ABSTRACT
Between July 1709 and March 1710, in London’s crowded market for periodical literature there appeared thrice weekly a series of 115 essays under the opening title of the Female Tatler; By Mrs. Crackenthorpe, A LADY THAT KNOWS EVERYTHING. The most obvious marketing strategy of this paper’s self-presentation is that it imitates and complicates the title of Richard Steele’s highly successful periodical, the Tatler, which had begun its remarkable run a few months earlier in April of 1709.1 While precise authorship of the Female Tatler remains uncertain, recent scholarship has attributed substantial editorial credit to Delarivier Manley, perhaps best known for her Tory political writings and her amatory romans à clef.2 Tempting but inconclusive evidence for Manley’s authorship comes from the fact that the periodical breaks off temporarily in the middle of its exceptionally long run just at the moment when Manley herself was taken into government custody under charges of libel brought about by her attack on the Whig administration in The New Atalantis (1709); in Female Tatler 51, the last number of the fi rst part of the series, Mrs. Crackenthorpe suggestively claims she so “resent[s] the affront offered to her by some rude citizens altogether unacquainted with her person” that she will “resign her pretensions of writing The Female Tatler” (FT 117).3 The paper picks up again later that very week, advertising on its title page that it is now “Written by a Society of Ladies,” without further mention of the “affront” to its original author fi gure (FT 119).
