ABSTRACT
Structuring the male homosociality of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the “bachelor,” one of Maga’s most familiar “types,” shapes Blackwood’s’ complex configurations of and responses to women. The series of essays analyzed here (1817–19), beginning with “Letters of an Old Bachelor,” uses “feminine” issues—fashion, the marriage market, domestic topics—as tropes to mediate the larger, masculinized concerns of the periodical project. As women are both producers and consumers in periodical culture, Blackwood’s embraces its duallygendered audience by invoking multiple femininities through competing views of women in its pages, while carefully maintaining the primacy of its masculinity under the governing principle of a bachelor typology.
