Jane Austen’s voracious reading of novels and plays is well known. But she is generally thought, however, to have made a deliberate decision to ‘keep out’ of the popular periodicals and magazines that flourished in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The evidence strongly suggests that this was far from the truth. Not only did her brothers famously launch a periodical but Jane Austen read newspapers and magazines and, after her death, her works were discussed widely in them. This illustrated talk by Jennie Batchelor (University of York) looks at Jane Austen’s indebtedness to periodicals and her playful reuse of their contents in her novels.

Speaker: Jennie Batchelor joined the University of York in 2023 as Professor and Head of English and Related Literature after nearly 20 years at the University of Kent. She has published widely on eighteenth-century women’s writing, periodicals and material culture (especially needlework, which she also practises). In 2020 she published (with Alison Larkin) the popular history-craft book Jane Austen Embroidery (Pavilion). Her most recent monograph, The Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832) and the Making of Literary History (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), won the 2023 Colby Scholarly Book Prize awarded by the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals.

Details and booking: https://hampshirearchivestrust.co.uk/events/jane-austen-and-the-magazines-2