Like the corset, the women's magazines which emerged in the nineteenth century produced a `natural' idea of femininity: the domestic wife; the fashionable woman; the romancing and desirable girl. Their legacy, from agony aunts to fashion plates, are easily traced in their modern counterparts. But do these magazines and their promises empower or disempower their readers? A Magazine of Her Own? is a lively and revealing exploration of this immensely popular form from its beginnings. In fascinating detail Margaret Beetham investigates the desires, images and interpretations of femininity posed by a medium whose readership was and still is almost exclusively female. A Magazine of Her Own is at once a chronological tracing of the history, a collection of intriguing case studies and an intervention into recent debates about gender and sexuality in popular reading. It is a book which anyone who is interested in the unique, influential world of the woman's magazine - students, scholars and general readers alike - will want to read

When beautiful Lucy Graham becomes Lady Audley, her future looks secure. But her past is shrouded in mystery, and the disappearance of a young man sparks an investigation that will reveal her dark secret... This new edition explores the novel in the context of nineteenth-century sensation fiction and the lively debates it provoked.

A series of "papers on books, their history and art," issued in 12 quarterly numbers.