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Submitting articles to The Lady magazine

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Written By Christiana Walter

10 Women’s Magazines that Pay Freelance Writers

Several women’s magazines have weathered today’s turbulent publishing market. Here are ten publications with topics that run the gamut from style and beauty, to politics, to women’s health features.

For a counterpoint to these magazines, be sure to check out our list of Feminist Magazines.

  • Cosmopolitan

The classic magazine brings love, relationship, career, and beauty/style to 20-to-40-something women. Here is the list of editors for Cosmpolitan.com, as well as the print magazine. Searching each particular editor on the website will uncover their emails. Bonus tip: Cosmo is currently taking submissions for personal essays about college. Find out more here.

  • Woman’s Day

Woman’s Day is a fun, down-to-earth publication that features parenting tips, car reviews, and articles about relationships.  Here are their writer’s guidelines. They are a bit stringent about only accepting pitches from writers with clips from national publications, but even if you’re a beginning writer, you can bookmark their guidelines for the future.

  • Elle Magazine

Elle features high fashion, culture, and women’s issues. Check out their editor list here to pitch your story. The magazine has been going in different directions in recent years, so they may have room for both new and experienced writers.

“The premiere lifestyle, fashion, and beauty magazine for African-American women,” Essence has been a popular magazine for decades. Click here for specific query-writing instructions in their writing guidelines.

  • Good Housekeeping

Good Housekeeping is a classic women’s magazine whose primary audience is married, working women with children. Known for its recipes and articles about issues everyday women face, Good Housekeeping has a few ongoing submission topics if you’re looking for ideas. Here are the submission guidelines.

  • Marie Claire

An international monthly magazine for women, Marie Claire was originally published in France in the 1930s. Since then it has become a staple magazine covering fashion, career advice, and politics. Check out their submission guidelines under About Us (scroll down a little ways) here.

  • Ms. Magazine

Debuting in the 70’s Ms. is a magazine that discusses a variety of issues from a feminist perspective. Click here for a complete masthead, and if you keep scrolling down you’ll find blog and magazine submission instructions as well.

A general women’s publication, Redbook’s audience is women 25-35 who are often navigating life transitions like getting married or having children. The magazine focuses on topics like parenting, relationships, and more. This is your chance to write about relatable, modern issues that women tackle. Click here for your writer’s guidelines.

Oxygen is a women’s health magazine that features training, workouts, nutrition tips, and other relevant information. Find the list of editors’ emails here.

  • Bitch Magazine

Bitch Magazine skews a bit younger (though it’s for gen-exers and boomers as well!), with a sharp, analytical focus on media and popular culture. It features news curation, thoughtful commentary, and provocative personal essays. Click here to learn about Contributor guidelines.

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How to Write For Women's Magazines

Writing for women’s magazines is a lucrative and easy way of getting into print. Most National magazines have readerships in the thousands – some in the millions – so your name can gain huge exposure through this medium. Indeed, many writers who have had stories published regularly by women’s magazines go on to build their careers in writing through short stories and novels, helped by the exposure gained from stories they’ve had published in women’s magazines.

Is it simple to do?

The process of submitting a story couldn’t be more straightforward: firstly write your story, secondly send it to the fiction editor of the magazine of your choice – and in a few weeks you’ll know if it’s going to be published! No agents, no publishers, no mystifying contracts, advances or royalties! Women’s Magazines usually pay a one-time fee for your story and you retain copyright. That means that you are free to sell the story again sometime to another magazine! Payments range usually between £100 – £300 (approx. $200-$600) per story, depending on the magazine and story length. And as the story length seldom exceeds 2,000 words, that’s a great rate of pay!

‘That’s fine,’ I hear you say, ‘but what do I write about?’

That’s a good question. All women’s magazines have target markets. For some – let’s say UK ‘Best’, it’s younger women who enjoy stories that are “young, fresh and lively” – their words, not mine! Not too clear, is it? I’ve found that the very best way – indeed, some writers for women’s magazines say the only way to find out the type of story required is – to buy the magazine. That’s right! You don’t have to subscribe for a year, just get hold of a few recent copies and they’ll give you an idea of what it is the editor’s looking for at the moment. And that’s important, because women’s magazines requirements for stories can change – maybe they have had a run of ‘twist in the tail’ type stories and are now looking for light romance, or more humorous tales. So it’s good to know what’s hot right now.

Are there any storylines that don’t sell?

Not many, but there are some things to remember when writing stories for this market:

The main character is usually a woman.

Stories don’t often contain more than three or four characters.

Any story containing explicit sex, violence or any form of cruelty will be REJECTED!

Ghost stories are fine as long as they’re not too frightening or horrific.

Stories containing divorce-in-process storylines are unlikely to succeed.

Although many women’s magazines say that they don’t expect good old-fashioned boy-meets-girl kind of storylines, this type of story is still a favorite. Most stories are quite simple – after all, you just haven’t got time in 1,000 words for a complex plot! – and easy to read. Don’t baffle your reader with jargon or use overlong words or flowery prose – be simple, direct and write your story for your reader – not for you.

Why do stories have to be a certain length – my stories are longer!

Here we hit a ‘fact of life’ point. Women’s magazines – and all other newspapers and periodicals – assign a certain amount of space for each feature, article and advertisement. The reason that stories are usually either 1,000 or 2,000 words is simply because 1,000 words fits comfortably onto a single side of one page of the magazine, 2,000 onto two sides, and so on. And that’s it! If you write a story that’s 1,500 words long you’re in a very uncomfortable zone as far as they are concerned – you simply don’t fit! It then means one of two things must happen – either you edit the story down ruthlessly to 1,000 words or ‘pad’ it to 2,000.

There are a few exceptions. These apply to UK women’s magazines but are common to this type of publication in the USA, Australia and anywhere else this type of magazine is printed. They’re usually called ‘Fiction Specials’ and are normally printed in Summer, near Christmas and other times dependent on the magazine in question. One of note in the UK is ‘My Weekly’. These Fiction Specials are just that – little in the way of advertising or regular in-house features are to be found – instead, they are cover-to-cover short stories and, as such, are a goldmine for writers! Here word lengths can vary from 1,000 to 6,000 or more, with no absolute length required – though if you take my tip you should still stick to multiples of 500 words.

So it’s easy to get my story published, then!

I didn’t say that! It’s easy to submit your story and you’ll get a quick decision – but competition is fierce and only the best make it. I’ve had literally dozens of stories rejected – but I still write them. Why? Well, as a writer you have to learn to take rejection. It’s not personal. It doesn’t mean you can’t write or that your story was terrible (although both of these might be a factor!). No – it could be any of the following –

The magazine recently accepted a story on much the same lines as yours.

They may have a full ‘book’ of stories like yours.

They just don’t feel it fits in with what they want to print right now.

Your story might have been targeted at the wrong readership for them

And a variety of other reasons. One thing: please – if your story is rejected do not call the editor to ask for an explanation/berate them for a fool/tear them a new one or anything else. It will do no good and I can personally guarantee that you will never, ever have a story published with that magazine – ever!

So what do I do if my story does get rejected?

Simple. Re-read it. Could you have written it better? Is the word-length right? Did you, in fact, send it to the right magazine? If that’s No, yes, yes – then put it away for a while and write another. It may well be that it’s been rejected for any one of the reasons above. If you can’t honestly answer ‘No, yes, yes’ – and be honest with yourself – then get to work. Re-write it. Edit it. Send it to a magazine more in tune with your storyline. And one day you will get that acceptance letter!

Are there any purely story-content women’s magazines out there?

In the UK – and that’s my market – I know of only one, and it’s world-famous. It’s called ‘The People’s Friend’ and is published by D.C Thompson & Co. of Dundee, Scotland. It’s been going for many, many years and has a (justified) reputation of helping fledgling writers with their craft. Their story requirements are a little different to most other women’s magazines – highly valued are the principles of honesty, loyalty and respect for others. If you can adapt your style to suit them it’s a great magazine to work with.

So – how do I begin?

Read the magazines! They are your very best source of information. The stories they publish will tell you how long they must be, generally what they’re looking for in a story, the kind of plots that get published and the standards of writing they expect. And there’s more! Write to most of them and ask for a copy of their fiction guidelines and they’ll send them to you – free! (Don’t forget an SAE, though!) Honestly, this is one of the very few writing markets where publishers are actively looking, all the time, for fresh talent – unpublished writers who want

Their first break! So just DO IT!

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Written by Ella Peary October 13th, 2016

Lady: Now Seeking Submissions by Female Authors

Lady is an online literary magazine of fiction, young adult fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry written by women. They publish writing by authors of all ages and backgrounds, showcasing the infinite nuances of female experience. At Lady, they hope to give all women the opportunity to share their stories—sad and happy, pretty and ugly, fun, boring, frightening, and all other emotive shades. They seek strong writing, layered with thought and meaning. To get a sense of what they publish, you can read past issues of Lady online.

Poets may submit as many poems as they want, of any length. Fiction and nonfiction writers may submit works of fiction, young adult fiction, or creative nonfiction, up to 5,000 words in length. Fiction writers may also submit works of flash fiction, 1,000 words or fewer.

Lady accepts submissions on a rolling basis. Submitting authors can expect a response within about two weeks. They accept submissions via email, but not online or by post. They do not accept simultaneous submissions, nor do they accept previously published work.

If you would like to learn more or submit to Lady, please visit their website at http://www.ladyliterarymag.com/p/submissions.html . There, you can also find resources for female authors, such as profiles and interviews of women in the writing world, as well as articles about writing and publishing written with women in mind.

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February 3, 2024

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Free Talk: The Art of Writing Immersive Worlds

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January 22, 2024

Free Talk: Write Like a Wild Thing – Six Lessons on Crafting an Unforgettable Story

Want to work with John Claude Bemis? John’s course, Plot Your Novel – Plot Your Scenes is now open for enrollment. Get in-depth feedback on your novel directly from John Claude Bemis. Learn more and enroll here.

February 22, 2024

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Ghost Orchid Press: Now Seeking Manuscript Queries

They pay advances and 50% net royalties. No agent required.

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Haymaker: Now Seeking Submissions

A new online journal seeking fiction, nonfiction, poetry, one-act plays and visual art.

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Setting the Scene for Your Story

So you can breathe life into your story and characters.

February 19, 2024

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25 New Literary Journals (Seeking Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry)

New journals seekingfiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

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writing for the lady magazine

WordMothers – for women writers & women’s writing

WordMothers – for women writers & women’s writing

Women's writing resources, interviews with female authors & reviews of books by women

Women’s Literary Journals, Magazines & Publications

The following journals and magazines specialize in writing by / for / about women. Some of these publications feature women exclusively; others are simply committed to amplifying marginalized voices, drawing attention to women’s issues, or advancing a feminist agenda. The description of each is taken directly from the associated website.

I have tagged these publications according to country of origin, but please note that many — particularly the ones publishing online only — welcome international contributions and readership.

This list is a work in progress. If you find a non-working link or newly defunct publication at any time in the future, or if you know a journal or magazine that should be added to this list, please let me know. I appreciate your help in making this list as comprehensive as possible. Thank you!

LAST UPDATED: September 2022

— Nicole Melanson

Nicole Melanson - Writer, Poet, Editor of WordMothers

13th Moon: A Feminist Literary Magazine (USA)

13th Moon: A Feminist Literary Magazine is a home for women writers, and people who want to read their work.

Adanna  (USA)

While this journal is dedicated to women, it is not exclusive, and it welcomes our counterparts and their thoughts about women today. Submissions to Adanna must reflect women’s issues or topics, celebrate womanhood, and shout out in passion.

Alaska Women Speak

Alaska Women Speak welcomes submissions in the following genres: non-fiction, poetry, fiction, memoir, creative non-fiction, and essay for our quarterly journal. We also publish work from visual artists and welcome Cover Art/Photo submissions.

A literary zine for dangerous women

ang(st) is an intersectional, transnational, diverse, inclusive, and queer feminist zine. ang(st) explores the physicality of feminism — our relationships with our bodies, with society, and with other bodies. We publish prose, poetry, and visual art. But we are open to interstitial and hybrid pieces: micros, personal essays, visual poetry, etc.

Bi Women Quarterly (USA)

BWQ features the voices of women with bi+ sexualities (i.e., bi, pan, fluid, and other non-binary sexualities).

Bone Bouquet (USA)

Bone Bouquet is a biannual online journal seeking to publish the best new writing by female poets, from artists both established and emerging.

Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers

* Now part of Creative Nonfiction

An award-winning literary magazine dedicated to motherhood.

The Brown Orient

The Brown Orient  is a commitment to uplift the marginalized: women and LGBTQIA+ writers and artists from mainland and diasporic Brown Asia, who remain to be sidelined even among their own communities.

Brown Sugar Literary Magazine (USA)

Brown Sugar  is an online womanist literary magazine for women, womxn, and womyn of color, of any nationality, sexuality, religion, or cultural diasporas that are misrepresented and underrepresented.

CALYX Journal   (USA)

A forum for women’s creative work—including work by women of color, lesbian and queer women, young women, old women— CALYX Journal breaks new ground. Each issue is packed with new poetry, short stories, full-color artwork, photography, essays, and reviews.

Canthius (Canada)

Canthius accepts submissions of poetry and short fiction from established and emerging women and queer-identified writers.

Capulet Mag

Capulet Mag is a literary magazine for Juliets everywhere. For women by women, Capulet Mag searches for the best creative fiction and art across mediums and genres.

Cauldron Anthology

A literary journal about embracing the wild feminine. Pulling from classical stories and myth, each issue will be themed around a woman or myth who embraced the dark and seductive.

We are a quarterly online magazine, sharing the work of cis women*, trans women, and nonbinary artists, writers, and creatives. We are particularly interested in work that relates to a sense of spiritual life, ecology, and community, but we welcome submissions of all kinds that reflect one’s unique stories.

Crone   (USA)

At  Crone: Women Coming of Age , we believe that the experience of aging is rich with spiritual meaning. That’s why we have created a unique magazine that honors our deep wisdom as eldering women.

Desert Rose

We are a brand new biannual literary magazine publishing short fiction, essays, and poetry by writers of color. Each issue will publish writings inspired by a theme relevant in the intersectional feminist community.

Dying Dahlia Review

We are looking for  previously unpublished  work by  women  writers and artists. We want work that is brief and powerful. We want art and photography that make us feel something profound.

The Elpis Letters

We accept writing from writers with lived experience of womanhood or misogyny in the epistolary style.

Feels Blind Literary

Feels Blind Literary  welcomes submissions of short fiction, creative nonfiction, plays, and art from new and emerging writers and artists who are nonbinary or identify as women.

FemAsia was conceived as a magazine for women, in which issues and events which impact on girls and women in our contemporary world are discussed and explored. We wish to showcase the talents, experience and perspectives of women across Asia.

The Fem Lit Mag

THE FEM is a magazine of inclusive, diverse, and feminist poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and spoken word.

For the Sonorous

For the Sonorous is a literary journal dedicated to empowering and publishing women and non-binary people of color.

Girls on Key

Submit your original poems under 40 lines for a paid slot in our email newsletter sent to 550 people each month.

GUTS  (Canada)

GUTS is a digital, volunteer-run feminist magazine and blog. Our biannual magazine publishes literary essays and reviews, long-form journalism, interviews, fiction, poetry, and new media to further feminist discourse, criticism, and community engagement in Canada.

HerStry Literary Magazine (USA)

HerStry centers the experiences of women identifying persons. HerStry publishes personal essays every Wednesday.

HerWords is The Halycone / Black Mountain Press’s newest literary journal, featuring a collection of poetry for, by, and about women. The collection provides a feminine touch on the literary world and gives women the opportunity to receive recognition for who they are and for the words they have written.

Honey Literary

Honey Literary  is a space for BIPOC (Black/Indigenous/People of Color and any combination therein). We publish BIPOC womxn, non-binary and trans people,  disabled writers, and anyone of color from the LGBTQIAP2+ community.

Hysterical  is a dudeless literary utopia where we highlight and champion the voices of writers who are women, femmes, and non-binary people.

Iris   (USA)

Iris is an award-winning, nationally acclaimed magazine for thinking young women at U.Va. and beyond.

Jahanamiya  (Saudi Arabia)

Jahanamiya is a feminist literary magazine that publishes written work exclusively by Saudi women, as well as accompanying artwork created by regional artists.

La Vague publishes female poets and artists whose work occupies the space between poetry and visual art.

Lady   (USA)

Lady   is an online literary magazine for women, by women of all ages.

Lady / Liberty / Lit

Lady/Liberty/Lit is a journal spotlighting women-identifying and gender-non-conforming writers who address experiences of, and ideas about, freedom of voice and body.

The Last Girls Club

The Last Girls Club is an indie feminist horror ‘zine interested in creative work from the female gaze.

Lavender Review

Lavender Review is an international, biannual (June & December) e-zine dedicated to poetry and art by, about, and for lesbians, including whatever LGBTQ might appeal to a lesbian readership.

Lilith  (USA)

Independent, Jewish & frankly feminist since 1976, Lilith magazine charts Jewish women’s lives with exuberance, rigor, affection, subversion and style.

Literary Mama  (International)

Literary Mama publishes literary writing about the many faces of motherhood.

Lumen is a project for (and by!) women and nonbinary people. We are interested in poetry, fiction, personal essays, and interviews that examine how we move through the world, both as complex individuals and as members of larger communities.

Luna Station Quarterly

Luna Station Quarterly publishes speculative fiction written by women-identified authors.

MANTID Magazine

MANTID  is a literary publication featuring works of horror fiction by women from intersectional backgrounds who illustrate the power of diversity through their work. The series was created to celebrate unusual underground horror writing and to serve as a platform for marginalized women in the arts. MANTID focuses on publishing genre work including Weird Fiction and Literary Horror.

Maximum Middle Age

Online zine dedicated to women who are mostly over 35.

The Menstrual: Radical Feminist Literary Magazine

The Menstrual: Radical Feminist Literary Magazine  is an independent, online literary magazine with an objective to locate, publish and promote radical feminist literary opinions in the form of essays, memoirs and auto/biographical accounts, reviews, graphic and visual arts, poetry and creative texts.

midnight & indigo

midnight & indigo is a small publisher and literary journal dedicated to short fiction and narrative essays by Black women writers.

Mezzo Cammin

A web journal devoted to formal poetry by women.

Milk  (Netherlands)

Milk  art journal is a new, limited series publication of written and visual art works by artist-mothers about motherhood.

Minerva Rising (USA)

Minerva Rising is an independent literary journal celebrating the creativity and wisdom in every woman. We publish thought-provoking fiction, non-fiction, photography, poetry and essays by women writers and artists.

Minola Review

Minola Review fosters the conversation between women, publishing strong, honest work safe from the gaze of patriarchy.

Mothers Always Write  (USA)

A monthly, online literary magazine for mothers and mother writers who consider parenting to be their highest calling. We publish essays and poetry about the mothering experience.

Mom Egg Review  (USA)

Mom Egg Review  is an annual literary journal by and about mothers and motherhood.

Ms . continues to be an award-winning magazine recognized nationally and internationally as the media expert on issues relating to women’s status, women’s rights, and women’s points of view.

Mslexia  (UK)

At Mslexia we are committed to helping women writers progress and succeed, through our quarterly magazine, writer’s diary and annual writing competitions.

Mutha Magazine

Exploring real-life motherhood, from every angle, at every stage.

Not Very Quiet (Australia)

Not Very Quiet  is a new twice yearly online journal for women poets of all ages, ethnicities and backgrounds to publish their work.

OyeDrum Magazine

OyeDrum Magazine is an online magazine for all types of explorative creative work, exclusively by women, for all audiences. Our magazine features poetry, art, creative writing, and multimedia content.

Pen + Brush / P+B Publications (USA)

P+B Publications is an independent publisher, seeking the best new work by women and non-binary authors. We publish short stories and poems in our literary magazine  Pen + Brush In Print , which is distributed in print and electronically.

(NB: P+B publishes e-Books as well as magazines.)

Persimmon Tree  (USA)

Persimmon Tree , an online magazine, is a showcase for the creativity and talent of women over sixty.

PMS poemmemoirstory  (USA)

PMS poem­mem­oirstory is a 140-page, perfect-bound, all-women’s lit­er­ary jour­nal pub­lished annu­ally by the Uni­ver­sity of Alabama at Birmingham. We proudly feature the best literary writing by emerging and established women writers.

Poethead (Ireland)

Poethead was conceived and planned as a woman-friendly publishing platform that welcomes work from women poets, their translators, and their editors.

Pretty Owl Poetry

Pretty Owl Poetry is a feminist quarterly journal that publishes the visual arts, traditional and nontraditional forms, fiction masquerading as poetry, and work that does not snugly fit into a specific genre, all with a lyrical quality.

Q / A Poetry

*Q / A Poetry exists to amplify the voices of womxn and nonbinary poets, and to expand the subjects deemed “appropriate” for womxn to be writing about.

Quaint Magazine  (USA)

Quaint Magazine  accepts submissions from female-identified and genderqueer/non-binary folk only. We are strongly committed to publishing work from traditionally marginalized writers, and in exploring identity performance, particularly as it pertains to subverting the cultural cliche of femininity.

Quartet Journal

A poetry journal featuring work by women fifty and over.

Rag Queen Periodical

Rag Queen Periodica l is a femme-centric lit zine publishing quarterly in May, August, November, and February.

Raising Mothers

Raising Mothers is an online literary magazine created by and for femme-identifying and nonbinary POC writers who parent. Raising   Mothers  publishes creative nonfiction, graphic narrative, poetry, in-depth interviews and fiction, honoring both parenting and personhood.

ROAR  (USA)

ROAR  is a print literary journal that exists to provide a space to showcase women’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. We are committed to publishing literature by emerging and developing writers and we aim to support the equality of women in the creative arts.

ROOM Magazine  (Canada)

Room Magazine  is Canada’s oldest literary journal by and about women.

SageWoman Magazine  (USA)

Celebrating the Goddess in Every Woman.

Salty at Heart Journal

Published twice a year, Salty at Heart Journal features witty and creative content that highlights the work of female change-makers, scientists, humanitarians, politicians, artists, and explorers from across the globe.

Welcome to the Same,   an online literary journal for women . . . by women. Our goal is to advance and celebrate the voices of women and girls.

Sinister Wisdom   (USA)

Sinister Wisdom  is a multicultural lesbian literary & art journal that publishes four issues each year.

Sister Writes

Sister Writes is the annual literary magazine of the Sister Writes program, filled with stories about women’s experiences, plus original photography and artwork.

So to Speak   (USA)

A feminist journal of language and art.

Southern Women’s Review (USA)

By showcasing well-known and emerging southern women writers and artists, SWR amplifies their unique voices while exploring both traditional and innovative literary themes.

SWWIM (Supporting Women Writers in Miami) was co-founded by Jen Karetnick and Catherine Esposito Prescott. SWWIM publishes, promotes & celebrates women writers with a year-round reading series held at The Betsy-South Beach in Miami Beach, FL and the online poetry journal SWWIM Every Day .

Tangled Locks Review

Tangled Locks Journal i s an online literary journal committed to sharing complex, well-rounded stories, poetry, and essays that illuminate the experience and lives of women. We publish four full issues a year and feature one short piece each month that does not have a full issue scheduled.

They Call Us

They Call Us is a literary magazine created by powerful womxn wanting to empower other womxn. Using media, art, and literature as a means to inspire, They Call Us wants to tell the everyday struggles of womxn from around the world. They Call Us puts forward a themed edition every 3 months. We look for any submissions of prose, poetry, and visual art within that theme.

Torch Literary Arts (USA)

Torch Literary Arts , a nonprofit organization established to support and promote creative writing by Black women, seeks original work for its Friday Features.

Twisted Sister

Feminist and queer positive dark fiction.

Understorey (Canada)

Understorey Magazine  publishes literary writing and visual art by and about Canadian women.

Since 2011, Vela has taken steps to help close the byline gender gap by publishing exceptional nonfiction writing by women, and by drawing attention to outstanding work by women writers at other online publications, print magazines, and publishing houses.

VIDA Review

The  VIDA Review is a bi-monthly online literary magazine publishing original fiction, nonfiction, poetry, reviews, and interviews by those often marginalized in literary spaces, including Black, Indigenous, and People and of Color (BIPOC); cis and trans women, agender, gender non-conforming, genderqueer, non-binary, and two-spirit people; LGBQIA people; people with disabilities; and people living at the intersections of these identities.

Voice of Eve

Voice of Eve is a web magazine dedicated to showcasing quality women’s poetry.

VoiceCatcher (Washington & Oregon, USA)

VoiceCatcher is an online journal that supports, inspires, and empowers female-identified writers and artists. We encourage submissions from creatives who live in or have strong connections to the greater Portland, Ore. and Vancouver, Wash. areas.

Vox Viola is an intersectional feminist literary magazine that seeks to amplify the voices of all women regardless of race, age, ability, sexuality, or any other identifier.

Walled Women Magazine at the Walled City Journal (Pakistan)

Walled Women Magazine is home to a yearly-curated collection of poetry, prose, photography, digital/print artwork, and all the in-between of these categories about the women experience. Only womencan submit to this magazine.

We’Moon

We’Moon is a lunar calendar, a handbook in natural cycles and most importantly a collaboration of women! Women from around the world send us their art and writing to be considered for publication within the date book.

West Trestle Review

We are open to poetry, fiction and art by women and nonbinary creators from around the globe.

The Whorticulturalist

A magazine about sex, desire, culture and getting some. Stuff we publish regularly includes thought-pieces on modern culture, feminist reviews of books/tv shows/movies, memoir, erotica, creative nonfiction, poetry, art, photography, and essays.

Wicked Alice

Founded in 2001, wicked alice is an online journal dedicated to women-centered writing and art.

Willow Lit Mag

Willow is a literary magazine dedicate to publishing authors who identify as women, to whatever degree they do.

WomenArts Quarterly Journal  (USA)

WomenArts Quarterly Journal (WAQ) , an initiative of Women in the Arts, aspires to nurture, provide support, and challenge women of all cultures, ethnicities, backgrounds, and abilities in their role in the arts and seeks to heighten the awareness and understanding of the achievements of women creators.

Women’s Studies Quarterly  (USA)

Since 1972, WSQ has been an interdisciplinary forum for the exchange of emerging perspectives on women, gender, and sexuality.

Writing in a Woman’s Voice (USA)

Beate Sigriddaughter’s keen interest in women’s writing has led her to her blog  Writing In A Woman’s Voice,  where she posts poetry and prose written by women or by men who convincingly write in a woman’s voice.

Yellow Arrow Journal

Yellow Arrow Journal is a biannual publication of creative nonfiction, poetry, and cover art by writers and artists identifying as women.

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10 thoughts on “ women’s literary journals, magazines & publications ”.

Very happy to run into this list.

Like Liked by 1 person

Great.. Good luck with your submissions, Marlene! 🙂

Thanks for getting this list together Nicole! Plenty of inspiration there. Kathryn, Ireland.

You’re welcome, Kathryn! Good luck getting your work out. 🙂

This was just the list I was looking for, thank you!

Great. Good luck with your work!

Thank you so much for these resources. I really appreciate the comprehensive list. 🙂

Thanks for letting me know. Good luck with your work!

Thank you for this!! Loved having this resource as I searched for the right place to sub my CNF piece on motherhood. 🙂

Good luck with your piece!

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About The Lady Magazine

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The Lady Magazine

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The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Romantic-Era Women's Writing pp 1–5 Cite as

The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832)

  • Jennie Batchelor 2  
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  • First Online: 26 January 2023

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When the Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex was launched in August 1770, it was not the first periodical to target women readers, nor even the first to adopt this title. This Lady’s Magazine , however, was the longest-surviving and most influential female-oriented periodical of its day. From 1770, the year in which Lord North’s ministry was established, to the passing of the 1832 Reform Act, it edified and entertained readers with a diverse range of contents. Its readers were legion – circulation figures were around 10,000–15,000 monthly copies at its height – and it boasted a veritable army of contributors. While much of the magazine’s letterpress, as was customary, was extracted from published sources, a significant percentage was original and authored by the magazine’s thousands of largely anonymous contributors, many of whom were or became widely celebrated outside its pages. The community the magazine forged between writers, editors, and...

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Batchelor, Jennie, Koenraad Claes, and Jenny DiPlacidi. 2016. Lady’s Magazine Index. https://research.kent.ac.uk/the-ladys-magazine/

Brontë, Charlotte. 1995. In The Letters of Charlotte Brontë with a selection of letters by her family and friends , ed. Margaret Smith, vol. 1, 1829–1847. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.

Google Scholar  

Copeland, Edward. 1995. Women Writing about Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790–1820 . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

DeLucia, JoEllen. 2018. Travel Writing and Mediation in the Lady’s Magazine: Charting “the meridian of female reading”. In Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690–1820s: The Long Eighteenth Century , ed. Jennie Batchelor and Manushag N. Powell, 205–216. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Mayo, Robert D. 1962. The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740–1815 . Evanston/London: Northwestern University Press/Oxford University Press.

Powell, Manushag N. 2012. Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals . Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press.

Further Reading

Adburgham, Alison. 1972. Women in Print: Writing Women and Women’s Magazines from the Restoration to the Accession of Victoria . London: George Allen and Unwin.

Ballaster, Ros, Margaret Beetham, Elizabeth Frazer, and Sandra Hebron. 1992. Women’s Worlds: Ideology, Femininity and the Woman’s Magazine . Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Batchelor, Jennie. 2020. Unromantic Authorship: The Minerva Press and the Lady’s Magazine (1770–1820). Romantic Textualities 23: 76–93.

Batchelor, Jennie, and Manushag N. Powell, eds. 2018. Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690–1820s: The Long Eighteenth Century . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Batchelor, J. (2021). The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832). In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Romantic-Era Women's Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11945-4_49-1

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The Lady's Magazine (1770-1818): Understanding the Emergence of a Genre

A leverhulme funded research project at the university of kent.

The Lady's Magazine (1770-1818): Understanding the Emergence of a Genre

Crafting through Covid

CLICK HERE FOR THE LINK TO THE CRAFTING THROUGH COVID 1798 LADY’S MAGAZINE PATTERN AND STEP-BY-STEPS BY ALISON LARKIN

******* Now that we are post-event, I just wanted to add here the links so you can watch the conversation at your leisure.

If you’d like to watch on Youtube, the link is here.

Alternatively, you can watch on Facebook here . *******

Welcome back and I hope you’ve been keeping safe and well! It’s been a very strange and difficult time for us all, hasn’t it? In all the chaos and worry of the last few months, the Lady’s Magazine has been one of the things keeping me sane. I’ve been busy writing a piece on illustrations in the periodical and most busy finishing up (well: nearly finishing up) my book,  The Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832) and the Making of Literary History  (all 115000 words of it!). I’ve also been doing lots of talks and lovely online events about Jane Austen Embroidery , a history and craft book by me and professional embroiderer, Alison Larkin, that adapts 15 patterns from the Lady’s Magazine  for modern readers and situates the magazine, the patterns and the projects in terms of the lives of Georgian women, the world they lived in and, of course, the life and works of Jane Austen. (We know she read the magazine , of course.)

I have to say that when the book came out with Pavilion in March, Alison and I were a little disappointed. We had quite a few events and workshops lined up and were so looking forward to talking to people interested in the things the book is about and those who were trying out the patterns. But of course, these things couldn’t go ahead and we all had more important things to be worrying about.

Except that embroidery and crafting are things that are so important to so many of us and now more than ever in this locked down, quarantined and isolated new reality.

Craft is about creativity. It distracts, absorbs and connects us. It forges a sense of community as we make things for other people or show and discuss our work in progress on social media, and get tips and advice from others. (I do this latter a lot…) Craft is about turning some things into something different and something more. And when things feel like they are falling apart at the seams, making something brings an enormous sense of consolation. It feels like we are making a difference.

I’ve been bowled over by all the lovely images people have been posting on Twitter , Instagram and Facebook of the lockdown stitching they have been doing using Jane Austen Embroidery . It’s been a wonderful reminder of the Stitch Off I launched in 2016, where all this started.

This got me thinking. I really wanted to get everyone together. One of the best things to come out the pandemic – other than all the #covidcrafting – has been how creative we have got online by finding ways of connecting us despite the travel restrictions we are living under.

And this was how the idea of the virtual chat and Sew Along ‘Crafting through Covid: A Virtual Sew Along and Conversation’ was born. The event, which live streams via YouTube on 16 September 19:00 GMT, will feature some conversation and images and videos of the wonderful work you have been doing. The event is free and you can watch the talks and join in the conversation through YouTube’s chat function. You can register via Eventbrite .

Don’t worry if you haven’t used one of the patterns before or even embroidered before. All are very welcome. But if you do want to try one of the patterns before or even during the event, I am delighted to say that Alison has a gorgeous beginner sprig project for you. It uses a November 1798 motif from the Lady’s Magazine – one that isn’t in the book or available on my Stitch Off pattern pages – and it is free to download here .

I so hope you can join us at the event, but if life gets in the way, don’t worry as we will be recording it so you can watch it on YouTube whenever you like.

Take care everyone!

Prof Jennie Batchelor, School of English, University of Kent

Jane Austen Embroidery (or the Stitch Off is back on)

It’s World Book Day, which means I am frantically trying to wrestle my youngest child into a costume that he is not entirely sure he wants to wear to school while I am desperately wishing I had time to sit down and read Hilary Mantel’s  The Mirror and the Light  instead. But there is a light at the end of this particular parental tunnel. For today also sees the publication (by Pavilion) of my new book,   Jane Austen Embroidery , which I have been working on for the past few years with historic embroidery expert, Alison Larkin . And I couldn’t be happier.

Seasoned followers of the Lady’s Magazine project on Twitter or Facebook will know that the book has been a labour or love and many years in the making. It all started in 2015 when I came to own a copy of a half-year of the  Lady’s Magazine  for 1796 which had 6 original embroidery patterns in it. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. I had been working on and off on the magazine for a decade and a half before that phone call, and in that time I had only ever seen a handful of the 650 patterns for embellishing clothes, accessories and household objects that the magazine published between 1770 and 1819. You see, the patterns were never meant to be preserved. They were designed for use and designed to be used in ways that wouldn’t necessarily survive the usage. The patterns I now owned were an accident of history.

The result was the #StitchOff . I have said it before, but I’ll say it again: The #StitchOff was the most lovely thing that I have done in my career to date. Being part of a community of people – first time stitchers to textile artists, Embroiderer’s Guild members and RSN graduates – across 3 continents united by their shared love of needlework, craft and women’s history was energising. And how fitting it was that all this was because of a magazine that owed so much of its success to its creation of a community of subscribers who chatted and debated with each other in the pages of the magazine itself.

Getting to display and share some 60 or so of the many gorgeous #StitchOff items at Chawton House, in a room dedicated to women’s accomplishments at the Emma at 200 exhibition, was a terrific experience. Seeing these rare patterns brought back to life some 200 and more years since their first publication was, frankly, moving.

The exhibition ran for 6 months and I felt both proud and sad when I went to Chawton to pack up the work to send back to its makers. I wanted to do something more. I just couldn’t think what.

At the end of the talk, I had lots of fabulous questions from the audience, but one struck a particular chord. A very experienced embroiderer – someone who had been stitching for decades – pointed to one of the slides I had shown of a Lady’s Magazine  pattern and said: ‘I couldn’t do that’. I couldn’t understand why. She replied, that looking at the pattern was like looking at a photo of a completed dish in a cookbook without an ingredients list and method. You see, the Lady’s Magazine never printed instructed with its patterns as later Victorian magazines did. It just knew its readers (girls and women) would have the skills to interpret the patterns and to determine colours and stitches themselves.

The question started ringing in my ears. I was taught to sew as a child by my grandmother and dabbled with embroidery until my teenage years, when study got in the way of everything. But years of working on eighteenth-century dress, needlework and craft meant that I knew – in theory – what to do with the patterns and how they were imagined to look. I could tell people what to do with the patterns even if my needlework skills were not up to showing them properly. Similar thoughts were clearly occurring to the infinitely more skilled Alison. As we sat drinking coffee after the talk she said that we should do a book you know to teach other people how to do this work and to contextualise the work for them historically. I left thinking it was a nice idea, but I had no idea how to make it happen…

In the acknowledgements at the back fo the book, we thank various people without whom it wouldn’t have become a reality, most especially the Stitch-Offers. You know who you are. I hope the publication of the book will mean there are many more of us soon!

Thank you, Jennie.

Jane Austen Embroidery  by Jennie Batchelor and Alison Larkin is published in the UK by Pavilion on 5 March 2020 at £16.99. It will be published by Dover in the US on 17 May 2020.

Professor Jennie Batchelor

School of English

University of Kent

Call for Papers: ‘The Lady’s Magazine at 250’ a two-day event at the University of Kent (24-25 April 2020)

Date: 24-25 April 2020

Location: University of Kent (Canterbury, UK)

Keynote Speakers: Prof Manushag N. Powell (Purdue University) and Dr Chloe Wigston Smith (University of York)

This two-day event will commemorate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the L ady’s Magazine  (1770-1832). Part symposium, part study day and part public celebration of the first recognisably modern women’s magazine, this event will reflect and explore the diverse content, broad readership and multiple legacies of this influential periodical.

The first day will have a full programme of talks on and celebrations of the magazine. The second day will include a study day on fashion, embroidery, material culture and the Lady’s Magazine  including optional embroidery workshops, which will allow participants to get hands on with history by learning to embroider a motif from a Lady’s Magazine pattern under the expert tutelage of historical embroidery expert, Alison E. Larkin. Further celebrations and specialist panels will be announced in due course.

Proposals are invited for talks on all aspects of the Lady’s Magazine, its origins, legacies and place in eighteenth-century and Romantic print and periodical culture.  Please send abstracts of 250-300 words to Jennie Batchelor ([email protected]) on or before 1 June 2019.

Identifying Mrs. T-SS: Ann Thicknesse and the Lady’s Magazine

As many of you know, the Lady’s Magazine  project began as an effort to provide an annotated index of all of the text content of the Lady’s Magazine  from 1770 to 1818. In addition to cataloguing every one of the around 15000 anecdotes, essays, serials and so on that the periodical printed during these years, we classified each of these items generically and provided keywords for every separate item in it to make its thousands of pages more easily navigable for modern readers and researchers.

Additionally, we worked to identify source texts for the magazine’s reprinted and excerpted material (no mean feat since periodical editors in this era were usually coy, shall we say, about such matters) and we also tried to identify as many as we could of the magazine’s anonymous and pseudonymous contributors.

We posted a number of our findings along the way on this blog, identifying the likes of the truly fascinating translator R . while also illuminating the careers of poets such as John Webb and fiction writers such as the Yeames sisters .

The indexing part of the project officially ended in 2016 with the end of our Leverhulme funded research project. But for me, this work is far from over. In recent months, I have given a paper on Radagunda Roberts and have written a journal article on Mary Pilkington and Catherine Day Haynes/Golland’s unacknowledged work for the Lady’s Magazine . I still haven’t given up on finding out more about gothic novelist Mrs Kendall either.

But I really wasn’t intending to think about attribution earlier this week when doing further research for a small section of the book on the magazine I am writing on the many, often beautiful, illustrations the periodical published in its more than six decade run. I was simply refreshing my memory about the key figures – G. M. Brighty, James Heath, Charles Heath, H. Mutley and Thomas Stothard etc. – with whom the magazine’s publishers collaborated and whose engravings, frontispieces and fashion plates ‘elegantly embellished’ successive issues of the Lady’s Magazine .

Private collection.

While doing this, I remembered a few occasions in the publication’s history where it didn’t have to commission engravings because contributors provided them with their copy.  Once such case was in February 1784 when ‘P. T.’ submitted a description of a monument raised in Bath to honour the poet Thomas Chatterton. It didn’t take much ingenuity to work out that P. T. lightly conceals the identity of Philip Thicknesse, the travel writer and compellingly eccentric (some might say dubious or downright obnoxious) figure in the grounds of whose home the ‘Mausoleum’ was built and under which he would intriguingly bury his sixteen-year-old daughter Ann Frances in late 1785. But even if ingenuity (and Google) had failed me, the magazine’s ‘Correspondents’ column left me in no doubt about the identity ‘P. T.’ Indeed, the editor went out of his way to ‘ acknowledge ’ his ‘ obligation to Capt. Thicknesse, for the honour of the Embellishment for this month’s collection ’.

What I had forgotten about before I revisited this ‘Correspondents’ column (one of well over 600 the magazine printed) was the sentence that followed: ‘and  we must likewise add, that his lady had previously favoured us with several singular marks of her patronage, and obligation; our Readers are obliged to her for one of the best pieces of Advice to her Daughter , that has appeared in any periodical work whatever; as well as several Lives  from her Sketches of Learned Ladies in France.’

I suspect I originally read this late in the day, because the notes I had taken on it back in 2015 read: ‘ CHECK: WAS ANN THICKNESSE REALLY AN ORIGINAL CONTRIBUTOR TO THE LADY’S MAGAZINE ??? ’ (Yes: sometimes my research notes look like this initially, but I usually go back and answer any questions I pose myself and delete them.) In this case, I had clearly forgotten to follow up the lead! Fast forward three years…

Thomas Gainsborough, ‘Ann Ford’ (later Mrs. Philip Thicknesse). Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Ann Thicknesse ( née  Ford, 1737–1824) has interested me for some time. A talented musician and writer, she was known primarily to me as the author of the three-volume biographical dictionary, Sketches of the Lives and Writings of the Ladies of France  (1778-81), from which the magazine reprinted a number of extracts in the early 1780s, and upon which Matilda Betham and Mary Hays drew in their own biographical works a few decades later. [1]  Thicknesse was much later the author of a now relatively obscure (and not desperately good ) novel entitled The School of Fashion  (1800).

I didn’t know a great deal about Thicknesse’s life, beyond the fact that it was long and that she had had to rebuff in print the taint of scandal as a young woman when Lord Jersey, a considerably older and married admirer, tried and failed to make her his mistress. In 1762, Ann became Philip Thicknesse’s third wife, months after the death of his second wife (and Ann’s close friend), Elizabeth. They would have several children together (quite how many is disputed) and were married for thirty years until Philip’s death in France in 1792 on the last of their many European travels together.

Ann’s life and career are documented in various places including the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography   and the indeispensible  Orlando   database of women writers in Britain. Both acknowledge that her writing career began in the 1760s with the publication of a staunch defence of her reputation in the face of Jersey’s allegations as well as two musical primers. A hiatus followed until the publication of Sketches in 1778, one that seems entirely natural given the amount of time Ann spent being pregnant, giving birth to and raising children in the next decade and a half.

But the note in the Lady’s Magazine ’s ‘Correspondents’ column about the work entitled ‘Advice to her Daughter’ indicated clearly that this hiatus might not have been as long as we had suspected, and that Thicknesse’s literary career might have pre-dated the publication of Sketches . But what was the ‘Advice’?

‘Mrs. T-ss’s Advice to her daughter’ was an original conduct-book serial published in thirteen parts in the Lady’s Magazine  between 1775 and 1776. The opening installment of serial, which takes the form of letters on different themes, was accompanied by an editorial note stating that ‘these letters are the real sentiments of the lady who wrote them, and who meant to leave them in manuscript as a legacy to her daughters’, before she was persuaded to send them to the Lady’s Magazine ’s publisher, George Robinson, by ‘a friend’ (6 [June 1775]: 294). The daughter addressed in the letters is named Charlotte, likely Ann and Philip’s daughter, Sophia Charlotte Thicknesse, born in June 1763. (The Thicknesse family name usually appears without the final ‘e’ in the historical record, just as Ann’s blanked out name also omitted the ‘e’ in the title of her series for the magazine.)

I’ve long been intrigued by ‘Mrs. T-ss’s Advice to her daughter’, not least because of its worldly but conservative views on three of my favourite preoccupations: dress, masquerades and dancing, all of which, Mrs. T. pointed out, had the potential to make women ‘disgustful’ in the eyes of others. But Thicknesse’s more reactionary views sat alongside her deep-seated conviction in the potential of the female mind.

‘Mrs. T-ss’s Advice to her daughter’ was not Thicknesse’s first published work but it was, arguably, her first recognizably literary work and now it has been identified as her work should be seen as an important precursor (literally and thematically) to her famous Sketches . Whether she wrote other original pieces for the  Lady’s Magazine or other periodicals is not yet known.

As I wonder how many other notable women writers published works we have yet to discover in the Lady’s Magazine  and rival periodicals I realize that while the book I am writing will get written some time in the not too distant future, the Lady’s Magazine project will always feel open-ended for me. There is still, I feel, so much to find out and so much I want to know.

[1] Sketches  is in fact an an unacknowledged translation of Joseph La Porte’s Histoire littéraire des femmes françoises (1769). I am grateful to Gillian Dow for pointing me in the direction  Séverine Genieys-Kirk’s ‘ The Turbulent Seas of Cultural Sisterhood: French Connections in Mary Hays’s Female Biography’ (1803), Women’s Writing , 25:2 (2018):   167-85,  for more information on this. ( DOI: 10.1080/09699082.2017.1387337 )

Prof Jennie Batchelor

Fashioning the Reader: Dress and Early Women’s Magazines (Part 1)

Many of the Lady’s Magazine  project’s followers do so because they are interested in fashion. That’s hardly surprising, really. The periodical’s fashion plates, reports, embroidery patterns and the many hundreds of essays it published on the allure and perils of sartorial consumption are the very things that first brought me to the Lady’s Magazine  as a PhD student writing on eighteenth-century dress back in the late 1990s.

From its very first issue in August 1770 the periodical signalled that regular ‘fashion intelligence’ in the form of engravings and written descriptions of ‘the covering of the head, or the clothing of the body’ would be an indispensible part of its format (1). It was, though, a promise the magazine struggled to made good on. Although those essays on dress, as well as attention to the costumes of other nations in travel writing and an antiquarian interest in dress in works of history, are recurrent features in the periodical from its inception, fashion journalism, as we would call it now, is conspicuously absent in the magazine in its first thirty years.

LM 1 (Nov 1770). Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

The first fashion report, of sorts, the magazine published was in November 1770 and was accompanied by an engraving showing the actress Ann Catley in a scene from Love in a Village . In it, the magazine’s editors remarked that they had not lost sight of their promise to provide readers with the latest trends, but they struggled to live up to their stated objective of purveying metropolitan fashions to those in the provinces in subsequent issues (170). The first recognisably modern fashion report was not published until February 1773 and is typical of the economical to the point of obscurity, staccato prose style that would characterise the genre at this time: ‘The hair in front, with small puff curls; a close cap, made with wings; narrow ribbon, in small puffs; double row of lace; ditto lapelled …’ (72). Next month the magazine followed with an account of full dress and undress for March, allowing the unknown author to make comparisons that suggested fashion’s progress, even month by month, would be bewilderingly relentless – ‘Hair front lower, puff curls or none …’ – without the guiding hand of the magazine to steer readers through its labyrinthine course (152).

The magazine’s fashion reporters were as impermanent as the quickly outmoded styles they described, however, and readers wanting to know if hair fronts would plunge lower still (gasp!) would have to wait until September for the next update, and thereafter for another four issues until the Supplement to learn more. The problem got a good deal worse before it got better. A contributor known as Charlotte Stanley was by far the most reliable of these figures, although that’s not saying much. Her career of fashion reporting for the magazine began in March 1774; she produced another three reports across the rest of the year but did not resume her column until March 1776 (after the magazine apparently received a barrage of complaints from readers). She would produce only one more report that year. In 1777 and 1778 no fashion reports appeared in the magazine at all, but readers would not let the matter lie. As late as June 1782, a regular contributor to the magazine, Henrietta C-p-r, was begging Miss Stanley to once again bestow her ‘elegant favours’ upon her readers. The request fell on deaf ears.

Both publications faced further fashion competition from the launch of John Bell’s sumptuous, royal octavo La Belle Assemblée, or Belle’s Court and Fashionable Magazine,  which launched in February 1806 and also later merged with the Lady’s . Bell’s magazine carried rich and varied contents, but remains best known for its dedicated and substantial, multi-page monthly fashion section originally entitled the ‘Second Division’. In the first issue alone this section included: reports on  ‘London Fashions for the Present Month’; ‘Parisian Fashions, for February’; ‘General Observations on Fashions and the Fashionables’; ‘Three whole length Portraits, and four Head Dresses of the London Fashions’; ‘Five whole length Portraits of Parisian Fashions’; and four embroidery patterns. None of the fashion plates was coloured, but this would change just ten months later when, in response to competition from his son John Browne Bell’s Le Beau Mode, and Monthly Register (1806–9), Bell Senior offered La Belle Assemblée in two formats: 2s 6d for issues containing uncoloured engravings, and 3s and 6d for those with coloured fashion plates.

LM 58 (Nov 1827). Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Cambridge University Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

The  Lady’s Magazine  could never compete fully with the high production values of Bell’s periodical, which even at its lowest price point cost twice as much as George Robsinson’s monthly magazine. But La Belle Assemblée ’s influence can nevertheless be felt in the Lady’s Magazine ’s and Lady’s Monthly Museum ’s fashion coverage. One of its most important developments was its emphasis upon named fashion authorities, a trend that Rudolf Ackermann’s Repository of Arts (1809–29) also followed. Professional dressmakers and milliners such as Madame (Margaret) Lanchester and then Mrs M. A. (Mary Ann) Bell featured prominently as the ‘inventresses’ of the fashions La Belle Assemblée  and the Repository visualised and described, while advertisements for these women’s fashionable London establishments featured in their back pages. By the 1810s, the Lady’s Monthly Museum and Lady’s Magazine  had followed suit by looking to their own fashionistas – Miss Macdonald of 50 South Molton Street, Mrs W. Smith of 15 Old Burlington Street and Miss (Mary Maria) Pierpoint of Portman Square – to provide direction on the latest styles with instructions.

The reliance upon the expertise of these women changed the magazine’s fashion content in various ways that I have been trying to think through and write about in a book I am working on about the Lady’s Magazine . I’ve now worked out what I want to say about that, but as I was mulling it over and pondering the way the magazine’s fashion content changed over time, I couldn’t stop thinking about Madame Lanchester, Mrs Bell – interchangeably referred to in various sources as John Bell’s wife or daughter-in-law – and Miss Pierpoint. Who were these women? Why do we know so little about them now when in their own day their name commanded such widespread respect from the fashion conscious readers of the Lady’s Magazine and its competitors? I don’t yet have all the answers and there is much more I hope to be able to find out about these women, but after many hours (confession: it might actually be days) diving into the newspapers and digging around on Ancestry, I know a good deal more than I did and I plan to share some of these insights in part 2 of this blog post next week. Hope you’ll join me then!

Prof. Jennie Batchelor

            

What the Lady’s Magazine Project Did Next

It’s been quite a while since our last blog post. Team Lady’s Magazine spent most of the summer working really hard trying to complete the data compilation and analysis for our index to meet our project deadline in September. I’m delighted to say that we did it! The Lady’s Magazine project index to the more than 15000 text items in the first series of the Lady’s Magazine  is now live and free to view and download on our project website. Soon it will also be available in web format (and again in open access) on Adam Matthew Digital’s Eighteenth-Century Journals website .

I am very proud of all that we achieved and incredibly grateful for hard work and collegiality of Koenraad and Jenny, who both have now gone on to bigger and better things. Koenraad left the UK just days after the project ended to take up a postdoctoral research fellowship at Ghent University (Belgium) and Jenny has taken up a Lectureship in Eighteenth-Century Studies and Romanticism at the University of Kent.

For all of us, the Lady’s Magazine  project lives on. Koenraad’s work on the political content of the Lady’s Magazine  feeds into his new research project on political fiction in the long nineteenth century. Jenny continues to work on the fascinating fiction in the magazine. As for me, well my work on the Lady’s Magazine is still very much unfinished business. Having completed the project, I am now moving on to the next phase of my research on the magazine, which is preparations for the book I am researching and soon (I hope) to be writing on the Lady’s Magazine in Romantic print culture. The Lady’s Magazine project isn’t dead. It’s just in phase 2.

And for me, phase 2 began beautifully. Last month I went to the University of York to give a talk about the Lady’s Magazine and run a workshop in the Borthwick Institute for Archives in the University Library organised by the Research School for Eighteenth Century and Romantics .

It was the best possible way to move forward. I went back. I was an undergraduate at York a few  more years ago than I like to admit and left – in a spectacular piece of bad timing on my part – the year the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies was founded. I never need much encouragement to return to York. But this time I had a more compelling reason than ever before: the University’s recent acquisition of the Heath Collection, which contains a number of fine volumes of the  Lady’s Magazine .

LM LV (1824): 179. Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Cambridge University Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

As the University catalogue explains, the Heath Collection was the work of Sir John Heath, ambassador to Chile during the Falkland’s conflict, and descendent of the Heath family of engravers who, in turn, had close connections with the Robinsons who published the Lady’s Magazine. The Heaths produced some of the periodical’s finest illustrations. The Heath collection comprises an interrupted run of early nineteenth-century bound volumes of the magazine, all of which contain images by Charles Heath and some of them from Heath’s time as editor of the magazine (from May 1823).

Before arriving 30 minutes prior to the start of the workshop I hadn’t set eyes on the volumes in the Heath Collection, although I had read other copies of all of the volumes it comprises elsewhere. I had no idea of the condition of the run and didn’t have time to look at them in detail before the workshop started. Even just laying them out on book cushions with Sarah Griffin, Special Collections and York Minster Librarian, however, I could see the quality of the bindings and had high hopes. These were more than borne out. The volumes in the collection, some of which bear the striking book plate of royal dressmaker Hardy Amies, are some of the finest and most in tact, I have ever seen.

The workshop was fully booked out with seventeen undergraduate and postgraduate students in attendance. And we had the highest volume to person ratio of any workshop I have been involved in since the project began.

As always, I learned so much from the students. Despite the fact that many started the workshop by saying they had never worked with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century periodicals and still fewer saying that they had worked with original copies rather than digital surrogates, the workshop participants proved highly skilled in reading the magazine to gain insights into its readership, appeal, contents, politics and influence. First impressions – or more accurately, the assumptions we bring subconsciously to the table before even opening copies of periodicals like the  Lady’s Magazine –  started to fragment in the face of the complexity of the miscellany format and happy to say that everyone found items pertinent to their research topics. Everyone in the room seemed to find material in the magazine that spoke directly to their research interests, and we had a spirited conversation about the pleasures and pitfalls of the digital revolution and the hazards of overlooking the material archive.

I also had an opportunity of giving a demonstration of our index and was delighted to hear students telling me how they could use it in their research and, in one case, how it was already being used.

If you’ve used the index, do let us know what you think about it. We’d love to know. Oh and if you ever find yourself in the North East, do head to the Borthwick. You will not be disappointed. I promise.

Jennie Batchelor

Reader, he burned them: Charlotte Bronte, Shipwreck and the Lady’s Magazine

Sadly, good news stories are rare these days. So when they come along, I tend to cling to them like precious cargo that can keep me afloat amidst the torrents of awfulness threatening to pull us all under in this unsettling and violent world.

After initially reading this story on the BBC news website, I spent a good 40 minutes trawling through as many different versions of the same story as I could find. Each told more or less the same version of the same series of events in more or less the same language, as news outlets tend to do today just as they did in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. What I was fruitlessly looking for, I soon realised in my obsessive re-reading, was an answer to an unposed question: What else survived the shipwreck?  [2]

Based on the news coverage, you would be forgiven for thinking that only Southey’s  Remains of Henry Kirke White was saved from the briny deep in 1812. But this was not the case. Especially prized by Charlotte Bronte was a set of volumes that kept the young woman away from her lessons and hungering after a literary career of her own: a collection of the  Lady’s Magazine,  the full run of which periodical extended well beyond the date of the shipwreck (from 1770 to 1832).

We don’t know exactly how many copies of the magazine Charlotte and her siblings inherited in the years after their preservation from the shipwreck, although we have some sense of which volumes survived because of the detail with which she later recalled them. Our evidence comes in the form of a letter dated 10 December 1840 to Hartley Coleridge in which Charlotte expressed regret that

I did not exist forty of fifty years ago when the Lady’s magazine was flourishing like a green bay tree—In that case I make no doubt my aspirations after literary fame would have met with due encouragement— […] and I would have contested the palm with the Authors of Derwent Priory—of the Abbey and Ethelinda. You see Sir I have read the Lady’s Magazine and know something of its contents—though I am not quite certain of the correctness of the titles I have quoted … 

LM XXVII (Jan 1797): 12-13. © Jennie Batchelor. Not to be reproduced without permission.

In fact, Bronte’s recall is accurate. Like her, I have spent many happy hours reading the anonymous gothic novel  Derwent Priory  (serialised 1796-97 and later attributed to Mrs A Kendall), George Moore’s Grasville Abbey  (1793-97) and the unsigned ‘Athewold and Ethelinda’ (1797). The fact that Bronte remembered this fiction was remarkable because she did not have the copies before her. Although she vividly remembered the brine ‘discoloured’ pages of the magazine over which she pored ‘on holiday afternoons or by stealth when I should have been minding my lessons’, the volumes had long since left her possession by the time she wrote to Coleridge in 1840:

One black day my father burnt them because they contained foolish love-stories. With all my heart I wish I had been born in time to contribute to the Lady’s magazine.  [3]

The sense of horror and betrayal of her father’s act was evidently very much alive to Bronte years after it had been committed and clearly ran as deep as her affection for a magazine and an associated writing culture – ‘when the Lady’s magazine was flourishing like a green bay tree’ – that she sorely lamented the loss of as an aspiring professional writer.

I refer to Bronte’s letter frequently when I talk to people about the  Lady’s Magazine and I use it for lots of different reasons. For one thing, as an example of a near contemporary reader’s response to the magazine it is rare. The fact that this is an example of so well known a writer as Bronte only makes it more valuable, not least because it means that I don’t have to rely solely upon my own powers of persuasion to get people to take the magazine seriously. Don’t take my word for it that the  Lady’s Magazine is interesting and was influential, here’s what Charlotte Bronte thought about it …

But of course what is most interesting about this story is the tale of survival and destruction around which it turns and the complex psychodrama it plays out. For every fact the letter seems to give us – that Bronte read the  Lady’s Magazine , that she associated it with the successful promotion of women’s writing, for instance – at least one question is begged – did she really think that unpaid journalism was preferable to a life of professional authorship and did she share any of her father’s views of its foolishness, for example. Most insistently, however, the question that nags at the reader of the letter is this: How could Patrick Bronte destroy volumes that evidently meant so much to his daughter and which had been saved, along with the Southey, from the waves?

In many ways, I feel that the broader piece of research to which our current Leverhulme project is related – a book I am writing about the  Lady’s Magazine ‘s place in Romantic literature and culture – is an attempt to answer this question. The rage, which is at once unique to the Bronte family and yet also eerily emblematic of the fate of the  Lady’s Magazine , one of the most successful women’s magazines of all times and yet all but silenced in literary history, would certainly take many more words to explain than I have in this blog post.

For now though, I am struck by something I had lost sight of until the news stories of the past week or so. The Bronte Parsonage Museum’s acquisition of Maria Bronte’s copy of what has been repeatedly described as the treasured and invaluable Remains of Henry Kirke White  reminds me that what is most important and too often forgotten is that the  Lady’s Magazine was valued enough to be saved. Not only that but it was valued enough by at least one of Maria Bronte’s daughters enough to be read, re-read and remembered. The story of the destruction of copies of  The Lady’s Magazine  by a man who likely never read it (it was far more cynical about love than foolish) should not mute the more triumphant and arguably more telling one about its survival against the odds. These volumes will never be returned to Haworth, but given the personal and, I would argue, textual legacies that the magazine undoubtedly bestowed Charlotte Bronte, they never really left there.

[1]  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-36844945 <accessed 28 July 2016>

[2]  Prior to her marriage to Patrick Bronte, Maria sent for her possessions to be shipped from Penzance, but the vessel ran aground of the Devonshire coast en route.

[3]  The Letters of Charlotte Bronte: Vol. 1, 1829-1847, ed Margaret Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 240.

Dr Jennie Batchelor

Pedagogy and cosmopolitanism: Reader translations in the Lady’s Magazine

Dickens and Thackeray famously set their differences aside on this staircase (© Athenaeum Club)

In standard accounts of long-eighteenth-century print culture, most notably in the otherwise admirable history by Prof. Kathryn Shevelow, there is a strong emphasis on the domestic ideology allegedly advocated by the Lady’s Magazine . [1] Scholars sweepingly reducing the complex ideological debates within the magazine to this particular message may not have read far beyond the subtitle of the magazine, in which it styles itself ‘Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, Appropriated Solely to their Use and Amusement’. This does suggest a form of self-censorship calculated to reinforce strict gender norms so as to instil in its ‘fair’ readers their prescribed role in the household, and, of course, a secondary sense of ‘domestic’ is ‘of or pertaining to one’s own country or nation; not foreign, internal, inland, “home”’. [2] Nevertheless, as Jennie Batchelor has shown , the content of the magazine was much broader than this suggests, and for instance catered to the interest in other cultures and nations of a wide array of readers, most of whom will never have left the British Isles. There are hundreds of ‘anecdotes’ and ‘accounts’ of foreign cities and cultures, and many translations, often submitted by reader-contributors. In every volume of the magazine at least a number of items of foreign origins even appear in their original language.

Jenny DiPlacidi, who has categorized all contributions for our index, has made it very easy for us to find out how many items in French appeared in the magazine. Between 1770 and 1790 there were no less than 91 items in another language than English. Three of those are Italian, and all others are in French. While these relative proportions may be surprising, the choices of these two particular languages is soon explained. Italian was seen as a language of culture, amongst other reasons because it was the language of opera seria , and was additionally popularized through the parmesan-dusted verse of the Della Cruscans (also featured—need it still be said?— in the Lady’s Magazine ), and shelves have been written on the enduring love/hate relationship between Britain and France. These items come in a variety of genres, but tales and conduct pieces predominate; two genres that are of course very common in the magazine in general. The items in foreign languages seem to have been nearly exclusively appropriations .

The foreign-language items did not only function as reading material on par with the English content, but evidently had a particular pedagogical use. Nearly all are translated by readers who submit their efforts for publication in subsequent issues. An editorial footnote stating that ‘a translation is requested’ often appears to encourage this practice. Over a period of a staggering ten years, between 1774 to 1784, loyal reader-contributor ‘Henrietta R-’ submitted instalments from Abbé Séran de la Tour’s Histoire d’Épaminondas (1739), and these were diligently translated by a cohort of other readers who kept up quite well with the pace of publication of the serialized original. It finished several years before the first one-volume translation of this work (a different text) is published, in 1787.

The fact that often more than one submitted translation of the same foreign-language original is published indicates that the quality of the translation was at least as important as the content of the original piece. It is clear that these pieces were perceived as a challenge by the readers, much in the same way as the many puzzles, and like these served to consolidate the magazine’s readership and gave readers an opportunity to exercise and demonstrate their ingenuity. In April 1782, a regular reader-contributor signed ‘Maria’ submitted an unattributed poem in French, which I have identified as an extract from Beaumarchais’s Le Barbier de Séville (1775). The prefatory headnote included by this reader reveals a lot about the purpose of this submission:

LM XIII (1782): 216. Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

LM VI (1775): 179. Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Let’s dwell on the ‘shewing’ for a moment here, and not just for its cool archaic spelling. In the earliest volumes the magazine had followed the custom of magazines to organize a monthly poetry competition on a set theme, and it seems that getting your translation into print was perceived as a similar, though less official form of distinction. In fact, this sense of achievement must have been the primary motivation for many unremunerated amateurs to contribute in the first place. For the significant number of schoolchildren who contributed, there may have been a secondary incentive, as I have suggested before . The magazine’s translation assignments will have been similar to their homework for language classes at school, and it is certainly plausible that tutors made use of the material in the magazine in their teaching, and proudly urged star pupils to submit their work as an advertisement for their schools. We usually get the most information about juvenile contributors when they furnish translations, such as in this signature appearing in April 1775 with a translation of a French item that had appeared the month before, tacitly appropriated from Pierre Bayle’s ground-breaking Dictionare Historique et Critique (1697-1702).

Although, as said above, the foreign-language originals were extracted from a variety of sources, pedagogical works (themselves usually largely consisting of extracts) come up especially often. At the time, language pedagogy consisted mainly of translation exercises, and most textbooks were mainly compilations of short French or Italian texts for translation, written in a desirable style and register that students could emulate in their own compositions. They were explicitly marketed as aids for tuition in schools, such as Peter (occasionally ‘Pierre’) Hudson’s The French scholar’s guide: or, an easy help for translating French into English , that according to Worldcat goes through 13 editions between 1755 and 1805, and holds a long list of tutors, masters and teachers of French based in Britain who endorsed the work. Extracts from it, typical light reading such as anecdotes comparing the ways of different European nations, were republished in the Lady’s Magazine . In 1785, to give another example, two fables by Aesop in Italian were published, that before had appeared in several pedagogical books dedicated to that language. Fables were a popular genre for such works, probably because they are as a rule short and are inherently didactic.

This is a good year for studying the links between translation and pedagogy in the magazine, as in 1785 one ‘J. A. Ourry’ also has a short spell of busy activity, contributing eleven items in French. Ourry was to write a book of language instruction himself, The French scholar put to trial, or, Question on the French language (1795), and, as his signature in the magazine informs us, he too was a French teacher, based at ‘Mr. Birkett’s Academy’ in Greenwich. Most of Ourry’s contributions appear to be extracts from recent numbers of the popular Parisian monthly Mercure de France , but he also undertakes an odd and seemingly original correspondence in French with a reader-contributor signed ‘Juvenis’ on a minor religious controversy, while another reader-contributor signed ‘Philomathes’ provides English translations for each letter. Assuming an affable but gently condescending tone, the teacher Ourry used the magazine to publicize his didactic skills, learning and mastery of the French language. This was a good plan, given the magazine’s inferable extensive readership among middle-class mothers .

All of this demonstrates that language instruction was considered compatible with the mission of the magazine to provide content that was suitable for a wide readership of both sexes and all ages. Of course, the fact that only modern languages were included in this scheme is telling. Latin and Greek were avoided in the magazine, even to the point of removing quotes from the Classics from extracts or translating them without copying in the original, as Classical languages were usually not included in curricula for female education. When the opinionated ‘ J. Hodson ’ contributed a series entitled ‘The Critic’ with musings on Greek and Latin philology, an editorial note complained: ‘How often must we tell this young writer, that his critiques are not suitable to most female readers[…]?’ [ LM XIV (December 1783), p. 658]. None of the French and Italian material will have given offence to even the most morally and politically orthodox readers, but they are unmistakably a means of intellectual stimulation that encouraged male and female readers to broaden their horizons. The mind of the magazine’s implied ‘lady’ reader may have been domesticized, yet she could still be a citizen of the world. In May 1789, ‘M. L. B.’ from Hillington in Norfolk replied to a letter signed ‘J. H.’ (likely the same ‘J. Hodson’) of the month before, which had denigrated a recent French translation of Milton:

LM XX (1789): 263. Image © Adam Matthew Digital / Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

This vehemence is all the more striking as there was, generally speaking, no love lost between Britain and France in this period. I wonder what the tenor of conversation was, over tea in Hillington by King’s Lynn, only two short months later.

Dr Koenraad Claes

School of english, university of kent.

[1] Shevelow, Kathryn. Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical . London: Routledge, 1990.

[2] ‘domestic, adj. and n.’. OED Online . June 2016. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.chain.kent.ac.uk/view/Entry/56663?redirectedFrom=domestic& (accessed July 17, 2016).

1815: Modish Dresses, Modest Women and Bonaparte’s Brother

“Postman!” corrected my partner, grumbling irritably and pulling the duvet over his head.

Fashions for October, LM XLVI (October 1815), p. 427

My unusual excitement at being woken by man and beast was because of the anticipated delivery: a volume of the 1815 Lady’s Magazine . Ever since I bought a 1775 edition of the magazine I’ve been looking for another good deal (which for me means damaged but with as many engravings/plates/patterns as possible) and when 1815 appeared for sale with four fashion plates the opportunity was too good to miss.

For today’s post I leave off my ‘researcher’ hat and simply share my excitement at my new (old) edition of 1815 and some pictures of the engravings and plates that I’ve edited a bit to show off the really extraordinary skill of the artists. Although the engravings are one of the aspects of the magazine that we know little about (for most of the first series of the periodical they have no artist signatures or printer’s details) they have clearly been carefully chosen by the editors to accompany the tales and, at times, they are commissioned specifically for the stories.

One of the reasons the physical copies of the magazine are of such interest to researchers (and especially those who most frequently read the magazine in its digitized form) is of course the possibility of coming across something that is missing from the digitized edition. For example, the digitized edition of 1818 lacks several pages, so if you have only been able to access that edition the presence of those missing pages is welcome. Another reason to love the physical magazine is the possibility (that faint hope of treasure that keeps people like myself metal-detecting for hours in the rain) of finding something missing not only from the digitized edition, but likewise missing from most other volumes – such as a pattern unseen for over a hundred years, or an advertisement removed by the binders. And searching for such a possibility, I discovered something rather odd.

LM XVLI. Image © Adam Matthew Digital. Not to be reproduced without permission.

LM XVLI, Fashions for July

My volume of 1815 does indeed appear to have a fashion plate missing from the digital edition — it is opposite page 285 in my edition and is an engraving of a walking dress described in ‘Fashions for July’. The digitised edition also has an engraving for July depicting a walking dress, but it’s a different engraving. My engraving is numbered 6 in the upper left corner, while the digitised copy’s engraving is numbered 7. Curious indeed! Apparently my binder inserted the June engraving into July while the digitised edition is missing June’s entirely.

‘The Charm of Modesty’, LM XVLI

But even when these exciting possibilities fail to materialise, the material of the magazine is fascinating enough in its own right. I’ve written before about the differences between working with physical and digital editions: I love the ease of the digitized magazine for work, for speed, for accessibility, for being able to drink a cup of coffee without fear of destroying something priceless, and so on. Yet the beauty of the fashion plates and engravings is undeniably enhanced by seeing them close up in person when the detail of the engravings, the strokes of the etchings, the brightness of the colours appear as if they were printed yesterday, not 200 years ago.

Amelia Opie, 1769-1853, author.

1815 was an especially rich year for engravings; it includes several portraits of famous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century personages, including Byron, Lucien Bonaparte, Lord Castlereagh, Amelia Opie and others. The illustrations to the fictional content are likewise particularly intriguing; ‘Parental Horror’ depicts a father witness a snake coil around his infant’s neck while ‘The Charm of Modesty’ shows the youth Lycophron discern his lover Aglaia from a group of women enchanted to appear identical to her only by virtue of her downcast, modest eye.

Melia’s Dog, LM XLVI (March 1815), p. 103

The engravings present an opportunity to learn more about the printing process and editorial decisions behind the scenes of the finished product, yet at the moment they remain frustratingly silent. Where did they appear first, who selected them for use in the magazine, who printed them and who wrote the stories for which they were commissioned? Hopefully as we proceed with our work on the project and uncover more about the mysterious editors and publishers behind the magazine we will learn more about the illustrations and plates that were a constant feature and important selling point throughout the over 62 year print run of the Lady’s Magazine .

But for now, enjoy the pictures.

Lucien Bonaparte

Opera Dress, Fashions for February, LM XVLI

Engraving to serial tale ‘Mher-ul-Nissa’, LM XVLI (Supplement 1815), p. 581

Dr Jenny DiPlacidi

Becoming Jane: The Case of a Lady’s Magazine Emigrant

Working on The Lady’s Magazine project this May and June has led me down all manner of bizarre eighteenth-century rabbit holes, and no two days are ever the same. I have, over the month, chased one of Mary Robinson’s stray Sylphids across numerous newspapers. I found myself reading about sheep rot in an agricultural magazine just yesterday. I encountered a very serious vicar (J. H. Prince) who, as well as reflections on suicide, also wrote odes on dead cats (there are a surprising number of these, from a surprising number of contributors, in the magazine). I caught a brief glimpse of Emma Hamilton, or someone posing as her, in the pages of 1800, waxing lyrical about reading Dimond’s petrarchal sonnets. I smiled as the same hopeless swain, writing hopeless lines of poetry, tried with his lays first to ensnare one Susan Yates, and then just two months later, a Sophia. I laughed at Dr Hawes’ recommended methods for restoring to life the apparently dead (‘what thou doest – do quickly’), and laughed even more as ‘Tommy Softchin’ bemoaned his lack of whiskers. Sometimes I got very carried away on Ancestry; I tracked down the son of one of the magazine’s long-term contributors, John Webb . Webb often wrote poetry about his sons, and this particular one, Conrade, had a ‘providential escape’ from death by cart in 1800. [1] This escape proved fortunate for him, obviously, but unfortunate for 18 year-old William Riddle, who, 33 years later, was sentenced to two month’s confinement for drunkenly stealing a ham from his master, a cheesemonger: Conrade Manger Webb. Reading the Old Bailey Records, I thought about the ‘playful Conrade’ that a charmed father wrote about, the suing cheesemonger of 1833, and the 77-year-old man who lived and died on Edgware Road, weaving together these three seemingly disparate images, these three traces of a real, lived life.

The paucity of biographical records from this period often sees lives squashed into stubborn, unyielding signifiers. The thrill of finding the right person is quickly overwritten by frustration as that person is reduced to a date of birth, marriage, death, or a street number. Sometimes the records give a bit more: a court appearance, a list of household residents, a photo of a document. But I found over the last few months, that the magazine contributions themselves could sometimes provide rich insights into the lives of the contributors. In other words, they can make the records speak to us.

My work on the project was on attribution and authorship. I donned my best detective hat and ploughed my way through the years, cross-referencing each entry to find out whether it was original; if not, where it came from; and in any case, who might have written it. Tracking down an unacknowledged appropriation has its own pleasures, particularly when the search is a long, piecemeal one, but the most rewarding (and the most potentially frustrating ) work lies, I think, in attribution. The magazine is a wonderful, dense, and unruly site in which to perform recovery project archaeology. Although there are so many contributors who will probably never be traced (the Eleanor H**** who translated 6 plays from French and German between 1799 and 1805 proved just one source of frustration for me this month), some are just waiting to be discovered. Likewise, although many contributors had short-lived careers in the Lady’s Magazine , some went on to publish novels or poetry collections after . Others can tell us something about their particular historical moment, about their situated and personal experiences. As Jennie noted in a recent blogpost, recovering the lives of contributors ‘might not seem all that important beyond fleshing out a footnote in literary history. But for [each writer] we find, we are able to bring into slightly sharper focus what it might have meant to be an author in the period covered by the  Lady’s Magazine .’ [2] Indeed, the aim is to uncover a messy eighteenth-century that is sometimes overlooked in favour of clean, linear narratives. The magazine is the perfect forum for this sort of work: inclusive, democratic, dialogic. And it affords fascinating glimpses into lost lives, which speak to modern concerns as much as they did to the concerns of their many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers.

In the spirit of recovery, then, and as a way of making the figures and names ‘speak’, I want to share the story of one of the Lady’s Magazine ’s contributors, which takes us all the way from Lincolnshire to Washington. This story resides in the poetry sections of the magazine for 1805, which play host, as they often did, to a transient poetic community. When I first opened up the index, I optimistically scanned the names, looking for partial ones that I might be able to flesh out. One jumped out right away: Jane C—k—g. I searched Ancestry a few times that day with variations, but with no definitive results, and quickly gave up and moved on with the more fruitful business of searching out appropriations. But Jane kept asking for attention. By the time I arrived in 1805, I’d given up on finding her, when one afternoon, I arrived at this acrostic:

LM 31 (Aug 1800): 439. mage © Adam Matthew Digital / British Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

And there she was. Jane Cocking, Holbeach Marsh. Right after an acrostic to her sister Anne Cocking. I had a lead, and Ancestry was forthcoming.

Jane was born in Lincolnshire on 14 th June 1789 to William (1760-1820) and Ann (nee Worseley, 1750-1834) Cocking. Her sister, Ann(e) (spelling varies in the records), was four years older than her (b. 7 th March 1785). They lived at Holbeach Marsh, a fenland area in the South Holland district of Lincolnshire, which is where Jane signed most of her poetry from.

Jane started her 7-month writing career in the Lady’s Magazine , just shy of 16 years old, with six contributions to April’s poetry section. [3] Two of these were acrostics; one for an unknown woman called Jane Herbbass(?), and the other for her sister’s fiancé, William Blanchard (‘May you e’er live in peace and ease, / Belov’d by her you wish to please’). She also contributed an elegy on the death of her friend, Mary Cooling, who had died in December 1804, aged 15 (‘how transient were her charms’), and she wrote a poem to a Miss. Harrison, (probably Nancy Harrison, b. 31 May, 1783). These four contributions are full of assertions of her subjects’ virtues, and hopes for their future happiness, mostly in terms of marriage, and the successful avoidance of ‘false-hearted swains’ and ‘fickle shepherds’. In one of the other poems, ‘Some verses on leaving H—–N’, Jane laments having to leave friends after a long stay spent reading and writing poetry. She writes, wistfully, ‘ah when I think how our time we were spending – / In composing of poetry, or reading a book – / We were ever obliging, and never offending, / And the smile of good nature appear’d in each look’. The final poem, ‘Verses on a pleasant walk near Lincoln’, bids farewell to the landscape she knows, although at this point, readers are unsure what this means or where she is going:

Farewell, lovely scene! I must go,

And leave thee, ah! leave thee behind!

But I this, as some solace, shall know

Thou wilt e’er have a place in my mind.

Ah! how peaceful I oft have sat down,

Enjoying thy beauties serene!

Undisturb’d by the noise of the town,

I’ve hail’d thee the charmingest scene.

But now I must bid thee adieu,

Tho’ ‘t will certainly give me much pain;

Much more, as I certainly know

I shall ne’er see thy beauties again.

These are clumsy and perhaps derivative poems, but they also tell us the story of a contributor that is wholly relatable to anyone who was once a teenage girl, who tried to imitate what she read, who had heartfelt hopes for her loved ones, or who had to move home as a child.

In ‘on leaving H—–N’, she writes, despite obviously being preoccupied with the upcoming move in her other poems:

My heart is a gay one, a stranger to sorrow: –

That word in my ear has a very harsh sound; –

Present time I employ, and ne’er think of tomorrow –

‘Tis a period, we’re told, ‘that’s no-where to be found.

In July, Jane heeds her own advice, and leaves off thinking about leaving, in order to respond to a poem written by James Murray Lacey. His ‘Lover’s List’ [4] establishes him as the Lady’s Magazine ’s very own, eighteenth-century version of Lou Bega (see the questionable 1990 hit single Mambo No. 5 ), cataloguing his adoration of Evelina, then Mary, then Selina, then Betsy, then Nancy, and so on: 32 named women and ‘fifty more’ that he cannot name. Jane’s witty response in July reworks the original poem from a female respective, listing a slightly more modest 10 lovers, and ending with a flirtatious address to the original author: ‘I never will desert this swain [Francis is the one she’s settled on], / I do him love so well; /No, no, I’ll never change again – / Except for J. M. L. [5]

The following month, James Murray Lacey raises young Jane a tongue-in-cheek declaration:

You wrote, – and now she charms no more;

Jane fills each love-devoted thought:

I only fancy’d love before,

But now I’m certain I am caught.

From Portsmouth lately when I came,

‘Where have you been?’ ask’d all I knew;

My answer ever was the same, –

‘To Holbeach Marsh,’ – a jaunt quite new!’ [6]

His request that she ‘turn Francis off’ and write back to him sadly went answered.

Meanwhile, we find out where Jane is actually going from another contributor, Belinda, who, in June 1805 writes two poems: ‘Lines to Miss Jane C—k—g’ and ‘Lines to the Misses C—k—g, on their going to America.’ [7] From Belinda’s other poetry, alongside poems written to her, I was able to establish that her real name was Mary, and she had a sister who was probably called Ann. The final stanza of ‘on their going to America’ is intriguing. Belinda writes: ‘‘Tis a prayer that proceeds from the heart, / Although by a stranger ‘tis penned: / With regret she will hear you depart; / Then what pangs ‘twill inflict on each friend!’ Whilst these lines suggest that was wasn’t known to Jane personally, Jane’s response suggests that they were actually close friends. This is perhaps then demonstrative of the ways in which, like modern internet forums, the Lady’s Magazine provided a space in which to make ‘virtual’ friends. More likely, I think, given that Belinda writes from Fleet, near where Jane lived, it demonstrates the writer’s dogged adherence to the pseudonymity of the poem. Whilst Mary knows Jane, Belinda does not.

Jane’s poetry dominated the section in April, and then in October, although the poems included in October’s issue were written between May and August. From Holbeach Marsh, she writes praising Belinda (Mary). She also writes a short poem on contentment; one on modesty, addressed to a Mr. W—ley; one entitled ‘The Forsaken Swain’; and an acrostic to Clement Coote, who had written acrostics to Jane and Anne in the magazine two months before. [8]

Coote, if he is the Clement Tubbs Coote that I tracked down, was christened in November 1784 in Cambridge, and so would have been close in age to Anne Cocking. In 1799, aged around 15, he was apprenticed to Charles Burnett, a grocer, in Fleet, Lincoln.

Clement T. Coote is apprenticed to Charles Burnett, grocer. Aug 1799.

He signs his 1805 poems from Fleet, as Belinda does, suggesting that this is how he knew Anne and Jane (Fleet is about 8 miles from Holbeach). In 1807, Coote returned to Cambridge, apparently giving up poetry, to take up another apprenticeship.

Clement Coote is apprenticed to William Cockett, draper. Dec 1807.

In 1809, he married Mary Cole, who I spent an inordinately long amount of time trying to prove was Belinda in the hopes of a nice tidy circle, but alas, no such luck. He went on to run a business as a draper, grocer and tallow-chaundler, but unfortunately went bankrupt in 1817.

Clement Tubbs Coote goes bankrupt. Literary Panorama and National Register 6 (Aug 1817)

At some point shortly after this, the Coote family moved to America too, arriving in Philadelphia. Clement Coote died in Baltimore in 1849. [9]

But back to Jane. By August 22 nd 1805, Jane was in London, where she penned a farewell poem to Clement Coote, wishing her ‘dear Mr C—’ health, wealth and contentment. [10] Did she see him when he arrived on American shores 12 years later? Jane also wrote a final goodbye poem to Belinda (Mary), and to ‘Albion’s happy isle’ before she ‘brave[d] th’Atlantic deep’. [11] In this latter poem, she writes touchingly of storing memories of the English countryside – singing blackbirds and linnets – anticipating that in her new home, ‘Remembrance then will force the tear to flow, / When in my fancy I behold each spot, / Each fav’rite spot, I formerly admir’d.’ But she goes on:

‘But what are these? mean trifles, when compar’d

With leaving friends, friends much esteem’d, behind:

Whene’er I think on that, it casts a damp –

A cheerless damp throughout my frame I feel.

‘Cheerless damp’ is the same phrase that Belinda uses in her 1806 poem ‘To a friend leaving the country.’ [12] On September 12 th 1805, Jane’s sister Anne married William Blanchard at St George in the East, in London. Then sometime over the next few weeks, Jane’s parents, Jane, and the newly married Anne and William all emigrated to America, where they settled in Washington, in the District of Columbia.

The Cockings emigrated at a time which saw a lull in the numbers of arrivals to America, mostly due to the Napoleonic wars. [13] Maldwyn Allen Jones suggests that the total number of immigrants from Europe to America 1783-1815 was about 250,000, but with only about 3,000 a year during the Napoleonic wars. [14] So what made them leave, enduring at best, an uncomfortable, and at worst, a deadly journey across the Atlantic? Belinda’s fears for her friend undergoing a dangerous journey are apparent in the lines:

Atlantic, be proud of thy charge!

Neptune, curb ev’ry boist’rous storm!

With honour thy duties discharge;

Let nought thy smooth bosom deform! [15]

And indeed, shipwrecks were a real threat. A list of all the shipwrecks in 1806, which is in the hundreds, can be found here . Unless I can track down Jane writing in America, it is unlikely that we will ever know what her journey was like or why her family travelled 3,000 miles to start again in Washington. However, they arrived safely. Life went on.

On August 19 th 1813, aged 24, Jane married an American called Charles Carroll Glover. They remained in Washington, appearing on the 1820 federal census with three children and – something that shocked me, and that might tell us a bit more about the Cockings’ economic status – two young female slaves. Suddenly the weaving of strands that I already thought I knew became harder; the coherent, imagined, and celebratory picture I’d created was fragmented. Jane’s sister Anne (now Blanchard) also remained in Washington, had a large family of six(?) children, and owned at least one slave in 1830. Around this time, the number of slaves in Washington had reached its peak, representing twelve percent of the city’s population. [16] Anne shows up in 1862 claiming compensation for two recently freed slaves, Rachel Jackson and William Henry Taylor. [17] You can view her petition here .

Jane was widowed in 1827, and outlived all of her children too: her daughter Adeline died at 9 months; and sons William at 21, and Richard at 29. Jane herself lived to the grand age of 87, dying on September 14 th , 1876.

Gravestones at Oak Hill Cemetery, Washington, District of Columbia. From left to right: Charles and Jane Glover; Charles and Jane Glover’s children; Anne Cocking (Blanchard).

Back in 1805, Clement Coote wrote a poem for Jane, ‘on her Arrival in London, just before her Departure for America’, but this wasn’t published until April 1806. [18] In it, he hopes: ‘May you upon Columbia’s plain / Find some who love the tuneful train’, and wishes that she will continue to be inspired by other poets to write. Whether she did or not remains to be seen, and checking some American periodicals for Jane Cockings or Jane Glovers is on the to do list.

Tracing Jane C—k—g did several things for me. It demonstrated the way in which the Lady’s Magazine functioned as a forum for communication between momentary, geographically-located, networks of friends. It gave me an insight into the materials available for a teenage girl to express her joys and her anxieties, her love of the countryside she grew up in, and her fears about leaving it for America. It suggested, in linking a village in Lincolnshire to the changing legal status of slaves in mid nineteenth-century America, that the magazine’s webs and networks can be extended to cover a huge variety of geographical spaces and historical issues, of which migration and globalisation formed an integral part. This month has been a profoundly odd one, but also a profoundly human one, in which the connections between the past and the present have at once been fractured – sheep rot seems inescapably alien to me, writing in 21 st century London – but also maintained. We continue, as people, to be fragmented across our daily lives, our writing, the records we leave, even the thoughts we have. Reading Jane – at once anxious, sorrowful, optimistic, virtuous, flirtatious; a child writing juvenilia and a slave owner; an intrepid teenage voyager and a widowed mother – was a palpable reminder of this.

Dr Kim Simpson

[1] LM 31 (Dec 1800): 672

[2] Jennie Batchelor, ‘Our ‘ingenious correspondent’: Finding Joanna Squire’, https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/ladys-magazine/2016/06/06/our-ingenious-correspondent-finding-joanna-squire/

[3] LM 36 (Apr 1805): 214-16

[4] LM 36 (Feb 1805): 103

[5] LM 36 (Jul 1805): 381

[6] LM 36 (Aug 1805): 437

[7] LM 36 (Jun 1805): 327

[8] LM 36 (Oct 1805): 549-51

[9] There is more information about Clement Coote, including a photograph of his portrait, here: http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&amp;GRid=113760171&amp;ref=acom

[10] LM 36 (Oct 1805): 551

[11] LM 36 (Oct 1805): 550

[12] LM 37 (May 1806): 275

[13] John Powell, Encyclopedia of North American Immigration (New York: Facts on File Inc., 2005), 37

[14] Maldwyn Allen Jones, American Immigration , 2 nd edn. (London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 54

[15] ‘Lines to the Misses C––k––g, on their going to America’. LM 36 (Jun 1805): 327

[16] http://civilwardc.org/texts/petitions/about

[17] ‘In December 1861, Senator Wilson submitted a bill proposing the immediate and compulsory emancipation of the District of Columbia’s 3,300 slaves through a program of federal compensation. The District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act, which President Lincoln signed on April 16, 1862, allotted an average of $300 per slave to all slaveowners who were loyal to the Union, for a total payment of $900,000. Under the Compensated Emancipation Act, all slaves in the District of Columbia were free immediately. Slaveowners had ninety days to submit a petition, which consisted of a preprinted form, requesting compensation for their slaves. The petitions, which were written by the slaveowners, identified each slave, provided a personal description, including the slave’s “age, size, complexion, health and qualifications,” and presented an estimated value of the slave for purposes of compensation. […] During the three-month process, 966 slaveowners filed petitions and testified before the commission.’ http://civilwardc.org/texts/petitions/about

[18] LM 37 (Apr 1806): 217

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writing for the lady magazine

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book: The Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832) and the Making of Literary History

The Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832) and the Making of Literary History

  • Jennie Batchelor

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  • Language: English
  • Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
  • Copyright year: 2022
  • Audience: College/higher education;
  • Main content: 320
  • Other: 38 B/W illustrations 38 black and white illustrations
  • Keywords: Literary Studies
  • Published: August 31, 2022
  • ISBN: 9781474487665
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'A subscription to the Society is the greatest investment a writer can make.'  Philip Pullman

On Woman’s Weekly, by Joanne Harris

writing for the lady magazine

What the rest of the reading and writing world may not yet be aware of, however, is what the firm is doing with rights.

Rights are what an author sells to a publisher , be it a book or a magazine publisher, that allows them to publish the author’s work. There are also film rights, stage rights, media rights, foreign rights, which are sometimes bundled into a contract as part of a publishing deal, or negotiated separately, depending on the author. It is generally accepted that if you sell the rights to a short story to a magazine, you’re only selling them the magazine rights.  You shouldn’t also be giving them the right to republish elsewhere without paying you, or to adapt your story for TV, or make it into a movie, or recreate it as a game, or translate it into different languages, without paying anything to the author . 

And yet, that’s what TI Media are doing with the short story writers at Woman’s Weekly. 

Here’s a bit of background from one of the womag writers concerned.

As you’ll see,  Woman’s Weekly  writers were originally paid £150 for a 2000-word short story (which is already a very low rate of pay for original fiction). Most writers, barring a few bestselling novelists, are already very poorly paid. The average professional writer, according to figures from the Society of Authors, earn less than £11,000 a year. That’s a drop of 40% over the past ten years, even though the publishing trade is doing better than ever.

And now, here’s a giant media corporation offering only £100 per story, and demanding  all  rights, including  moral copyright. That means that if they then sell the story to someone else, the author doesn’t even have the right to have their own name shown on the piece . 

This is a completely unfair and exploitative deal, and in most other EU countries, wouldn’t even be allowed. But as we prepare to leave the EU, companies like TI Media are preparing to close in, hoping to snaffle whatever they can from authors already facing a dramatic cut in earnings. 

In real terms, it means that, as an author, you’d be giving up all the valuable rights to your work, forever, including the right to have your name on the project, for no more than the initial sum of £100 (or whatever you’re left with after income tax). That means:

If TI Media ever decided to sell those rights to make a multi-million-pound grossing movie, you’d get nothing. Not even your name on the credits.

If TI Media ever decided to syndicate your piece to all its other magazines (and it has many, including Marie Claire, NME and Country Life), you’d get nothing. 

If you ever wanted to use your story in a collection of your short stories, you wouldn’t be allowed to. It would belong to TI Media.

So if you care about justice, you should be watching what ‘s going on here. If you care about reading, whether or not you’re not you’ve ever read a TI Media magazine, you should be watching what’s going in here.  If you’re a writer of any kind, you should be watching what’s going on here. Because this isn’t just an attack on a handful of womag writers. It’s an attack on  all  writers, and on the very concept of authors having rights at all. 

I’ve been trying to raise awareness of this situation through my various social media platforms, and I’m afraid that some authors (especially male authors of literary fiction) haven’t been what you’d call quick to react on behalf of these women’s magazine authors. But here’s the thing. Womag writers are the canary in a very deep literary mine. If we, the more influential and better-protected folk of the literary world, allow their rights to be exploited, then sooner or later companies like TI Media will come for the rest of us. Tomorrow it could be  your  publishers they’re taking over. And when that happens, you’ll be glad you stood up for the rights of those Woman’s Weekly writers. 

So please, all of you: make some noise. Whether or not you’ve ever written for Woman’s Weekly (and I haven’t) make some noise. Protest. Resist.  Don’t write for them. Don’t sign their exploitative contracts.  If you’re a new writer , be forewarned. Don’t let them scoop you up, easy prey, in the place of more seasoned writers standing up for their rights. There are other, better magazines than  Woman’s Weekly  out there. Don’t be lured by false promises. Keep control of your moral rights. Don’t sign away your future.

Readers, don’t buy their magazines  - and there’s a full list of all of them here on Wikipedia  - until they agree to better terms for their short story writers. 

Writers; talk to your trade union  - be that the Society of Authors, the Writers’ Guild, or any other. Call out @TI_Media_UK on Twitter.  So far they’ve ignored every attempt to communicate or negotiate - and that’s because they think our voices can safely be ignored .

Let’s show them they’s wrong. 

Because, fellow-authors (and I’m looking especially at you, white, middle-aged male writers of litfic), this isn’t just about the rights of womag writers.  Their rights are  your  rights. Their business is  your  business. And what unites us makes us stronger in the face of those giants who think they can bully us. 

We’re  writers , for fuck’s sake. We know how to use words. So let’s use them to make this right. Because there’s no place for “I’m all right, Jack” in the writing community. Bestseller or not, woman’s writer or not, we all know the difference between right and  wrong. And this is a wrong that we can right, together, and for all of us. 

This blog originally posted on joannechocolat.tumblr.com

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The Lure of Divorce

Seven years into my marriage, i hit a breaking point — and had to decide whether life would be better without my husband in it..

Portrait of Emily Gould

This article was featured in One Great Story , New York ’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

In the summer of 2022, I lost my mind. At first, it seemed I was simply overwhelmed because life had become very difficult, and I needed to — had every right to — blow off some steam. Our family was losing its apartment and had to find another one, fast, in a rental market gone so wild that people were offering over the asking price on rent. My husband, Keith, was preparing to publish a book, Raising Raffi, about our son, a book he’d written with my support and permission but that, as publication loomed, I began to have mixed feelings about. To cope with the stress, I asked my psychiatrist to increase the dosage of the antidepressant I’d been on for years. Sometime around then, I started talking too fast and drinking a lot.

I felt invincibly alive, powerful, and self-assured, troubled only by impatience with how slowly everyone around me was moving and thinking. Drinking felt necessary because it slightly calmed my racing brain. Some days, I’d have drinks with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, which I ate at restaurants so the drink order didn’t seem too unusual. Who doesn’t have an Aperol spritz on the way home from the gym in the morning? The restaurant meals cost money, as did the gym, as did all the other random things I bought, spending money we didn’t really have on ill-fitting lingerie from Instagram and workout clothes and lots of planters from Etsy. I grew distant and impatient with Keith as the book’s publication approached, even as I planned a giant party to celebrate its launch. At the party, everyone got COVID. I handed out cigarettes from a giant salad bowl — I had gone from smoking once or twice a day to chain-smoking whenever I could get away with it. When well-meaning friends tried to point out what was going on, I screamed at them and pointed out everything that was wrong in their lives. And most crucially, I became convinced that my marriage was over and had been over for years.

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I built a case against my husband in my mind. This book of his was simply the culmination of a pattern: He had always put his career before mine; while I had tended to our children during the pandemic, he had written a book about parenting. I tried to balance writing my own novel with drop-offs, pickups, sick days, and planning meals and shopping and cooking, most of which had always been my primary responsibility since I was a freelancer and Keith had a full-time job teaching journalism. We were incompatible in every way, except that we could talk to each other as we could to no one else, but that seemed beside the point. More relevant: I spent money like it was water, never budgeting, leaving Keith to make sure we made rent every month. Every few months, we’d have a fight about this and I’d vow to change; some system would be put in place, but it never stuck. We were headed for disaster, and finally it came.

Our last fight happened after a long day spent at a wedding upstate. I’d been drinking, first spiked lemonade at lunch alone and then boxed wine during the wedding reception, where I couldn’t eat any of the food — it all contained wheat, and I have celiac disease. When we got back, late, to the house where we were staying, I ordered takeout and demanded he go pick it up for me. Calling from the restaurant, he was incensed. Did I know how much my takeout order had cost? I hadn’t paid attention as I checked boxes in the app, nor had I realized that our bank account was perilously low — I never looked at receipts or opened statements. Not knowing this, I felt like he was actually denying me food, basic sustenance. It was the last straw. I packed a bag as the kids played happily with their cousins downstairs, then waited by the side of the road for a friend who lived nearby to come pick me up, even as Keith stood there begging me to stay. But his words washed over me; I was made of stone. I said it was over — really over. This was it, the definitive moment I’d been waiting for. I had a concrete reason to leave.

A few days later, still upstate at my friend’s house, I had a Zoom call with my therapist and my psychiatrist, who both urged me in no uncertain terms to check myself into a psychiatric hospital. Even I couldn’t ignore a message that clear. My friend drove me to the city, stopping for burgers along the way — I should have relished the burger more, as it was some of the last noninstitutional food I would eat for a long time — and helped me check into NYU Langone. My bags were searched, and anything that could be used as a weapon was removed, including my mascara. I spent my first night there in a gown in a cold holding room with no phone, nothing but my thoughts. Eventually, a bed upstairs became free and I was brought to the psych ward, where I was introduced to a roommate, had blood drawn, and was given the first of many pills that would help me stop feeling so irrepressibly energetic and angry. They started me on lithium right away. In a meeting with a team of psychiatrists, they broke the news: I had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder; they weren’t sure which kind yet. They gave me a nicotine patch every few hours plus Klonopin and Seroquel and lithium.

I wasn’t being held involuntarily, which meant I could write letters on an official form explaining why I ought to be released, which the psychiatrists then had three days to consider. I attached extra notebook pages to the letters explaining that I was divorcing my husband and was terrified I would never be able to see my kids again if I was declared unfit because I was insane. These letters did not result in my release; if anything, they prolonged my stay. I got my phone back — it would soon be revoked again, wisely — but in that brief interim, I sent out a newsletter to my hundreds of subscribers declaring that I was getting a divorce and asking them to Venmo me money for the custody battle I foresaw. In this newsletter, I also referenced Shakespeare. The drugs clearly had not kicked in yet. I cycled through three different roommates, all of whom were lovely, though I preferred the depressed one to the borderline ones. We amused ourselves during the day by going to art therapy, music therapy, and meetings with our psychiatrists. I made a lot of beaded bracelets.

In the meetings with the shrinks, I steadfastly maintained that I was sane and that my main problem was the ending of my marriage. I put Keith, and my mother, on a list of people who weren’t allowed to visit me. Undaunted, Keith brought me gluten-free egg sandwiches in the morning, which I grudgingly ate — anything for a break from the hospital food. My parents came up from D.C. and helped Keith take care of our children. I was in the hospital for a little more than three weeks, almost the entire month of October, longer than I’d ever been away from my kids before in their lives. I celebrated my 41st birthday in the hospital and received a lot of very creative cards that my fellow crazies had decorated during art therapy. Eventually, the drugs began to work: I could tell they were working because instead of feeling energetic, I suddenly couldn’t stop crying. The tears came involuntarily, like vomit. I cried continuously for hours and had to be given gabapentin in order to sleep.

writing for the lady magazine

On the day I was released, I didn’t let anyone pick me up. I expected the superhuman strength I’d felt for months to carry me, but it was gone, lithiumed away. Instead, I felt almost paralyzed as I carried my bags to a cab. When I arrived at my apartment, I couldn’t figure out where I should sleep. It didn’t feel like my home anymore. We couldn’t afford to live separately, even temporarily, but the one thing that our somewhat decrepit, inconveniently located new apartment had in its favor was two small attic bedrooms and one larger bedroom downstairs. I claimed this downstairs room for myself and began to live there alone, coming into contact with Keith only when we had to be together with our children.

You might assume that my fixation on divorce would have subsided now that my mental health had stabilized and I was on strong antipsychotic medication. But I still did not want to stay in my marriage. If anything, I felt a newfound clarity: Keith and I had fundamentally incompatible selves. Our marriage had been built on a flaw. My husband was older, more established and successful in his career. These were the facts, so it had to be my job to do more of the work at home. Unless, of course, I decided to take myself and my work as seriously as he took his. But that was unappealing; I had managed to publish three books before turning 40, but I didn’t want to work all the time, like he does.

I wondered if my marriage would always feel like a competition and if the only way to call the competition a draw would be to end it.

We picked the kids up from school and dropped them off, or really mostly Keith did. I appeared at meals and tried to act normal. I was at a loss for what to do much of the time. I attended AA meetings and the DBT meetings required by the hospital outpatient program, and I read. I read books about insanity: Darkness Visible, The Bell Jar, An Unquiet Mind, Postcards From the Edge. I tried to understand what was happening to me, but nothing seemed to resonate until I began to read books about divorce. I felt I was preparing myself for what was coming. The first book I read was Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath, which has become the go-to literary divorce bible since its 2012 publication. In it, Cusk describes the way her life shattered and recomposed after the dissolution of her marriage, when her daughters were still very young. She makes the case for the untenability of her relationship by explaining that men and women are fundamentally unequal. She posits that men and women who marry and have children are perpetually fighting separate battles, lost to each other: “The baby can seem like something her husband has given her as a substitute for himself, a kind of transitional object, like a doll, for her to hold so that he can return to the world. And he does, he leaves her, returning to work, setting sail for Troy. He is free, for in the baby the romance of man and woman has been concluded: each can now do without the other.”

At our relationship’s lowest moments, this metaphor had barely been a metaphor. I remembered, the previous winter, Keith going off on a reporting trip to Ukraine at the very beginning of the war, leaving me and the kids with very little assurance of his safety. I had felt okay for the first couple of days until I heard on the news of bombing very close to where he was staying. After that, I went and bummed a cigarette from a neighbor, leaving the kids sleeping in their beds in order to do so. It was my first cigarette in 15 years. Though that had been the winter before my mania began, I believe the first seeds of it were sown then: leaving the children, smoking the cigarette, resenting Keith for putting himself in harm’s way and going out into the greater world while I tended to lunches, homework, and laundry as though everything were normal.

In Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, as in Aftermath, I found an airtight case for divorce. The husband was the villain and the wife the wronged party, and the inevitable result was splitting up. I felt an echo of this later on when I read Lyz Lenz’s polemic This American Ex-Wife, out this month, marketed as “a deeply validating manifesto on the gender politics of marriage (bad) and divorce (actually pretty good!).” The book begins by detailing how Lenz’s husband rarely did household chores and hid belongings of hers that he didn’t like — e.g., a mug that said WRITE LIKE A MOTHERFUCKER — in a box in the basement. “I didn’t want to waste my one wild and precious life telling a grown man where to find the ketchup,” Lenz writes. “What was compelling about my marriage wasn’t its evils or its villains, but its commonplace horror.”

This was not quite the way I felt. Even though I could not stand to see my husband’s face or hear his voice, even though I still felt the same simmering resentment I had since I entered the hospital, I also found myself feeling pangs of sympathy for him. After all, he was going through this too. When we were inevitably together, at mealtimes that were silent unless the children spoke, I could see how wounded he was, how he was barely keeping it together. His clothes hung off his gaunt frame. And at night, when we passed in the kitchen making cups of tea that we would take to our respective rooms, he sometimes asked me for a hug, just a hug. One time I gave in and felt his ribs through his T-shirt. He must have lost at least 15 pounds.

It began to seem like I only ever talked to friends who had been through divorces or were contemplating them. One friend who didn’t know whether to split up with her husband thought opening their marriage might be the answer. Another friend described the ease of sharing custody of his young daughter, then admitted that he and his ex-wife still had sex most weekends. In my chronically undecided state, I admired both of these friends who had found, or might have found, a way to split the difference. Maybe it was possible to break up and remain friends with an ex, something that had never happened to me before in my entire life. Maybe it was possible to be married and not married at the same time. Then I went a little further in my imagination, and the idea of someone else having sex with my husband made me want to gag with jealousy. Maybe that meant something. I was so confused, and the confusion seemed to have no end.

I read more books about divorce. I received an early copy of Sarah Manguso’s Liars, marketed as “a searing novel about being a wife, a mother, and an artist, and how marriage makes liars out of us all.” In it, John, a creative dilettante, and Jane, a writer, meet and soon decide to marry. Liars describes their marriage from beginning to end, a span of almost 15 years, and is narrated by Jane. The beginning of their relationship is delirious: “I tried to explain that first ferocious hunger and couldn’t. It came from somewhere beyond reason.” But the opening of that book also contains a warning. “Then I married a man, as women do. My life became archetypal, a drag show of nuclear familyhood. I got enmeshed in a story that had already been told ten billion times.” I felt perversely reassured that I was merely adding another story to the 10 billion. It made it seem less like it was my fault.

The beginning of my relationship with my husband wasn’t that dramatic or definitive. I thought I was getting into something casual with someone I didn’t even know if I particularly liked, much less loved, but was still oddly fascinated by. I wanted to see the way he lived, to see if I could emulate it and become more like him. He lived with roommates in his 30s — well, that was the price you paid if you wanted to do nothing but write. I wanted what he had, his seriousness about his work. We went on dates where we both sat with our laptops in a café, writing, and this was somehow the most romantic thing I’d ever experienced. On our third date, we went to his father’s home on Cape Cod to dog-sit for a weekend, and it was awkward in the car until we realized we were both thinking about the same Mary Gaitskill story, “A Romantic Weekend,” in which a couple with dramatically mismatched needs learn the truth about each other through painful trial and error. Our weekend was awkward, too, but not nearly as awkward as the one in the story. On the way home, I remember admiring Keith’s driving, effortless yet masterful. I trusted him in the car completely. A whisper of a thought: He would make a good father.

In Liars, cracks begin to form almost immediately, even before John and Jane get engaged; she is accepted to a prestigious fellowship and he isn’t, and he is forthright about his fear that she will become more successful than he is: “A moment later he said he didn’t want to be the unsuccessful partner of the successful person. Then he apologized and said that he’d just wanted to be honest. I said, It was brave and considerate to tell me. ”

Through the next few years, so gradually that it’s almost imperceptible, John makes it impossible for Jane to succeed. He launches tech companies that require cross-country moves, forcing Jane to bounce between adjunct-teaching gigs. And then, of course, they have a baby. The problem with the baby is that Jane wants everything to be perfect for him and throws herself into creating a tidy home and an ideal child-development scenario, whereas John works more and more, moving the family again as one start-up fails and another flourishes. Jane begins to wonder whether she has created a prison for herself but pacifies herself with the thought that her situation is normal: “No married woman I knew was better off, so I determined to carry on. After all, I was a control freak, a neat freak, a crazy person.” The story John tells her about herself becomes her own story for a while. For a while, it’s impossible to know whose story is the truth.

I thought about Keith’s side of the story when I read Liars. Maybe it was the lack of alcohol’s blur that enabled me to see this clearly for the first time — I began to see how burdened he had been, had always been, with a partner who refused to plan for the future and who took on, without being asked, household chores that could just as easily have been distributed evenly. Our situation had never been as clear-cut as it was for Lyz Lenz; Keith had never refused to take out the trash or hidden my favorite mug. But he worked more and later hours, and my intermittent book advances and freelance income could not be counted on to pay our rent. As soon as we’d had a child, he had been shunted into the role of breadwinner without choosing it or claiming it. At first, I did all the cooking because I liked cooking and then, when I stopped liking cooking, I did it anyway out of habit. For our marriage to change, we would have needed to consciously decide to change it, insofar as our essential natures and our financial situation would allow. But when were we supposed to have found the time to do that? It was maddening that the root of our fracture was so commonplace and clichéd — and that even though the problem was ordinary, I still couldn’t think my way out of it.

Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, by Leslie Jamison , is in some ways the successor to Aftermath — the latest divorce book by a literary superstar. It is mostly an account of Jamison’s passionate marriage to a fellow writer, C., and the way that marriage fell apart after her career accelerated and they had a child together. It then details her first months of life as a single mother and her forays into dating. In it, she is strenuously fair to C., taking much of the blame for the dissolution of their marriage. But she can’t avoid describing his anger that her book merits an extensive tour, while his novel — based on his relationship with his first wife, who had died of leukemia — fails commercially. “It didn’t get the reception he had hoped for,” Jamison writes, and now, “I could feel him struggling. He wanted to support me, but there was a thorn in every interview.” C. grows distant, refusing to publicly perform the charming self that Jamison fell in love with. “I wished there was a way to say, Your work matters, that didn’t involve muting my own,” Jamison writes.

For all my marriage’s faults, we never fought in public. Friends encouraged us to reconcile, saying, “You always seemed so good together.” (As if there were another way to seem! Standing next to each other at a party, it had always been easy to relax because we couldn’t fight.) And we never did anything but praise each other’s work. Until this last book of my husband’s, that is. I had read Raising Raffi for the first time six months before it was published, while I was out of town for the weekend. I had, at that time, enjoyed reading it — it was refreshing, in a way, to see someone else’s perspective on a part of my own life. I even felt a certain relief that my child’s early years, in all their specificity and cuteness, had been recorded. This work had been accomplished, and I hadn’t had to do it! There had been only a slight pang in the background of that feeling that I hadn’t been the one to do it. But as publication drew nearer, the pang turned into outright anger . The opening chapter described my giving birth to our first son, and I didn’t realize how violated I felt by that until it was vetted by The New Yorker ’s fact-checker after that section was selected as an excerpt for its website. Had a geyser of blood shot out of my vagina? I didn’t actually know. I had been busy at the time. I hung up on the fact-checker who called me, asking her to please call my husband instead. (In case you’re wondering, Keith has read this essay and suggested minimal changes.)

I related to the writers in Splinters trying to love each other despite the underlying thrum of competing ambitions. But most of all, Jamison’s book made me even more terrified about sharing custody. “There was only one time I got on my knees and begged. It happened in our living room, where I knelt beside the wooden coffee table and pleaded not to be away from her for two nights each week,” she writes. Envisioning a future in which we shared custody of our children made me cringe with horror. It seemed like absolute hell. At the time we separated, our younger son was only 4 years old and required stories and cuddles to get to bed. Missing a night of those stories seemed like a punishment neither of us deserved, and yet we would have to sacrifice time with our kids if we were going to escape each other, which seemed like the only possible solution to our problem. Thanksgiving rolled around, and I cooked a festive meal that we ate without looking at each other. Whenever I looked at Keith, I started to cry.

We decided to enter divorce mediation at the beginning of December. On Sixth Avenue, heading to the therapist’s office, we passed the hospital where I’d once been rushed for an emergency fetal EKG when I was pregnant with our first son. His heart had turned out to be fine. But as we passed that spot, I sensed correctly that we were both thinking of that moment, of a time when we had felt so connected in our panic and desperate hope, and now the invisible cord that had bound us had been, if not severed, shredded and torn. For a moment on the sidewalk there, we allowed ourselves to hold hands, remembering.

The therapist was a small older woman with short curly reddish hair. She seemed wise, like she’d seen it all and seen worse. I was the one who talked the most in that session, blaming Keith for making me go crazy, even though I knew this wasn’t technically true or possible: I had gone crazy from a combination of sky-high stress and a too-high SSRI prescription and a latent crazy that had been in me, part of me, since long before Keith married me, since I was born. Still, I blamed his job, his book, his ambition and workaholism, which always surpassed my own efforts. I cried throughout the session; I think we both did. I confessed that I was not the primary wronged person in these negotiations, and to be fair I have to talk about why. Sometime post–Last Fight and pre-hospitalization, I had managed to cheat on my husband. I had been so sure we were basically already divorced that I justified the act to myself; I couldn’t have done it any other way. I had thought I might panic at the last minute or even throw up or faint, but I had gone through with it thanks to the delusional state I was in. There aren’t many more details anyone needs to know. It was just one time, and it was like a drug I used to keep myself from feeling sad about what was really happening. Anyway, there’s a yoga retreat center I’ll never be able to go to again in my life.

At the end of the session, we decided to continue with the therapist but in couples therapy instead of divorce mediation. It was a service she also provided, and as a bonus, it was $100 cheaper per session. She didn’t say why she made this recommendation, but maybe it was our palpable shared grief that convinced her that our marriage was salvageable. Or maybe it was that, despite everything I had told her in that session, she could see that, even in my profound sadness and anger, I looked toward Keith to complete my sentences when I was searching for the right word and that he did the same thing with me. As broken as we were, we were still pieces of one once-whole thing.

My husband would have to forgive me for cheating and wasting our money. I would have to forgive him for treading on my literary territory: our family’s life, my own life. My husband would have to forgive me for having a mental breakdown, leaving him to take care of our family on his own for a month, costing us thousands of uninsured dollars in hospital bills. I would have to forgive him for taking for granted, for years, that I would be available on a sick day or to do an early pickup or to watch the baby while he wrote about our elder son. I would have to forgive him for taking for granted that there would always be dinner on the table without his having to think about how it got there. He would have to forgive me for never taking out the recycling and never learning how to drive so that I could move the car during alternate-side parking. I would have to forgive him for usurping the time and energy and brain space with which I might have written a better book than his. Could the therapist help us overcome what I knew to be true: that we’d gone into marriage already aware that we were destined for constant conflict just because of who we are? The therapist couldn’t help me ask him to do more if I didn’t feel like I deserved it, if I couldn’t bring myself to ask him myself. I had to learn how to ask.

No one asked anything or forgave anything that day in the couples therapist’s office. After what felt like months but was probably only a few days, I was watching Ramy on my laptop in my downstairs-bedroom cave after the kids’ bedtime when some moment struck me as something Keith would love. Acting purely on impulse, I left my room and found him sitting on the couch, drinking tea. I told him I’d been watching this show I thought was funny and that he would really like it. Soon, we were sitting side by side on the couch, watching Ramy together. We went back to our respective rooms afterward, but still, we’d made progress.

After a few more weeks and a season’s worth of shared episodes of Ramy, I ventured for the first time upstairs to Keith’s attic room. It smelled alien to me, and I recognized that this was the pure smell of Keith, not the shared smell of the bedrooms in every apartment we’d lived in together. I lay down next to him in the mess of his bed. He made room for me. We didn’t touch, not yet. But we slept, that night, together. The next night, we went back to sleeping alone.

Pickups and drop-offs became evenly divided among me and Keith and a sitter. Keith learned to make spaghetti with meat sauce. He could even improvise other dishes, with somewhat less success, but he was improving. I made a conscious effort not to tidy the house after the children left for school. I made myself focus on my work even when there was chaos around me. Slowly, I began to be able to make eye contact with Keith again. At couples therapy, we still clutched tissue boxes in our hands, but we used them less. Our separate chairs inched closer together in the room.

That Christmas, we rented a tiny Airbnb near his dad’s house in Falmouth. It had only two bedrooms, one with bunk beds for the kids and one with a king-size bed that took up almost the entirety of the small room. We would have to share a bed for the duration of the trip. The decision I made to reach across the giant bed toward Keith on one of the last nights of the trip felt, again, impulsive. But there were years of information and habit guiding my impulse. Sex felt, paradoxically, completely comfortable and completely new, like losing my virginity. It felt like sleeping with a different person and also like sleeping with the same person, which made sense, in a way. We had become different people while somehow staying the same people we’d always been.

Slowly, over the course of the next months, I moved most of my things upstairs to his room, now our room. We still see the therapist twice a month. We talk about how to make things more equal in our marriage, how not to revert to old patterns. I have, for instance, mostly given up on making dinner, doing it only when it makes more sense in the schedule of our shared day or when I actually want to cook. It turns out that pretty much anyone can throw some spaghetti sauce on some pasta; it also turns out that the kids won’t eat dinner no matter who cooks it, and now we get to experience that frustration equally. Keith’s work is still more stable and prestigious than mine, but we conspire to pretend that this isn’t the case, making sure to leave space for my potential and my leisure. We check in to make sure we’re not bowing to the overwhelming pressure to cede our whole lives to the physical and financial demands, not to mention the fervently expressed wants, of our children. It’s the work that we’d never found time to do before, and it is work. The difference is that we now understand what can happen when we don’t do it. I’m always surprised by how much I initially don’t want to go to therapy and then by how much lighter I feel afterward. For now, those sessions are a convenient container for our marriage’s intractable defects so that we get to spend the rest of our time together focusing on what’s not wrong with us.

The downstairs bedroom is now dormant, a place for occasional guests to stay or for our elder son to lie in bed as he plays video games. Some of my clothes from a year earlier still fill the drawers, but none of it seems like mine. I never go into that room if I can help it. It was the room of my exile from my marriage, from my family. If I could magically disappear it from our apartment, I would do it in a heartbeat. And in the attic bedroom, we are together, not as we were before but as we are now.

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Writing for women’s magazines…

shopping

1. Research the publication

Women’s magazines are definitely not all the same. They are extremely individual and are highly focused on their readers. For example, many are targeted at women in different age groups or at different stages of life (such as having a baby, career orientated or retiring.) So if you are planning to send a story or story idea to one, buy copies of the magazine you are thinking of approaching and digest them avidly. Your idea MUST be unique enough to be commissioned, yet fit in with the style of the magazine.

2. Look out for niches you could contribute to

Many magazines run different weekly slots. If your experience or idea fits one of these slots then that can be a good way of getting a piece in. Even if you are already a journalist, writing about yourself or a point of view you have is a good initial way of getting a foot in the door.

3. Send your idea to the right person.

Ring the magazine and ask for the commissions editor. Most will ask you to send your idea in on email. Keep it short (they are far too busy to read lots) and don’t write in riddles (‘I will tell you what my story is when you ring’ is a no). Don’t forget to include your daytime contact number and if the story is about you, a snapshot.

4. Be persistent but not a pest

If a few days go by and there’s no reply, then there’s no harm in emailing to remind them. If you still don’t hear, then try another (researched magazine and commissions editor) on your list. If you hear back and it’s a no, don’t ask ‘why’ as editors do not have the time to discuss it. Never ring as you will undoubtedly pick a bad time and you will just catch that editor on the hop (very awkward.)

5. Don’t send your complete written story

It is pointless to write a whole story out and then send it round to editors. You must precis it in a few paragraphs. If it is written, then you can ask if it’s ok to send in. Remember though that however wonderful your writing is it will often be re-written. All magazines have very definite styles and if someone does want your story (unless you are a seasoned magazine feature writer) even book authors are often required to be interviewed and your story will be rewritten in their house style.

6. Real Life stories

Many women’s magazines rely on readers sending their stories to them. Some magazines have a form either online or inside the magazine for you to fill in and advertise that they will pay for stories. However, most real-life stories – if they are not sourced directly by in-house journalists – are sourced from long-established agencies and journalists who regularly supply publications day in, day out with these types of stories. We believe if you have a real life story to tell about yourself, then you must get expert advice. For example, our sister site, Featureworld is a specialist site and sends all stories out to multiple magazines to gain the best deal. Interviewees with real life stories are usually required by magazines to sign contracts, which can be deceptively simple (it is pretty easy to sign all your rights away…) and multiple magazine deals are best left to an agent. Even if you are already a journalist wanting to sell a real life story to a magazine, if you are inexperienced in this area it can be fraught with pitfalls. Your story must be exclusively signed and tied up to you, and your interviewee willing to appear/be photographed/supply personal photos/not have any legal issues to impede publication/might expect to be paid. If your real life story ticks these boxes, you should then pitch as above.

7. Get everything in writing

Ensure you sort out a fee (or credit for your blog/book/charity) before you write any article. Also be sure to ask how many words, first or third person (this is why it is pointless to have written your story first…) and to study the style of the magazine. Always double check how it should be written – even if it is for a regular slot as the magazine might recently have decided to change the way they present that slot. The way the magazine writes is how your story must be written – it cannot be changed for you. Don’t be too precious either over your copy as editors in magazines are pedantic and will often write and rewrite copy until it is just right for them. The vast majority of magazines, however, do read copy back to interviewees prior to publication.

8. Get your timing right

Many magazines are news led – or alternatively they are setting the agenda for the news. So magazines are often looking for stories to lead on from the week’s headlines. If for example, a celebrity husband has just had an affair and you want to talk about how your husband did the same, that can be a great way to get your story in. But be quick – magazines will soon be onto the next headlines to follow up.

Don’t forget too that many monthly magazines (and even some weeklies) do literally plan months in advance. So a Christmas story will need to be put up to them in August (ring to find the exact edition they are currently working on.)

9. The waiting game

Although some weekly magazines are able to get something into print within a week or two the vast majority will take weeks – or even months – to get a story in. Unfortunately there is little you can do except wait. Although some pay as soon as you send your copy in, a number pay on publication and then take at least four to six weeks to pay from publication.

10. A word about fiction.

Many writers are keen to get a short fiction story into print. But the same rules as above will apply. Firstly, identify the correct magazine (many do not run any fiction stories so it is truly wasting your time even sending it in) and then study the style. Often fiction stories are written in the same style as the real life stories. And the story you are writing (to an exact word count and in the exact style) must appeal to their readers (ie: age, stage in life as above.) To add to this, Editors often have a long list of storylines they will not accept – these include the story was a dream, the story is being narrated by the pet dog, the woman you thought the attractive guy was with turns out to be his sister to name a few. In fact, it is a good idea to contact the magazine you intend to send a fiction story to and ask for their guidelines so you don’t waste your time and theirs.

Finally … do not underestimate women’s magazines. Incredibly, we often receive limply written ideas with the suggestion they ‘might be suitable for a women’s magazine’ from someone who has clearly not read one for years! Women’s magazines are looking for fresh ideas, quirky real life stories, news-led opinion pieces (although they like to set the news too) and they are often hugely loyal to their readers. If anything, writing for magazines – especially the UK women’s weekly magazine market – is the hardest, most cut-throat and competitive of all journalism. It is also already very well covered by very established agencies and freelancers. We therefore suggest as there are so many other magazines around that the best way in is to first target a niche magazine or blog and gain lots of experience that way before going this route.

Do you have any other tips to add? If so we would love you to add them below…

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Alison Smith-Squire

Alison Smith-Squire is a writer, journalist and media agent selling exclusive real life stories to newspapers, magazines and TV. She owns the sell my story website Featureworld.co.uk, which was set up to help ordinary people sell their stories to the press.

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  • Write for Magazines: 21 Publications That Pay $500+ Per Assignment

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1. AARP, The Magazine

2. alaska beyond, 3. the atlantic, 4. chatelaine magazine, 5. delta sky, 6. discover magazine, 7. early american life, 8. earth island journal, 9. eating well, 10. enroute, 11. family circle, 13. green entrepreneur, 14. hakai magazine, 15. hemispheres, 16. kitplanes, 17. liisbeth, 18. popular science, 20. smithsonian, 21. the sun, get paid to write for magazines.

Get Paid $500+ to Write for Magazines. Makealivingwriting.com

It’s a great way to make a living writing if you pitch the right publications. How about $500 or more per assignment?

If you’ve been cranking out magazine stories for $50 to $150 a pop, you may be wondering if that’s really even possible. That’s often the going rate for local, regional, or small-circulation magazines.

If you want to write for magazines, and have limited experience, these are great places to get some clips, and earn some money, but it shouldn’t be your last stop.

Many consumer and trade magazines pay $500 or more per assignment. And the pitching process is pretty much the same as smaller pubs:

  • Identify a magazine you want to write for
  • Study the submission guidelines
  • Develop a solid story idea
  • Do a little research and interview a source
  • Write a killer query letter, and pitch your story idea to an editor

If you can do that, you’ve got the chops to get paid well to write for any magazine on the market . But you need to know where to look for those $500-plus assignments. Check out these 21 magazines to find freelance writing jobs .

Here’s an interesting fact about the magazine published for readers over age 50. AARP has the highest circulation of any magazine in the United States, with more than 35 million subscribers.

That also means it pays well, on average $1/word or $1,500 per assignment. Publishes news, features, how-tos, and essays about money, health and fitness, food, travel, relationships, and more for over-50 readers.

AARP  may be a tough magazine to crack for newbies, but it’s not impossible. Smart networking efforts and a solid story idea helped Freelance Writers Den member Willi Morris land an assignment with AARP , one of her dream clients.

Contact: Senior Editor George Mannes or Features Editor George Blooston

Not all in-flight magazines openly publish writer’s guidelines, but  Alaska Beyond is one that does. About 75 percent of this magazine is written by freelancers. Best way to break in: Pitch a short piece for “The Feed” department. Then you’re a lot more likely to land higher paying assignments (up to $700) for travel, news, and feature stories.

Contact: Editor Paul Frichtl

If you want to write for The Atlantic , a magazine that covers news and analysis on politics, business, culture, technology, national, international and political life, read this by former Atlantic staffer Garance Franke-Ruta: “ How (not) to pitch: A guide for freelance writers .”

FYI –  The Atlantic is also open to working with new freelancers. It’s where Freelance Writers Den member Douglas Fitzpatrick landed his first magazine assignment as a newbie for a piece about the career trajectory of Donald Trump.

Want to write for  The Atlantic?  Study the magazine and  pitch an idea with a query first . Pays $150 to $1,600 depending on assignment.

Contact: See department staff info here

Chatelaine is a popular monthly women’s magazine in Canada that covers health and fitness, finance, social issues, fashion, beauty, food, and home decor. It’s target audience is active women ages 25 to 54.

“The Health section covers the latest news and studies, gives fitness and workout tips and explores hot-button issues,” says Managing Editor Laura Brown. Query with a story idea first. Pays an average of $1/word or $1,500 per assignment.

Contact:  Managing Editor Laura Brown

If you’re interested in writing for custom pubs for airlines, pitch the in-flight magazine Delta Sky . Carol Tice happens to be a regular contributor, including a  story in the November 2018 issue.

Pitch story ideas about food, sports, lifestyle, business, and travel (including international destinations). The current issue includes stories about destinations around the world like Seoul, Korea, Beijing, China, Grenada, and must-see places across the U.S.

Contact: Editor Sarah Elbert

If you customized your search in  Writer’s Market to find magazines that pay the highest rate, this is one that would rise to the top of the list. How about $2/word or $3,000 for a 1,500-word feature story.

This science-based magazines features stories about medical research, scientific breakthroughs, technology, physics, space travel, and even paleontology. Keep in mind it’s written for a lay audience, so academic language won’t get you an assignment.

Want to write for Discover? Here’s some advice from freelancer  Susan Etchey : “The only way a new writer has a chance to get the attention of its editors is to have an explosive, compelling untold science story to tell.”

Contact: Senior Editor  Gemma Tarlach  or another member of the  editorial team .

From colonization to life in the mid-1800s, this magazine features stories about history, architecture, antiques, crafts, and travel destinations for people interested in early American life.

In the most recent issue, you’ll learn about rolling pins from the Colonial era, the evolution of the bald eagle as America’s mascot, brewing in the 1700s, and more.

Know how to dig up the bones to pitch a story about early American life? It’s worth the effort. This pub pays an average of $500 to $2,000 per assignment.

Contact: Executive Editor Jenmarie Andrews

If you want to write for  Earth Island Journal , follow the first rule of writing for any magazine. Read it. Study back issues.

In the current issue, you’ll learn about Donald Trumps rhetoric about the environment, the trouble with hydroponic growing and our food supply, bee conservation, a curious new way to clean up trash, and more.

Pays an average of $1,000 per assignment for stories about science, technology, the environment, and people making a difference.

Contact: Editor Maureen Nandini Mitra

Get in line at the grocery story, and you might see this magazine on the news stand. But it’s not just a magazine filled with recipes, photos of tasty food, and tips for healthy eating.

There’s a lot more “meat” in the pages of Eating Well that explains the science behind the taste, textures, and flavors that make food delicious. If you can combine smart storytelling with science and food, write a query letter and pitch an idea.  Eating Well pays an average of $1/word.

Contact :  Associate Nutrition Editor Julia Westbrook  or another member of the editorial team.

Glamping, conservation efforts, fishing for a record-setting marlin, and a Canadian’s guide to the Louvre. Those are just a few of the the types of stories featured in Air Canad’s in-flight magazine enRoute.

“We engage our audience through intelligent writing, insight, humour and spot-on service journalism,” says Editor-in-chief Jean-François Légaré. Study the guidelines, back issues, and  media kit  before pitching a story idea.

Contact: Editor Caitlin Walsh Miller

How do you run a house, pursue a career, take care of kids, eat healthy, look good, and feel good? It’s the kind of answers you’ll find in the articles published in Family Circle magazine. It’s a national women’s magazine with a circulation of around 4.2 million readers, and a healthy budget to pay freelancers $1/word.

Need some story ideas? In the current issue, you’ll find stories about raising teenagers, the struggle to lose weight and keep it off, popular vacation spots for kids, and more

Contact:  Associate Editor Caroline Mullen or another member of the editorial staff .

Carol Tice spend over a decade writing about business, commerce, entrepreneurship, finance, and big businesses like Amazon and Microsoft. And it was the perfect proving ground for her to land a long-term gig writing for Forbes.

This business magazine is among the most recognized for publishing stories about the people, businesses, and trends in entrepreneurship, innovation, leadership, and more. And it’s good for freelancers. Forbes pays an average of $1/word and up.

In the most current issue, you’ll learn about tennis phenom Serena Williams smart investing strategies. You’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at the deal to build Trump Tower. You’ll be exposed to a new perspective on climate change truths that may impact everyone’s bottom line, and more.

Contact: Senior Editor Susan Adams or another member of the editorial staff.

Last year, Entrepreneur  magazine launched  GreenEntrepreneur.com , to give readers that latest news about entrepreneurship, business, technology and lifestyle aspects of the cannabis industry.

“Rarely does a new industry explode with the exponential success that the legal marijuana trade has experienced,” Entrepreneur Media President Bill Shaw, said in a press release.

If you want to write for  Green Entrepreneur , study the guidelines and pitch a story idea about the cannabis industry. Pays up to $1.50/word.

Looking for story ideas? The latest buzz in Green Entrepreneur includes stories about a new weed vaporizor that may popularize smoking marijuana, a $400 million shopping spree spent on cannabis, the latest news about legalization, and more.

Contact:  Executive Editor Jonathan Small

If you want to write about archaeology, ecology, biology, geology, and oceanography of marine coastal environments, take a closer look at Hakai magazine.

You’ve got the chops to write for this magazine that pays up to $1/word if you have solid journalism experience, research skills, and the ability to interview sources.

“We are interested in great stories and strong voices,” says Editor Jude Isabella. “We tilt toward science and environmental stories, but we’re also interested in people and communities and how they interact with coastal ecosystems.”

Pitch short news stories about coastal environmental topics (500 to 800 words), or an in-depth feature (1,000 to 5,000 words).

If you can provide video (five minutes or less) or content for an infographic, to go with your story, your chances of acceptance go up.

Contact:   Editor Jude Isabella

The United Airlines in-flight magazine,  Hemispheres , happens to be one of two in-flight magazines listed in  Writer’s Market  listed with a $$$ pay rate.

Translation: This magazine pays freelancers an average of $750 to $1,500 per assignment. Publishes stories about global culture, adventure, business, entertainment, and sports .

Inside the current issue, you’ll find stories about must-see-and-do activities in Chicago, insights on life, career and relationships from actress Kristen Bell, moon-landing anniversary celebration tips, and more.

Contact: Editor Ellen Carpenter

This is what the Wright Brothers inspired more than 100 years ago:  build a plane from a kit, and fly it.

You might not think a highly-niche magazine with a small circulation (about 72,000 readers). But Kitplanes pays well enough to be included in this list, up to $1,000 per assignment.

Pitch story ideas about building and design, flight testing, construction techniques, personal experience, and features on the people and businesses who are involved in building personal aircraft.

Contact: Editor Paul Dye

Before you pitch a story idea to this feminist-focused magazine that covers entrepreneurship, innovation, social issues, and the politics and policies of business, be sure to read the LiisBeth Manifesto .

If you can pitch a story idea that jives with that about people and businesses making a difference, you’re on your way landing an assignment that pays up to $1,500 U.S. You best bet for a well-paid assignment…pitch a story idea for a profile, how-to, or investigative feature.

Contact:  Editor Margaret Webb — This email no longer works. Per the publication guidelines, you can send queries to [email protected] – or do some sleuthing and find another editor contact!

If science and technology writing for an educated lay audience is your niche, don’t waste another minute waiting to pitch Popular Science. It’s one of the oldest magazines still in existence with roots dating back to the late 1800s.

It’s got a circulation of about 1.5 million readers, and a healthy budget to pay freelancers. How about $2/word or $1,000-plus per assignment?

Need story ideas? In the current issue, you’ll read about new threats posed by the Zika virus, rapidly-evolving drone technology, a cookie-test kitchen in outer space, and more.

Contact: Senior Editor Rachel Feltman

When Sierra magazine editor Jason Mark stepped into his new role a few years ago, he had just walked through Nevada’s Carson-Iceberg Wilderness, surrounded by massive wildfires. That solo experience shaped his mission to lead this magazine dedicated to causes to protect the planet, natural spaces, and outdoor recreation.

“I keep thinking about that trip to the Sierra, which seems emblematic of the challenges facing the environmental movement today,” says Mark. “We want to celebrate and enjoy the big, open spaces we love. At the same time, we have to be always on guard to protect those places. ”

This is the magazine for Sierra Club members. Pitch story ideas about outdoor adventure, environmental issues, and people on a mission to “explore, enjoy, and protect the planet.” Pays $1/word and up per assignment.

Contact: Editor Jason Mark

Did you know the Smithsonian Institute includes 19 museums and galleries, the National Zoological Park, and 2.7 million square feet of indoor space? There’s a lot to know and a lot to learn about the past, present and future of science, technology, the environment, and even the universe.

And you can write about it for the  Smithsonian  magazine and get paid well. The  Smithsonian  pays freelancers $1-$3/per word, which means a $500 assignment is more than realistic. So how do you break into this magazine?

“There has to be something surprising and narratively interesting there,” says  Senior Editor Jenny Rothenberg Gritz . “If the story is about the natural world, either the person you’re writing about has to be super charismatic and interesting, or something done about the issue has to be amazing.”

Contact: Associate Editor Thomas Stackpole or another member of the editorial staff.

Here’s an interesting way to differentiate yourself as a news and literary magazine…no advertising. That’s the Sun’s approach to focus on great writing.

This magazine has been around for 40-plus years, and is looking for essays, interviews, and story ideas about political and cultural issues. The Sun  pays up to $2,000 per assignment.

“We’ve been described in many ways,” says Editor and Publisher Sy Safransky. “Celebratory, fierce, unflinching, thoughtful, truthful, dark, darkly funny, tender.”

And it shows in recent articles on food inequalities in the U.S., an outsider’s view from inside the commercial fishing industry, the uncanny sense for home that dog’s have, and more.

Contact: Senior Editor Andrew Snee or another member of the editorial staff .

If you’re looking for magazines that pay $500 or more per assignment, this isn’t even the tip of the iceberg. Lots of magazines pay pro rates.

  • Check Writer’s Market (print or online) for more. Skip over the magazines that pay low rates, and focus those that pay $1/word or more.
  • Get in touch with the editors at custom pubs and trade magazines . These mags frequently work with freelance writers and pay pro rates, but aren’t as easy to find as consumer pubs in Writer’s Market .
  • Keep on pitching. Then work through the process to study the magazine, develop a story idea, and write a killer query letter. If you can do this for magazines that pay lower-rates, you can do it for bigger magazines that pay top dollar.

What well-paying magazines do you write for? Tell us in the comments below.

Evan Jensen is a contributing writer for Make a Living Writing. When he’s not on a writing deadline or catching up on emails, he’s training to run another 100-mile ultra-marathon.

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Get Paid to Write: 23 Sites That Pay Freelancers $100+

Get Paid to Write: 23 Sites That Pay Freelancers $100+

In this list of sites that pay freelance writers, we’ve identified new markets we haven’t featured before. And even though these sites represent a variety of different niches, they all have one thing in common.

These are sites that pay $100 or more for blog posts, articles, essays, tutorials, and other types of writing assignments.

Write for Money: 80+ Websites that Pay Freelance Writers $50+

Write for Money: 80+ Websites that Pay Freelance Writers $50+

Tired of earning pennies (or peanuts or whichever cliche for crappy pay you prefer) and ready to learn how to write for money online for real?

writing for the lady magazine

Writing for Women’s Magazines by E.D. Thompson

ED Thompson

E.D. Thompson

  • 17 October 2022

At a guess, you might well not have heard of Glenda Young. She is a lovely woman who lives in the north-east of England, has a great smile and a ready sense of humour.

She is also probably the most prolific fiction writer in these islands at this time.

Not only does Glenda have multi-book deals for writing series of both historical sagas and cosy crime, she also created and continues to write the weekly ‘soap’, Riverside, in the world’s longest-running weekly women’s magazine, The People’s Friend.

In addition, she contributes occasional short stories to various women’s magazines, and oversees a number of blogs related to Coronation Street, of which she is a lifelong fan.

I cannot imagine what her annual word count is, but I would be very surprised if any author, anywhere, is producing that amount of new material and getting it published.

Glenda is kind of my role model. Like her, I have found a great deal of encouragement via writing stories for popular women’s magazines, and this helped give me the confidence to try to write a full-length, contemporary thriller, and then another, and another.

I need to state that I had written novels before. I wrote two darkish comedy-dramas, Notes for the Next Time and The Undercover Mother, over a dozen years ago. They were well-received, but sales were less than hoped for and my publishing contract was not renewed.

I assumed that was it, I’d had my chance and my fiction-writing career had failed to flourish. Needing to earn a living, I went off, retrained in Children’s Care, Learning and Development and then in Playwork, which I loved, and worked in those fields for several years.

It was only because I was on sick leave following surgery that someone brought me a gift of popular women’s magazines to help me pass the time. I became intrigued by the fiction element and wondered who wrote those stories – was the content produced in-house or could anyone submit material?

Closing In

But one of the three sold. So I knew there was hope.

Managing a full-time, full-on job, further training, a family of teenagers and a home, I didn’t have a lot of time to write, but I did what I could. Some of what I submitted was declined – I once had twelve stories turned down in a single email; there were exceptional circumstances, but still… However, I learned as much from the rejections as from the successes and the ratio of hits to misses started to improve markedly.

I have heard some people speak dismissively of what are fondly known as the ‘womags’ – as though their fiction content is for  the simple-minded or for people who aren’t clever enough to read actual books. I must disagree! Womag readers are a discerning bunch who expect and demand well-drawn, engaging characters, sharp, believable dialogue and a robust plot. Nothing flimsy, predictable or tired, please. And this is no place to try and flog off your apprentice pieces – only submit your best work.

If you are prepared to persist and to learn, the rewards are there to be reaped. You will see your work in print, often with original, bespoke artwork. You will forge relationships with editors who want to work with you more. You will be paid! (Not a fortune, but certainly not merely a token amount.) And you will develop as a writer. I know I have done. My first two novels, way-back, were diary-style musings with minimal dialogue. This was partly because the stories were very introspective in nature, but I suspect it was also partly because I had very little confidence about writing direct speech. Not any more. I’m not saying I’m Anne Enright, whom I heard on radio recently reading aloud a row she had composed – it was electric! But, after half a dozen successful short magazine stories I was definitely improving, and now I have no fear of it.

I have had about four hundred ‘womag’ stories accepted in the past four years, and if anyone suggested that I ‘churn them out’ I would be seriously offended. I have never ‘churned out’ anything in my life. I wouldn’t. I am fully committed to every piece I write, be it a gentle rom-com for The People’s Friend or a psychological thriller like my new one, Closing In, which I really hope you will rush out and read. (Christmas, an old flame, and a BIG secret!)

In each of the past three years I have produced a crime-thriller from scratch, plus written around a hundred magazine stories. I’m not quite up there with Glenda Young, or, indeed, in terms of greatness, with the incomparable Kate Atkinson, who also began her writing career with stories for the ‘womags’, believe it or not. But my recent experiences have made me productive and professional and, as a route into fiction writing, I would strongly recommend approaching women’s magazines.

Do bring to the project lots of fresh ideas about family and friendship, bomb-proof optimism to meet the inevitable rejections, patience when you have written a piece so that you let it rest instead of firing it off in a fit of excitement the minute it’s written, and more patience, because sometimes magazines take a while to let you know.

I absolutely love writing for the ‘womags’, and have no intention of giving it up, just because I now write novels, as well. They were doing ‘up-lit’ long before the recent fashion, and writing in that genre can hardly help putting a smile on your face.

(c) E.D. Thompson

Closing In by E.D. Thompson is published by Hachette Ireland.

About  Closing In:

But Caroline’s good life is not her only life.

When, out of the blue, she spots a frighteningly familiar figure in the crowd – a man she hasn’t laid eyes on in more than twenty years – she is jolted shockingly back to a secret past she’d hoped she’d put behind her forever.

As Christmas nudges closer and alarming events unfold, she feels him closing in on her. Caroline must come up with a plan to keep this man away from her family. But just how far will one woman go to protect a good life? And just how far will one man go to destroy it?

Order your copy online here .

About the author

E.D. Thompson worked as a newspaper journalist before turning to fiction writing. She is a graduate of the Creative Writing MA at Queen’s University, Belfast and prolific author of short stories for women’s magazines. A mother of three grown-up children, she lives in County Armagh with her husband and cat.

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Why the Case Against Fani Willis Feels Familiar to Black Women

In interviews, professional women were dismayed by the personal attacks on the Georgia prosecutor, but not surprised.

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A portrait of Fani Willis, the district attorney of Futon County, Ga.

By Clyde McGrady and Katie Glueck

Tangala L. Hollis-Palmer felt a sense of pride when she learned that Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., and one of the nation’s few elected Black female prosecutors, would lead the election interference case against former President Donald J. Trump.

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But that pride would be tempered by dismay as news emerged of Ms. Willis’s personal relationship with a fellow prosecutor, Nathan J. Wade , an outside lawyer she hired to help run the case. Ms. Hollis-Palmer, a Black, 40-year-old attorney from Mississippi, is mostly upset at critics trying, she said, to discredit Ms. Willis. At first, she was skeptical of the allegations. But when Ms. Willis herself conceded the relationship, Ms. Hollis reserved some disappointment for the prosecutor who should have used a “little more discretion and a little better judgment,” she said.

Mr. Trump and several co-defendants are calling Ms. Willis’s hiring of Mr. Wade a conflict of interest and want Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade disqualified, potentially upending a critical case against the former president and doing grievous damage to Ms. Willis’s reputation.

“We just have to be so careful when we are in these positions to not give people the ammunition to come after us,” Ms. Hollis-Palmer said.

On Thursday, a Georgia judge is scheduled to hear evidence on the relationship between the two prosecutors.

A defense lawyer for one of Mr. Trump’s co-defendants argues that Ms. Willis’s hiring of Mr. Wade is a “form of self-dealing” that provides Ms. Willis with incentive to keep the case going.

Mr. Wade has earned more than $650,000 since his hiring in 2021 while also spending money on joint vacations he has taken with Ms. Willis, issues that will be central to the hearing this week. Ms. Willis has said that the costs of joint personal travel have been “divided roughly evenly” between her and Mr. Wade.

Interviews with a dozen Black women at varying stages of their careers found them to be painfully conflicted about Ms. Willis’s situation and her treatment in the public eye.

To many, there is something galling about watching Mr. Trump and his allies attack Ms. Willis over a consensual romantic relationship when he has faced accusations of sexual misconduct and assault. Mr. Trump was recently ordered by a Manhattan jury to pay $83.3 million to the writer E. Jean Carroll for defaming her after she accused him of a decades-old rape. A civil jury also found Mr. Trump liable for sexually abusing Ms. Carroll.

Some lamented Ms. Willis’s conduct as a mistake, but not one that should remove her from the case against Mr. Trump. Others, thinking about their own experiences in the workplace, suggested another concern: They feel that Black women are held to a different standard and that Ms. Willis should have known that her identity, along with the enormous political stakes of the case, would create a white-hot spotlight on her personal conduct.

“I can’t sit in judgment of her as a human being, but I can say, in terms of her role as a public prosecutor, yeah, she showed bad judgment,” said Donna Brazile, a former chair of the Democratic National Committee, adding that she had always kept a clear separation between her own personal and professional life with “a bright red line.”

She said Ms. Willis faced “vitriol” and “racial animus” as a woman of color in a position of power.

But, Ms. Brazile said, some of the attention is to be expected for a high-profile person involved in a high-profile case, especially one that concerns a former president of the United States.

“She is undergoing public scrutiny — she’s a public official,” Ms. Brazile said. “Comes with the territory.”

Jeff DiSantis, a spokesman for Ms. Willis’s office, declined to comment.

The discussions about race, gender and Ms. Willis’s dilemma have played out in group chats with text messages flying back and forth, in kitchen table discussions between couples and at student hangouts.

“We deal with the sexism as well as the racism,” Ms. Hollis-Palmer said. “But sometimes the sexism is a little worse.” She practices law with her husband and said that when they walk into a courtroom, people automatically assume that he’s the lead counsel. “A lot of times people have thought that I was his assistant,” she added.

When publicly discussing Ms. Willis’s predicament, some women of color have tried to walk a tightrope of empathy and anger.

Those conflicting feelings played out during a recent discussion on the daytime talk show “The View.”

“I’m very pissed off, too,” said the co-host Ana Navarro-Cárdenas, who is a Nicaraguan American. “Because when you are a woman of color in such a high-profile position, you know that the scrutiny that’s going to befall you is greater than on anybody else, and she needed to have kept her house clean.”

The co-host Sunny Hostin, who is Black and Latina, chimed in, “Your stuff cannot stink,” before adding that she agreed with Ms. Navarro-Cárdenas.

In some cases, the concerns about Ms. Willis’s treatment are balanced with uneasiness over how her behavior could jeopardize a potential Trump conviction.

“My initial reaction was that it seemed to be kind of a halfhearted attempt to get the entire case thrown out, which I thought was just an incredible stretch,” said Faith Udobang, 25, president of the University of Chicago Black Law Student Association.

But now she is worried that the misconduct accusations against Ms. Willis could delay the outcome until after the election.

“I believe the American people deserve to have adequate information once they go to the polls,” she said.

Some legal observers have said the attempts to disqualify Ms. Willis rest on shaky legal ground. They say the allegations against Ms. Willis have nothing to do with whether or not Mr. Trump interfered with the state’s election in 2020, and conspired to subvert the will of Georgia voters. But lawyers for defendants could use the misconduct allegations to undermine perceptions about the fairness of the prosecution by calling into question Ms. Willis’s judgment.

In a January address at one of Atlanta’s oldest Black churches, Ms. Willis suggested that her critics are playing the “race card.” She defended her hiring of Mr. Wade and said that his “impeccable credentials” were only being questioned because they are both Black.

“Obviously, it was in somebody’s interest to bring her down,” said the former Senator Carol Moseley Braun, Democrat of Illinois and the first Black woman to serve in the Senate. “The fact that she’s a high-profile Black woman just means that she’s a bigger target.”

Others are less sure that race or gender are central to fueling the accusations, but instead argue that anyone in Ms. Willis’s position would be the target of personal attacks from Mr. Trump.

Luci Walker, a 54-year-old data analyst from Decatur, Ga., said she doesn’t believe Ms. Willis’s race or gender had played a role in the scrutiny.

“It would be some reason or another, but I think they might just be looking for excuses to get out of it, or to get her off the case,” Ms. Walker said.

Leah D. Daughtry, a veteran Democratic strategist, said that the focus on Ms. Willis’s personal life was, in some ways, in keeping with the kind of attention that follows many in public life. But there is an added complication for Black women, she said.

“There are people who will be emboldened and invigorated by the fact that she’s a Black woman and make it, then, their business to go further and farther than they may have gone,” she said. It is “easy to argue that white men are not often held to the same scrutiny.”

She pointed to the many accusations of misconduct Mr. Trump has faced, including from Ms. Carroll.

“No one made that a disqualifier,” she said of the current Republican presidential front-runner. “But for Fani Willis, the fact that she’s in a consensual relationship with another adult person somehow makes her disqualified, or unqualified, to continue the work that she’s been doing. In that sense there’s a double standard, absolutely.”

Glynda C. Carr, the leader of Higher Heights for America, an organization focused on engaging Black women in politics, said she had been raised with the idea that Black women must be “twice” as good to navigate challenging dynamics in the workplace.

“Yes, we have a playbook about how we have to be twice as better, that we have to dot all the i’s and cross the t’s,” she said. When the public thinks Black women have made a mistake, she added, they “fall harder on the sword.”

Audio produced by Patricia Sulbarán .

Clyde McGrady reports on how race and identity is shaping American culture. He is based in Washington. More about Clyde McGrady

Katie Glueck is a national political reporter. Previously, she was chief Metro political correspondent, and a lead reporter for The Times covering the Biden campaign. She also covered politics for McClatchy’s Washington bureau and for Politico. More about Katie Glueck

Our Coverage of the Trump Case in Georgia

Former president donald trump and 18 others face a sprawling series of charges for their roles in attempting to interfere in the state’s 2020 presidential election..

RICO Charges:  At the heart of the indictment in Georgia  are racketeering charges under the state Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act . Here’s why such charges  could prove to be a powerful tool for the prosecution .

Who Else Was Indicted?:   Rudy   Giuliani , who led legal efforts in several states to keep the former president in power, and Mark Meadows , the former White House chief of staff, were among the 18 Trump allies  charged in the case.

Plea Deals: Sidney K. Powell , Kenneth Chesebro  and Jenna Ellis  — three lawyers indicted with Trump in the case — pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors   against the former president.

Lt. Gov. Burt Jones: Since the indictment of Trump and his allies, a question has gone unanswered: Would charges also be filed against the longtime Trump supporter? It is now up to a state agency to find a special prosecutor to investigate him .

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15 Magazines That Accept Freelance Writing Submissions

Author: Kara Wilson

March 31, 2021 6 Comments

Not sure where to find work as a freelance writer? Check out this list of 15 magazines accepting freelance submissions; online and in print.

Do you love to write but don’t know where to find work as a freelancer ? Whether you’re a beginner, a college student wanting to earn a little extra spending money, a stay-at-home mom who needs a creative outlet, or someone who is looking for a career change, you could be writing for magazines. 

There are publications in every niche all over the world that pay freelance writers for their work.

Check out this list of 15 online and print magazines, and start pitching today from the comfort of your home.  

Popular Parenting Magazines That Pay Freelance Writers

Freelance writer working at laptop.

1. Focus on the Family

Focus on the Family has an ongoing list of submission topics that they are currently accepting. At this time of writing, topics included topics like Back to School with a Twist and Adjusting to No Schedule Days. Check out this page for submission calls.

  • Article length:  50-300 words, 400-500 words, and 800-1,200 words
  • Pay:  $50, $125, and $375 respectively upon acceptance

2. Her View From Home

Her View From Home is an online magazine that has over 1,000 contributors on its site but welcomes new writers. Articles are personal and written from the heart, with topics focusing on motherhood, marriage, kids, faith, grief, and living. Read their  submission guidelines .

  • Article length:  600-800 words or less
  • Pay:  Based on the number of unique page views your article receives within 30 days of publication

3. Mother.ly

Motherly stories are first-person insights into motherhood to inspire other moms, provide hope, and reassure them that many others share their experiences. It’s a non-judgemental, inclusive space. They are also looking for expert columnists if you are one of their listed experts. See their  submission guidelines .

  • Article length:  700-900 words 
  • Pay:  Writers earn $50 per article after publishing two posts ‘to ensure the writer’s voice and style aligns with Motherly’s voice and style’

Top Business and Finance Magazines That Pay Freelance Writers

4. incomediary.

If you’re an expert at creating awesome websites, social media, driving traffic, or making money online, IncomeDiary would love to hear from you. Your article needs to be engaging and of the highest standard to be published. You can subscribe for paid writing jobs so that you’re notified when opportunities arise.  Submit your article here .

  • Article length:  Minimum of 1,500 words
  • Pay:  Up to $200

5. BC Business Magazine

Focusing on business in British Columbia, BC Business Magazine is looking out for stories on the issues, trends, and people shaping BC companies. If you have an engaging writing style and would like to get an article in front of their 6 million readers, see their  writer’s guidelines  for more information. 

  • Article length:  Features vary from 2,000-3,500 words
  • Pay:  Rates vary depending on standard and writer’s experience

6. Success Magazine

Offering advice on best business practices and helping people (in particular, entrepreneurs) gain more control over their personal and financial situation, this magazine is seeking pieces on admirable self-made business owners. For your first pitch, send them a 300-word article following their  submission guidelines .

  • Article length:  300 words initially
  • Pay:  $0.50 per word

Great Food and Drink Magazines That Pay Freelance Writers

7. eating well.

For those of you who enjoy cooking delicious and nutritious food, why not write for a popular publication with over 1 million readers. If you can write about nutrition or recipes in a journalistic and authoritative voice, Eating Well would love to hear from you. Familiarize yourself with their  writers’ guidelines .

  • Article length:  Unspecified
  • Pay:  Up to $1 per word

8. Extra Crispy

A site more than a magazine, Extra Crispy is big on breakfast and looking for “opinion pieces, reported stories, personal essays, works of humor, illustrated narratives, breakfast-y profiles of people, original recipes, how-tos, and unusual points of view on the beloved morning meal we all love.”  Here’s how to pitch Extra Crispy .

  • Article length:  800-1,000 words
  • Pay:  Approximately $0.47 per word

Do you have some amazing stories about food and travel you’d like to share with the world? This loved and well-known magazine is the global guide to cooking, entertaining, and food travel. Follow its  guidelines for submitting stories , with links to your past work if possible. 

  • Article length:  Unspecified
  • Pay:  Up to $1 per word, varies whether published in print or on the website

Top Health and Fitness Magazines That Pay Freelance Writers

10. healthy living magazine.

Covering a full spectrum of health, wellness, beauty, and parenting content, this popular magazine usually has a quick turnaround time. You can expect to hear back from the editors within six days of submitting your full article. Check out their  submission guidelines .

  • Article length:  Ranging from 450-3,000 words
  • Pay:  $150 per article

11. Vibrant Life

Vibrant Life is a bimonthly lifestyle publication that focuses on physical and mental wellbeing and spiritual balance from a practical, Christian perspective. The tone should be informal, easy-to-read, and engaging with a person-centered approach. Submit your completed articles ready for publication, following their  submission guidelines .

  • Article length:  Short articles of 450-650 words are always in demand
  • Pay:  Ranging between $100-$300 based on quality, accuracy, and relevance

12. Whole Life Times

This publication is always searching for writers and is open to stories on “holistic and integrative health, alternative healing, green living, sustainability and organic food, yoga, spirituality and personal growth, social responsibility, conscious business, and the environment.” The magazine is local to Southern California, but if your topic is broad, include local sources or angles. See their  writer guidelines .

  • Pay:  Ranges from $75-$150 

Freelance writer working at laptop.

Best Magazines That Pay Personal Essay Freelance Writers

13. buzzfeed.

Buzzfeed READER is Buzzfeed News’ home for cultural criticism, personal essays, fiction, and poetry. Their editors welcome personal or critical essays with a strong voice on any topic that’s fresh and meaningful. See if you’re a good fit and find out  how to pitch your piece .

  • Article length:  1,500-2,500 words for personal essays
  • Pay:  Competitive rates

14. New York Times

New York Times accepts opinion essays on any topic for their daily print and online page, the Sunday Review, the International edition, and other themed series. All submissions must be original, well-written, with a fact-based viewpoint. Read  how to submit an op-ed essay .

  • Article length:  400-1,200 words
  • Pay:  Up to $300 per published article

This magazine is looking for submissions for short fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from writers with a fresh voice and compelling story to share. The great thing about Slice is that they use the space to publish emerging and established writers side-by-side. Each issue has a theme, so they look for work that plays off that theme. Find out more from their  submission guidelines . 

  • Article length:  5,000 words maximum
  • Pay:  $400 for stories and essays

There you have it – 15 magazines in five writing niches that pay freelance writers (and pay them well!), but there are so many more to be found globally. Any topic you can think of most likely publishes a print or digital magazine, so just keep searching.

Need help writing your pitch? Check out this blog post for some helpful tips.

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About the Author

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Kara Wilson

Kara Wilson has been an enthusiastic freelance writer for over 8 years. She is also a web content editor, infant sleep educator, and mama to two young children. When she isn't building forts with her kids, or hiding in her office to write, she loves to cook, read, and fantasize about traveling. If you're looking for a professional writer for your parenting website or blog, you can contact her at [email protected] .

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writing for the lady magazine

March 14, 2023 at 1:46 pm

My name is Kathy Pierce. I’m a freelance writer; I write about my kids and me and what we had to endure. I want to thank you for this article about who hires freelance writers.

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March 15, 2023 at 7:12 am

You’re welcome, Kathy!

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March 1, 2022 at 10:14 am

Just wanted to let you know – Slice is no longer accepting submissions. Their final issue was published last year’s fall.

March 1, 2022 at 1:44 pm

Thanks for letting me know.

writing for the lady magazine

October 15, 2021 at 8:22 pm

FamilyFun is no longer publishing. You’re giving 2013 info.

October 16, 2021 at 6:54 am

Thanks for letting me know. I’ve replaced that one with a different paid writing opportunity.

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The Work at Home Woman BBB Business Review

The 18th-Century Common

A public humanities website for enthusiasts of 18th-century studies, the lady’s magazine (1770-1818): understanding the emergence of a genre.

LadysMagazine

In an 1840 letter to Hartley Coleridge, Charlotte Brontë wrote that she wished “with all [her] heart” that she “had been born in time to contribute to the Lady’s magazine,” a periodical that ran for 13 issues per annum from more than six decades and had an estimated circulation of 10,000 monthly copies at the height of its popularity.  170 years later the history and cultural and literary importance of a publication, the vast majority of the original content of which was produced by unknown and unpaid reader-contributors, remains undocumented.

Our project fills this significant gap through a detailed bibliographical, statistical and literary-critical analysis of one of the first recognizably modern magazines for women from its inception in 1770 until the launch of its new series in 1818.  In its two-pronged book history/literary critical approach, this project sets out to answer three key research questions:

  • What made the Lady’s Magazine one of the most popular and enduring titles of its day?
  • What effects might an understanding of the magazine’s content, production, and circulation have upon our conceptions of Romantic-era print culture?
  • What role did the Lady’s Magazine play in the long-term development of the women’s magazine and the history of women’s writing?

In response to these questions, we are producing an open-access fully annotated, downloadable index of the magazine’s content for its first 50 years, which will launch in September 2016.  Titles of articles are accompanied by the names or pseudonyms of their contributors, and their contributors’ status (author, translator, extracter, or pilferer) is given wherever it can be clearly ascertained.  Attributions are made where possible.  In fact, we are amassing a small but growing body of evidence about a number of regular and mostly unknown contributors to the magazine and their lives or careers beyond its pages.  We regularly publish about these discoveries, and many other topics besides, on our project blog .

In addition to illuminating the production and composition of the magazine, we also pay detailed attention to its diverse, text-based contents.  Since the titles of articles in the Lady’s Magazine are often misleading (an article purporting to be about women’s dress might make an impassioned plea for reforms in female education, for instance), our index tags content by genre, key stylistic features and prominent keywords (marriage, education, politics, for example) making it easy for readers to find items of particular interest.

We are mining the data we are collating and will be presenting our findings in the form of web, book, and journal articles on attributions, the career profiles of magazine contributors, and statistical and interpretive analyses of the shifting content of the magazine over the course of its long history.  Jennie is also in the process of writing a book about the magazine’s place in the Romantic literary marketplace.  By making the annotated index of contributor signatures and content analysis freely available online, we also hope to promote further research by scholars and other interested parties on the Lady’s Magazine , late-eighteenth-century periodicals, and authorship and print culture in the period more generally.

One of the greatest joys of the project has been disseminating and talking about our research in progress via our Twitter feed , Facebook page, and blog , all of which are regularly updated. Through social media, we have entered into conversations about the magazine, its diverse content, and the issues it debates and generates with modern-day readers all over the world.  Establishing a community of interested parties who felt they had a stake in the publication was vital to the success of the Lady’s Magazine , whose readers and subscribers were also its authors.  We like to think that, in a small way, the online community that has grown around the project captures and perpetuates something of the spirit of the magazine itself.

It has certainly been a genuine and generative collaboration that has advanced the project in ways that we could not have anticipated when we began.  For instance, Jennie’s happy acquisition of a copy of the periodical from one of our blog’s readers, which contained a number of rare surviving embroidery patterns, led to a flutter of Twitter excitement that snowballed into ‘The Great Lady’s Magazine Stitch Off,’ a non-competitive sewing bee in which dozens of people all over the world have recreated 10 Lady’s Magazine patterns for display at an exhibition at Chawton House Library to commemorate the 200 th anniversary of the publication of Jane Austen’s Emma (1816), a novel whose hero and a major plotline are taken from a short story in the Lady’s Magazine .

To find out more, do visit the project website and blog , or contact Jennie ( [email protected] )

Jennie Batchelor

Jennie Batchelor is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Kent. She works and publishes widely on the long eighteenth century focusing primarily on women’s writing, periodicals, representations of gender, work, sexuality and the body, material culture studies and the charity movement. Her most recent book, Women’s Work: Labour, Gender, Authorship, 1750-1830 (Manchester University Press, 2010) was issued in paperback in 2014. She is currently co-editing, with Manushag Powell (Purdue University) Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690-1820s: The Long Eighteenth Century for Edinburgh University Press (forthcoming, 2017) and is writing a book on the Lady’s Magazine.

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Spectrum Women

Writer Guidelines

Spectrum women magazine submission guidelines .

Spectrum Women is an online magazine and community dedicated to women and identifying females who are uniquely different. Our approach is to bring to our readers articles, stories and interviews from women of all ages who have had a different outlook on life in a positive and unique way.

Our online magazine embraces diversity and the differing ideals we all have but with one common goal, to bring together a wealth of knowledge and strength in being the unique people we are.

Spectrum Women magazine and online community is looking for inspirational stories and writers who would love to be involved in this project. We would love to hear your suggestions and thoughts on what you would like to contribute or areas that you would like us to cover.

Please send your ideas and thoughts to the editor, Barb Cook at editor @ spectrumwomen.com

Please read our writers guidelines below for submission of content:

  • All articles should be related to women, identifying females and nonbinary people who have something unique to offer others in an inspiring and positive way.
  • Articles must be originally written for the Spectrum Women Magazine and cannot have appeared elsewhere in print or online prior to publication without prior consent from the author and the editor of the Spectrum Women Magazine. Links or references to original piece must be supplied.
  • Adaptations of previously published articles will be considered. The original article needs to be submitted for comparison with link back/references.
  • Word count: Articles. 800-1000 words for first-person accounts/personal experiences/hope and inspiration pieces; 800 – 1,400 words for educational/instructional/research articles. Word count is inclusive of a 50–100 word bio and as appropriate, a reference list and/or any sidebar pieces. Please adhere to these word count guidelines when writing your article. Articles of more than 1,400 words will not be considered unless the topic/idea was proposed to us beforehand and was determined to be of high interest.
  • Articles must be your own work and you own the copyright.
  • Articles are scheduled up to one month in advance unless prior arrangements and considerations have been taken into account for it to appear earlier.
  • Authors representing themselves as having a specific condition are encouraged to have a formal diagnosis, rather than being self-diagnosed. Self-diagnosed authors content will be considered if deemed suitable by the editor.
  • Poetry is not accepted unless it is part of the arts section and deemed suitable for the general public.
  • We do not accept personal opinion or theoretical pieces.
  • Article must be submitted in English in Microsoft Word, Font – Times New Roman, Font Size 12pt, Line Spacing 1.5 lines.
  • Articles are to be sent by email or (if by post) burnt to a CD or supplied on a USB drive. A return paid envelope or package is to be supplied if you would like your items returned to you.
  • Images, photos or logos must be of high resolution, maximum 300dpi – minimum 72dpi, in RGB format.

Spectrum Women Magazine does not ask for nor retain exclusive rights to any work. You may publish your piece elsewhere, though we would prefer you wait 60 days to do so. We request the right to publish your work on our website indefinitely and on any future related websites or other platforms in whole or in part and for your work to be archived indefinitely.

You will be notified if your submission is chosen for the print publication. At this time, we can provide no compensation for your submission other than the glory of your name in print and the knowledge that you are making a difference. We may use a portion of your work to advertise our website or book (by using a quote or summary, for example).

Other websites may link to your essay, but no one may republish your Spectrum Women Magazine article without your permission.

All submissions will be reviewed by both the Editor in Chief and Copy Editor.

Spectrum Women Magazine reserves the right to review and edit work before publishing, for accuracy, validity, length, spelling, grammar, style, and clarity.

We do not publish material that we deem to be ableist or disrespectful towards people with any form of disability. Ableist language should be avoided and we reserve the right to add a content warning if such terms are used in an appropriate context (for example, to criticise someone’s use of ableist language).

We may choose not to publish foul or derogatory language, photographs or references we deem offensive with regard to race, religion, gender or sexual orientation or for any other reason we decide.

Spectrum Women Magazine is not able to provide feedback on stories accepted or rejected.

You may submit changes to your story, or request its removal from our website at any time. However, if your submission appears in the print copy you will not be able to recall your work for any reason.

Personal Information 

Your full, real name will be required for your online and/or print publishing agreement, but you may publish your story under a different name.

Your information will never be released to any third party.

If you choose to publish with your real name you do so with the understanding that the Internet is a big place and that information you reveal may be used against you by former spouses or friends, identity thieves, the media, current or future employers, and lawyers. Spectrum Women Magazine will not be held liable.

To comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), we do not collect information from children under the age of 13. If you are 18 or younger, you must have your parent’s or guardian’s permission to submit an essay.

Spectrum Women Network Magazine does not assume responsibility for any information submitted by authors or readers. By submitting any work, each author/reader is stating they have properly followed all legal rules and regulations for writing and publishing.

When writing about individuals who are not public figures, please state explicitly in your submission that you have obtained permission to write about them, or have changed identifying details.

By submitting your essay to us, you guarantee that your submission is your own work, and that you are liable for its content. We will not tolerate libel, plagiarism, or copyright infringement.

For submissions please email the  Editor here.

writing for the lady magazine

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Rachel Johnson, journalist, author and former editor of the Lady

Rachel Johnson quits the Lady after three years

Rachel Johnson has quit the Lady magazine, after an eventful three-year stint characterised by clashes with the 127-year-old title's proprietor.

Johnson, who stepped down as editor at the end of 2011 and became editor-in-chief, confirmed that she left the title last week "to pursue other interests", thought to be writing books.

The magazine's publisher, Ben Budworth, told MediaGuardian that Johnson left last week "very amicably", adding: "She did a lot for the title – she raised awareness and brought in some really good writers and got us talked about."

Johnson was replaced as editor by Matt Warren, the first man to hold the job.

"We already have a great editor in Matt Warren. [Johnson] says she wants to do other things like writing and we wish her well," Budworth said.

Johnson's decision to leave the title brings to a close a very public tenure which was marked by a Channel 4 documentary charting her first months in charge called The Lady and the Revamp , in which she proved an outspoken critic of her own title.

At one point in the documentary she compares the publication's offices to "a cross between an undertakers and a lunatic asylum". Later she says of the title: "In the real world this is a piddling little magazine that nobody cares about. Or buys," before pausing to add: "I don't mean that."

There were also clashes with Budworth's mother Julia, the magazine's proprietor, over some of Johnson's racier content and her alleged self-promotion.

However, during her time Johnson was also praised for developing the brand by introducing new contributors such as Joan Collins and Sir Tim Rice, as well as overseeing a redesign aimed to competing with mainstream women's magazines.

After becoming the title's ninth editor in September 2009 following a relaunch the previous spring, Johnson continued to write for the Sunday Times and London Evening Standard, as well as authoring books.

The Lady launched in 1885 and is England's longest-running weekly magazine for women. It has been in the same family since it was founded by Thomas Gibson Bowles, grandfather of the Mitford sisters.

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writing for the lady magazine

Roni Stoneman, The First Lady of the Banjo & ‘Hee Haw’ Star Dies at 85

Hee Haw Roni Stoneman, 1969-1997

Veronica Loretta “Roni” Stoneman, a prominent bluegrass banjo player and comedian has died. She was best known for her role in Hee Haw but she also belonged to a famous family as the youngest daughter of Ernest V. “Pop” Stoneman, patriarch of the Stoneman Family.

Pop was one of the first-ever country musicians to make a living recording country music. He was known for his hit song, 1924’s “The Sinking of the Titanic” as it became the first ever million-selling country music record. He lost everything during the Great Depression but resumed his career in the 1950s, starting a family band with his wife Hattie and their children. Roni joined the family band, playing the banjo in 1957.

Roni Stoneman playing banjo

Walden S. Fabry Collection, circa 1965. Courtesy of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum

The family became a touring act and even got their own TV show called Those Stonemans in the late ’60s. In 1967, they won the CMA Award for Vocal Group of the Year. Pop died a year later and Roni decided to pursue a solo career, finding fame when she joined the cast of Hee Haw in the 1970s.

Hee Haw Lorrie Morgan, Roni Stoneman ca. 1984, 1969-93

Everett Collection

In recent years, Roni and her sister, mandolinist Donna Stoneman continued to perform occasionally. Now, Donna is the only surviving member of the Stoneman Family band. Kyle Young, CEO of Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum shared after the news broke of her passing, “For Roni Stoneman, known as ‘The First Lady of the Banjo,’ country music was a birthright and her life’s work. The second youngest of twenty-three children born to Hattie and Ernest ‘Pop’ Stoneman, Roni was an integral part of a bedrock country music family, who were longtime fixtures in the country music scene of Washington, DC. For eighteen years on ‘Hee Haw,’ she stole scenes as both a skillful banjo player and as a comical, gap-toothed country character. She was a great talent and a strong woman.”

Queens of Country

Queens of Country

November 2019.

Get your toes-tapping as we give a nod to the queens of classic country music.

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The Lady Magazine

In continuous publication since 1885 and widely respected as England's longest running weekly magazine for women, The Lady is celebrated both for the quality of its editorial pages and its classified advertisements.

Recent issues

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You have to read this story about a woman who was scammed out of $50,000

  • New York Magazine's personal finance writer just published a personal essay about how she was scammed.
  • Believing she was talking to the FBI, she handed a shoebox with her $50,000 in savings in cash to a stranger.
  • Trust me, you have to read this. 

Insider Today

We all like to think we're too smart to fall for a scam, like the kind where someone tricks you over the phone into liquidating your bank account, putting the cash in a shoebox, and handing it to a stranger in a car. And hopefully, you are!

But the truth is, people get scammed all the time — even smart people.

New York Magazine published an astonishing personal essay from one of their writers (a personal finance writer, no less!) who says she was the victim of a phone scam that bilked her out of $50,000 by convincing her that she was a victim of identity fraud and that to fix it she would need to transfer money.

That's selling it short — the details of the scam are SO MUCH more wild. I don't want to spoil it all because reading it for yourself, your eyes popping further and further out of your head, and your stomach churning, is all part of the fun.

This story is being endlessly dissected on social media by readers who are either appalled or sympathetic or simply believing that even under waterboarding, they'd never reveal they had fallen for this.

Just read it : The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger

writing for the lady magazine

Watch: This is one of the best responses to Jamie Dimon calling bitcoin a fraud that we have heard so far

writing for the lady magazine

  • Main content

TheThings

Melania Trump Has A Specific Theory About Why She Didn't Get A Vogue Cover As First Lady

  • Melania believes Vogue is biased, only choosing certain first ladies for covers due to party affiliation and the polarizing nature of Donald Trump.
  • Despite claims of never being offered, it's revealed that Melania turned down a Vogue feature as they couldn't guarantee the cover.
  • Republican first ladies, like Melania, historically have not been granted Vogue covers, potentially due to political affiliations and the publication's audience.

Melania Trump is best known for being the wife of Donald Trump and for being the former first lady of the United States. But before Melania was thrust into the limelight of politics, she worked as a model. Melania was a wanted entity in Paris and Milan and was doing well with her career.

In 1996, Melania moved from the fashion hubs in Europe and started a life in New York City. While there, she continued with her modeling career, appearing on the covers of publications like InStyle , New York Magazine, Harper's Bazaar, British GQ, and more. Melania is no stranger to print work or being put front and center of magazines to sell copies.

When Melania met Donald in 1998, she admitted their encounter was inappropriate . However, Melania was intrigued and eventually married Donald in 2005 in a marriage that Melania claims is equal between the two . The month after the wedding, Melania appeared on the cover of Vogue in her wedding dress. Many thought that she would appear on the cover after becoming first lady., something that has become a tradition over the years. However, a cover was not meant to be.

Not Everyone Believes That Melania Trump and Ivanka Are Close After A Rumored Feud

While some may question Melania's absence from the coveted publication, Melania Trump has a specific theory about why she did not get a Vogue cover as the first lady, and she didn't mince words when asked about it. Here is why Melania believes she did not get the cover of Vogue , the opportunity that Melania was offered by the publication, and why Melania's party affiliation may have precluded her from ever getting the cover of Vogue.

Melania Trump Believes That She Did Not Get The Cover Of Vogue Because The Publication Is "Biased"

Melania trump claimed that vogue only chose particular first ladies to be on the cover and specifically excluded others.

Before Melania was the first lady, there was a tradition of putting first ladies on the cover of Vogue . Hillary Clinton was on the cover once and Michelle Obama was on the cover three times. After Melania, Jill Biden was on the cover. Even Kamala Harris was a cover girl for the publication.

But in the four years that Melania was in the East Wing of the White House, she never received the distinction , and in an interview, Melania explained why she thinks she didn't get a cover .

"They're biased. They have likes and dislikes and it's so obvious and I think everyone see it," Melania stated when asked about the Vogue cover. "I have much more important things to do and I did in the White House than being on the cover of Vogue."

Melania went on to say, "People I see always criticize me whatever I do and I'm used to that. I move forward and I'm here to helping people and that is the mission."

Not being included in the group of first ladies who were profiled in Vogue did not appear to upset Melania after she was no longer in the White House. Donald doubled down on the subject in September 2023 when he was asked about Melania's absence from the cover by Megyn Kelly.

"Can you believe it? Can you believe it? She was on the cover of Vogue before she met me," Donald said about Melania. "But once I said I'm running for president, that was, that was the end of the cover."

Donald went on to say, "And it's so sad. But she doesn't care. She's been on the cover of the magazines for a long time, and she was on the cover of Vogue before. And she was actually very friendly with [Vogue editor] Anna Wintour. But once I ran for politics, that was the end of that. And that's OK."

Melania Trump Thought The Presidential Election Was A Good Time To Renegotiate Her Prenup

What is interesting, however, is that despite what both Melania and Donald have said in their respective interviews, it appears that Melania was offered an opportunity to be in Vogue yet turned it down.

Melania Trump Was Offered A Spot In Vogue But Was Not Guaranteed The Cover

Vogue offered melania trump the opportunity to be in the magazine, but she wasn't promised a cover shoot.

While Melania and Donald contend that Melania was never offered any opportunity to be involved with Vogue , Melania's former friend and senior advisor, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff tells a different story in her book, Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship With the First Lady. In it, not only does Winston Wolkoff claim that Melania was offered the opportunity to be in Vogue but she states Melania turned the publication down because they could not "guarantee" her the cover.

"Vogue reached out to Melania, hoping to schedule an Annie Leibovitz photo shoot of the First Lady in the White House, with writer Rob Haskell shadowing her for a few days to write a profile," Winston Wolkoff wrote. "All that sounded great, but the magazine could not guarantee that Melania would appear on the cover."

Winston Wolkoff went on to state, "For the record, not all First Ladies are put on the cover of Vogue. Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton, yes. Laura and Barbara Bush, no. Melania wasn’t going to do anything for Vogue or any other magazine if she wasn’t going to be on the cover. 'Give me a break!' she texted. 'Forget it.'"

Donald Trump Subjected Melania To Howard Stern's Racy Flirtation During His Presidential Campaign

Melania reportedly has a high IQ , and it could be that she could read the room when it came to Vogue . With Anna Wintour choosing who gets to be on the cover, and the fact that she and Melania did not have a great relationship, despite what Donald claimed, Melania knew she would never get the coveted spot.

Instead, Melania would be downgraded from her previous 2005 cover and a 14-page spread

Melania Trump's Party Affiliation Could Have Soured Her Opportunities At A Vogue Cover

Republican first wives have not been featured on the cover of vogue since the publication began in 1892.

In addition to Melania and Anna not having a good relationship with one another, Melania had other factors working against her that ultimately precluded her from being on the cover of Vogue . The first was that Donald tended to be very polarizing to the core audience and having Melania on the cover likely would not have helped the publication sell.

Secondly, Melania's Republican Party affiliation all but made the possibility of being on the cover dead in the water, given that Vogue historically puts Democrat first ladies on the cover, but not Republicans .

Since Vogue was first published in 1892, it has never put a Republican first lady on the cover. Many have appeared inside the pages of the magazine but have never been offered top billing for the publication. Cases in point, according to Fox News , Nancy Reagan, Laura Bush, and Barbara Bush were featured in the magazine but were never cover ladies. All the recent Democrat first ladies from Hillary to Jill have all had covers.

The story that Melania tells about Vogue being "biased" could very well be true, but it's also true that she passed on an opportunity to appear in the magazine, possibly sacrificing an opportunity to grace the cover, too.

Melania Trump outside the White House

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What to Know About Lady Gaga Headlining Fortnite Festival Season 2

Lady Gaga The Chromatica Ball Tour - Stockholm

L ady Gaga was announced as the headliner of Fortnite Festival Season 2: Unlock Your Talents , which launches on Feb. 22.

The concert game will be inspired by Lady Gaga’s last album, Chromatica , for which she did a stadium tour in 2022. The stage will take inspiration from the aesthetics of the album, and one of the skins— which are different outfits your character can wear in the game—will feature the custom purple bodysuit designed by Nange Magro she wore during the tour, according to Fortnite’s website.

The playable concert is a “rhythm-based game” that has “two unique experiences: Fortnite Festival Main Stage and Fortnite Festival Jam Stage,” Epic writes on its website. The main stage allows players to “party up and play through a licensed soundtrack of some global hits and Fortnite originals.” The jam stage lets players make their own music.

Lady Gaga stuns in new Fortnite skins. pic.twitter.com/dE1wsFLivQ — Pop Crave (@PopCrave) February 21, 2024

Eight of Lady Gaga’s songs will be available as playable Jam Tracks: “Born This Way,” “The Edge of Glory,” “Applause,” “Rain on Me” featuring Ariana Grande, “Bloody Mary,” “Stupid Love,” “Just Dance,” and “Poker Face.” 

To make the announcement, Lady Gaga took to X on Tuesday and quote-tweeted a post she uploaded in Oct. 2019 where she asked, “What is fortnight?” She corrected it to the proper spelling “*Fortnite” with a photo of her character skin in the game.

*fortnite https://t.co/1FwPHmMfRJ pic.twitter.com/9BSG6S23zh — Lady Gaga (@ladygaga) February 20, 2024

In 2023, the playable headlining festival was introduced with a partnership between The Weeknd and Epic Games . But Fortnite isn’t the only game interested in a live music aspect, and more artists are working with video games to have their music played in the games. Roblox has held multiple concerts in its game with big-name artists such as Lil Nas X, Charli XCX (through Samsung’s Superstar Gallery), David Guetta, Twenty One Pilots, and more.

The announcement that Lady Gaga will headline the second Fortnite Festival comes as her fans wait for her to reveal plans for a new album, which she’s hinted that she’s working on through photos on her Instagram.

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    Lady is an online literary magazine of fiction, young adult fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry written by women. They publish writing by authors of all ages and backgrounds, showcasing the infinite nuances of female experience.

  5. Women's Literary Journals, Magazines & Publications

    Lady (USA) Lady is an online literary magazine for women, by women of all ages. Lady / Liberty / Lit * CLOSED. Lady/Liberty/Lit is a journal spotlighting women-identifying and gender-non-conforming writers who address experiences of, and ideas about, freedom of voice and body. The Last Girls Club

  6. The Lady (magazine)

    [1] 39-40 Bedford Street, in the Covent Garden area of central London, the headquarters of The Lady between 1885 and 2019 [2] Bowles gave the Mitford girls' father ( David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale) his first job: general manager of the magazine.

  7. About Us

    Featuring commentary, fashion, travel, reviews of the latest books and the arts, cooking ideas and gardening tips, thousands of readers already look to The Lady magazine for their regular intake of inspiration and culture and carefully sourced domestic recruitment. Subscribe today and SAVE £11.25 on your first three issues.

  8. The Lady's Magazine (1770-1832)

    The Lady's Magazine was an ambitious and enduringly influential publication. The community it forged between writers, editors, and subscribers was a key element of this success. Disagreements broke out, authors were sometimes not treated to their satisfaction, and production values slipped at times, but a strong, coterie-like atmosphere of shared interest and endeavor pervades the magazine ...

  9. The Lady's Magazine (1770-1818): Understanding the Emergence of a Genre

    Ann Thicknesse (née Ford, 1737-1824) has interested me for some time.A talented musician and writer, she was known primarily to me as the author of the three-volume biographical dictionary, Sketches of the Lives and Writings of the Ladies of France (1778-81), from which the magazine reprinted a number of extracts in the early 1780s, and upon which Matilda Betham and Mary Hays drew in their ...

  10. The Lady's Magazine (1770-1832) and the Making of Literary History

    The Lady's Magazine (1770-1832) and the Making of Literary History Jennie Batchelor In the series Edinburgh Critical Studies in Romanticism https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474487665 Cite this Overview Contents About this book The first major study of one of the most influential periodicals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

  11. Lady Day of the Alhambra, by Ian Penman

    Discussed in this essay: Bitter Crop: The Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holiday's Last Year, by Paul Alexander.Knopf. 368 pages. $32. Early on in Billie Holiday's 1956 memoir Lady Sings the Blues, she recalls the picaresque world of New York nightlife in the Thirties:. Prohibition was on its last legs then.

  12. On Woman's Weekly, by Joanne Harris

    09 August 2018 Anyone who has ever written for Woman's Weekly will already be aware of the fact that the parent magazine group, formerly International Publishing Corporation, IPC Media and Time Inc. UK, has been rebranded, with some personnel changes, as TI Media.Look it up on Wiki and you'll know that this giant company (CEO Marcus Rich) has a portfolio selling over 350 million copies ...

  13. Should I Leave My Husband? The Lure of Divorce

    I tried to balance writing my own novel with drop-offs, pickups, sick days, and planning meals and shopping and cooking, most of which had always been my primary responsibility since I was a freelancer and Keith had a full-time job teaching journalism. ... you can also find this article in the February 12, 2024, issue of New York Magazine. One ...

  14. Writing for women's magazines…

    Alison Smith-Squire Top tips Writing for the UK's women's magazine market is much harder than many people imagine. Here, as writers with 30 years in this industry, we give our top ten tips if you are considering breaking into this competitive sector … 1. Research the publication Women's magazines are definitely not all the same.

  15. How to Write and Sell Articles to Women's Magazines

    Explain briefly (one short paragraph) the theme of your article and why it will appeal to the magazine's readers. Follow up with a bullet point outline of the content and an estimated word count. Mention if you will provide photographs. Include your contact details: email, telephone, address.

  16. Journals & Magazines

    Canthius is a Canadian literary magazine publishing poetry and prose by women, transgender men, nonbinary, Two-Spirit, and genderqueer/gender non-conforming writers. Capulet Mag. Capulet Mag seeks the best in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art. This publication highlights the work of young women writers and artists of all levels.

  17. Write for Magazines: 21 Publications That Pay ...

    Write for Magazines: 21 Publications That Pay $500+ Per Assignment Evan Jensen Table of Contents 2 1. AARP, The Magazine 2. Alaska Beyond 3. The Atlantic 4. Chatelaine magazine 5. Delta Sky 6. Discover magazine 7. Early American Life 8. Earth Island Journal 9. Eating Well 10. enRoute 11. Family Circle 12. Forbes 13. Green Entrepreneur 14.

  18. Writing for Women's Magazines by E.D. Thompson

    Closing In by E.D. Thompson is published by Hachette Ireland. About Closing In: Caroline has a good life - a job she likes, a daughter she'd do anything for. In the midst of the Christmas rush, covering events and parties, the local journalist is looking forward to the holidays and having some quality time with the ones she loves.

  19. Why the Case Against Fani Willis Feels Familiar to Black Women

    But that pride would be tempered by dismay as news emerged of Ms. Willis's personal relationship with a fellow prosecutor, Nathan J. Wade, an outside lawyer she hired to help run the case. Ms ...

  20. 15 Magazines That Accept Freelance Writing Submissions

    1. Focus on the Family Focus on the Family has an ongoing list of submission topics that they are currently accepting. At this time of writing, topics included topics like Back to School with a Twist and Adjusting to No Schedule Days. Check out this page for submission calls. Article length: 50-300 words, 400-500 words, and 800-1,200 words

  21. The Lady's Magazine (1770-1818): Understanding the Emergence of a Genre

    Subscribe to 18th Century Common. 'The Lady's Magazine (1770-1818): Understanding the Emergence of a Genre' is a two-year project funded by the Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant scheme. The team of academics behind it is based at the University of Kent and is led by Jennie Batchelor, who works closely with the project's two full ...

  22. Writer Guidelines

    Spectrum Women Magazine Submission Guidelines Spectrum Women is an online magazine and community dedicated to women and identifying females who are uniquely different. Our approach is to bring to our readers articles, stories and interviews from women of all ages who have had a different outlook on life in a positive and unique way. Our online magazine embraces diversity and the differing ...

  23. The Lady Magazine

    The Lady Magazine. 39-40 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND, LONDON WC2E 9ER Telephone : 0207-379 4717. The Lady is not currently accepting unsolicited short stories.

  24. Rachel Johnson quits the Lady after three years

    Tue 20 Nov 2012 12.58 EST. Rachel Johnson has quit the Lady magazine, after an eventful three-year stint characterised by clashes with the 127-year-old title's proprietor. Johnson, who stepped ...

  25. Roni Stoneman, The First Lady of the Banjo & 'Hee Haw' Star Dies at 85

    Veronica Loretta "Roni" Stoneman, a prominent bluegrass banjo player and comedian has died. She was best known for her role in Hee Haw but she also belonged to a famous family as the youngest daughter of Ernest V. "Pop" Stoneman, patriarch of the Stoneman Family.. Pop was one of the first-ever country musicians to make a living recording country music.

  26. The Lady Magazine

    The Lady Magazine In continuous publication since 1885 and widely respected as England's longest running weekly magazine for women, The Lady is celebrated both for the quality of its editorial pages and its classified advertisements. ... Read more Recent issues 2 February 2024 5 January 2024 1 December 2023 3 November 2023 6 October 2023

  27. Story About Woman Scammed Out of $50K Is Blowing up the Internet

    New York Magazine published an astonishing personal essay from one of their writers (a personal finance writer, no less!) who says she was the victim of a phone scam that bilked her out of $50,000 ...

  28. Melania Trump Has A Specific Theory About Why She Didn't Get A ...

    Before Melania was the first lady, there was a tradition of putting first ladies on the cover of Vogue. Hillary Clinton was on the cover once and Michelle Obama was on the cover three times.

  29. The Poet Whose Writing Will Be Launched Into Space

    Ada Limón is no stranger to good news. In 2022, she was appointed the 24th poet laureate of the U.S., a role previously held by the likes of Tracy K. Smith, Joy Harjo, and Rita Dove. Last spring ...

  30. Lady Gaga is Headlining Fortnite Festival Season 2

    L ady Gaga was announced as the headliner of Fortnite Festival Season 2: Unlock Your Talents, which launches on Feb. 22.. The concert game will be inspired by Lady Gaga's last album, Chromatica ...