalist to poet, making good use of her early work and eventually leaving Dunton behind.

This chapter discusses Aaron Hill's early life from 1685-1711. He has mastered the art of self-invention at an early age, publishing a lavish oriental travelogue at age 24 with a subscription list of 424 names vaunting his contacts with the rich and powerful. In 1708, Hill networked to establish a literary career for himself in London and collaborated with Nahum Tate on the Celebrated Speeches of Ajax and Ulysses, promoted as rhetorical guidebook for youth, and launched the British Apollo, a question-and-answer journal modelled on John Dunton's Athenian Mercury. At age 26, as director of opera at the Queen's Theatre in the Haymaker, Hill co-wrote and staged Rinaldo, Handel's first original opera for the English stage. In the published libretto, Hill presented himself as a well-travelled musical connoisseur familiar with European operatic vogues, intent on making ‘the English OPERA more splendid than her MOTHER, the Italian’.

One of the questions published in the 23 May 1691 issue of The Athenian Mercury (1690-7) was ‘Whether it be proper for Women to be Learned?’ In this essay, James Wood takes the question of the propriety of women's education and the learned woman as a lens through which to read a selection of periodicals and magazines from the 1690s to the 1820s. Through detailed case studies of the Ladies’ Diary (1704–1841), Ladies Mercury (1693), Female Tatler (1709–10), Female Spectator (1744–6), Lady’s Museum (1760–6), and Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832), Wood elucidates how periodicals offer unique insights into: how women participated in the wider culture of learning across the long eighteenth century; how learning was incorporated into women’s lives; how women’s learning was understood and variously negotiated by the periodical press; and the role that gender difference played in what in meant to be learned across the long eighteenth century.

The editors of this volume assert that periodical studies and feminist studies within the British eighteenth century are inseparable activities. While male authors dominated eighteenth-century periodicals, it does not follow that the form itself existed or could have existed independent of women: quite the opposite was true. From John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury (1690–7) to the Tatler (1709–11) and Spectator (1710-11), to Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator (1744–6), to the magazines like the Lady’s Museum (1760–1) or Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832) that filled out the later portion of the period, women were avid readers of, contributors to, and consumers fostered through periodical culture: the form was thoroughly tied up in the ‘fair-sexing’ upon which it founded itself – but, the editors contend, ‘fair-sexing’ is only one part of the story. Tracing the conditions that affect periodical scholarship, such as limited publishers’ archives and the challenges of digital scholarship, the introduction also considers the question of readership, and, with it, nomenclature: what does it mean to call a periodical a Lady’s paper? Resisting the traditional separation between essay and magazine, this introduction seeks to alert the reader to a more flexible and capacious understanding of how periodicals interact with one another, and with the women who enable them.