Chair: Sara Lodge

During the late eighteenth-century, conduct books competed with the novel for a 'proper' young lady's attention. One encouraged women "to conceal any blemishes and set off your beauties" using dress, dancing, music and drawing. The other supposedly corrupted its female readers by displaying, and thereby encouraging them to commit, wild acts of unrestrained passion - certainly the opposite intent of any conduct manual! The nineteenth-century audience accepted the passionate form and clamored for more women's voices. As a result, literary annuals and women's magazines overwhelmingly captured the fancy of middle class women in England and America. But how far did any of these literary forms stray from the original conduct manual? Even in its appearance, the literary annual represented a delicate femininity clothed in a silk dress; magazines entertained women with recipes, the latest fashions and poetry. These literary forms attempt to define 'femininity,' and some even to revolutionize it, but they all had an agreed-upon mission to educate or civilize women.

In this panel, the three presenters will focus on these closely allied forms of nineteenth-century media. Dr. Ledbetter will investigate the civilizing mission of magazine editors and poetry. Dr. Linley continues this conversation by focusing on poetry as a didactic and educational cornerstone of the literary annual's mission. Dr. Harris acknowledges these civilizing and educating missions but turns the conversation to short stories and an eventual subversion of feminine propriety caused by the literary annual's Gothic short stories.