ABSTRACT
This chapter purports to examine the interplay between history and the essay periodical in the 18th century starting with the most famous and most influential of them all, Joseph Addison's and Richard Steele's Spectator (1711–1712; 1714). Its aim is to trace the influence the Spectator's conception of historical representation exercised on later periodicals, and particularly on two women's monthly journals: Eliza Haywood's Female Spectator (1744–45), and Charlotte Lennox's The Lady's Museum (1760–61). The Spectator implicitly inferred that women's sight prevented them from producing valuable historical narratives and led them to produce immoral and deficient narratives. It seems that this discourse was currently held to denounce the scandalous subhistorical genre of secret memoirs female writers were accused of writing. This paper therefore offers to examine the way Haywood and Lennox, who published history in their periodicals, reconciled writing history with femininity and contributed both to popularising history among female readers as well as to defending women's rights to produce and make history in the way they thought fit.
