• The Woman Reader and What She Wanted
• Emma Liggins (bio)

Many periodical researchers will have a well-thumbed copy of A Magazine of Her Own? on their bookshelf, particularly if they work on women’s magazines and/or the nineteenth century. Although its preface declares that, despite its range, it is “by no means the whole history of the magazine for women,” what it did offer was a challenge to the ways in which the magazine had been positioned within women’s history.¹ The questions raised by the book about readerships, women’s regulation of the home, training for domestic roles, the ways in which adverts addressed women, household management, or the magazine’s status as commodity have been shown to generate and stimulate new fields of enquiry across periodical studies and media studies since its publication. Research into the expansion of women’s print media in the long nineteenth century, a time when the Victorian woman’s claims to a magazine of her own would increasingly come to fruition, has been shaped by these questions.

The originality of A Magazine of Her Own? certainly has many strands, but I want to highlight two here: its interrogation of readership and its focus on advertising. Whilst travelling by train to Ghent in 2015 to attend the RSVP conference on “Life and Death in the Nineteenth-Century Press,” a group of us nearly missed our stop because we had engaged Margaret in a conversation about whether it was ever correct to speak of readerships in the plural (she said it was, and we did manage to get off in time). Her fascination with issues of readership, not only with the ambiguous woman reader but also with lower-class readers or the ideological positioning of the woman at home, was clearly evident in this publication, which linked the reading of nineteenth-century periodicals to desire, consumption, the creation of the house beautiful, the emerging New Woman, and commodity culture. Advancing feminist work on readership by Judith Fetterley, Kate Flint, and others, the introduction shows how readers can both resist and negotiate their positions, how “the magazine as a form empowers its readers in specific ways which encourage the possibility of diverse readings.”² [End Page 611] The potential subversiveness of the periodical text can be linked to its “radical heterogeneity,” its empowering diversity.³ The focus on interviews with women writers and activists, advice columns, and readers’ letters helped to invigorate debates about the woman reader, women’s uses of magazines for political purposes, and the complex identity of the female editor, all strands which have been taken up in the endeavours of the next generation of researchers. Paying attention to the consumption of the magazine and women readers’ participation in the genre through letters and competitions has become essential to the ways in which we approach periodicals.

The critical interrogation of advertising, particularly the fashion plates and the corset controversy signalled in the iconic Queen advert from the book’s cover, also show A Magazine of Her Own? to be ahead of its time. Sometimes dismissed as ephemeral or peripheral to the main text, advertisements for a whole range of products from cocoa to corsets are now recognised as important signifiers of the periodical brand and house style. “These papers live mainly by their advertisements,” Evelyn March-Phillips noted in an article on “Women’s Newspapers” in 1894, and this apt epi-graph to the chapter “Advancing into Commodity Culture” heralded an important framework for the women’s press.⁴ Over the last twenty years the visuality of the magazine, what Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor have memorably called “the lure of illustration,” has taken centre stage, and most approaches to the periodical now take account of its verbal/visual dynamics, “all possible juxtapositions of text and image.”⁵ Adverts were always part of this allure and were inextricable from the magazine’s status as commodity. The redefinition of readers as consumers, argued Beetham, was inseparable from the growth of advertising in the era of the New Journalism. Situating the development of the New Journalism and the New Femininity in the history of the development of advertising, this argument advanced the...

• 女读者和她想要的
• 艾玛·利金斯（生物）

许多期刊研究人员都会得到精心设计的《自己的杂志》副本。放在他们的书架上，尤其是当她们在女性杂志和/或19世纪工作时。尽管其序言宣称，尽管涉及范围很广，但它“绝不是女性杂志的全部历史”，但它所提供的内容对该杂志在女性历史中的定位方式提出了挑战。^1个该书提出的有关读者群，妇女对家庭的监管，对家庭角色的培训，广告对女性的处理方式，家庭管理或杂志作为商品的地位等问题已显示并在整个期刊中产生并激发了新的研究领域自出版以来就进行研究和媒体研究。十九世纪以来，维多利亚时代妇女对自己的杂志的主张越来越多地成为现实，对女性印刷媒体的扩展的研究就受到这些问题的影响。

她自己的杂志的原创性？当然有很多方面，但是我想在这里强调两点：对读者的审问和对广告的关注。在2015年乘火车前往根特参加“十九世纪出版社的生与死” RSVP会议时，我们中的一些人几乎错过了我们的停留时间，因为我们与玛格丽特进行了一次对话，谈论说话是否正确的读者人数以复数形式出现（她说是的，我们的确做到了及时赶下车）。她对读者群的迷恋，不仅是对模棱两可的女性读者的痴迷，还是对下层阶级读者或女性在家庭中的意识形态定位的迷恋，在这份出版物中都可以清楚地看到，该出版物将19世纪期刊的阅读与欲望联系在一起，消费，美丽房屋的创造，新兴的新女人和商品文化。² [结束第611页]期刊文本的潜在颠覆性可以与其“自由基异质性”联系起来，从而赋予其多样性。³对女性作家和活动家的采访，建议专栏和读者来信的重点有助于激发关于女性读者，女性将杂志用于政治目的以及女性编辑的复杂身份的辩论，这些观点全都被采纳。致力于下一代研究人员的努力。重视杂志的消费以及女性读者通过信件和竞赛参与该类型作品已成为我们处理期刊的必不可少的方式。

广告的批判性审问，尤其是从书的封面上的标志性女王广告中暗示的时装板块和紧身胸衣的争议，还显示了《自己的杂志》？领先于时代。从可可到紧身胸衣的全系列产品的广告有时被视为暂时性或主要内容的外围词，现在被认为是期刊品牌和家庭风格的重要标志。伊夫琳·马克斯·菲利普斯（Evelyn March-Phillips）在1894年发表的一篇关于《妇女报纸》的文章中指出：“这些报纸主要靠广告来生存。”这本题为“推进商品文化”一章的题词预示着妇女新闻界的重要框架。⁴在过去的20年中，该杂志的视觉效果被劳雷尔·布雷克（Laurel Brake）和玛丽莎·德莫尔（Marysa Demoor）令人难忘地称为“插图的诱惑”，成为了舞台的焦点，现在该期刊的大多数方法都考虑了其语言/视觉动态，“文字和图像可能并列。” ⁵广告始终是这种魅力的一部分，与杂志作为商品的地位密不可分。Beetham认为，将读者重新定义为消费者与新新闻时代的广告增长密不可分。这一论点是在广告发展史上处于新新闻学和新女性主义发展的背景下，从而推动了...