‘Be but a Little Deaf and Blind … and Happiness You’ll Surely Find’: Marriage in Eighteenth-Century Magazines for Women

Abstract

This chapter refocuses common perceptions of eighteenth-century marriage through the lens of eighteenth-century women’s magazines. It demonstrates that the miscellanies’ dialogic character produced a view of married life both richer and more complex than that found in any other textual form in the period. Working against conventional scholarship that positions titles such as The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832) as conduct books by another name, this chapter instead suggests that magazines’ interactive formats ensures that their concerns were not easily reducible to particular agendas or conventional wisdoms. Early women’s magazines present the bourgeois domestic ideal with which they have so long been erroneously associated with marked scepticism and enjoin their readers to navigate its myriad challenges and grim realities with pragmatism, imagination and wit.