Adburgham provides an excellent resource on the history of British women magazine writers and on magazines widely read by women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Concisely and elegantly, she positions each writer and periodical in its political and social context and addresses connections and intersections between various publications. Though brief, her discussion of the Female Tatler forms some of the most detailed scholarship to date on this magazine's relationship to politics.

Bond does the necessary and important work of providing a straight history of the events and individuals surrounding the creation and publication the Tatler. In lucid prose, Bond details information about the editor, writers, finances, subject matter, style, and demise of this periodical.

In this delightfully written and accessible compendium of the arts in the eighteenth century, Brewer delineates the fields of print, painting, performance, architecture, and nationality. His focus is on "high-brow" culture: its practitioners and its purveyors. Brewer draws on anecdotes and generalities, so that the reader acquires both a general sense of eighteenth century cultural forms and a detailed understanding of the role certain figures played in the cultural history of this period. He usefully points to the differences between London's culture and the vibrant but somewhat separate cultures of the provinces as well.

Although a study of the importance of fashion and status in Samuel Richardson's novel Pamela, Brückmann's essay offers interesting details about those culturally situated signifiers of gender and class in the wider sphere of eighteenth century England. As the Female Tatler and Brückmann's essay illustrate, fashion indicated much more than beauty; it was a signifier of one's very place in society.

A much needed corrective to traditional accounts of the working class (such as E. P. Thompson's classic The Making of the English Working Class), which focus primarily on men, Clark's book provides a one-hundred year history of women's role in the formation of working-class identity. She convincingly argues that such identity was forged and secured, in large part, through the complex struggles between men and women for control of the home and the workplace.

An engaging overview of women's magazines from roughly the sixteenth to the late twentieth century, Dancyger's work offers students of the genre a useful starting point. She notes historically situated trends (in fashion, beauty, politics, housewifery, etc.) and the ever-changing role of women as writers, readers, and consumers of texts.

This collection includes a series of recent essays by various scholars working on eighteenth-century periodicals. Positioning the periodicals as windows into eighteenth-century politics, most essays focus on only a single periodical, which limits the richness of their insights. Still, Calhoun Winton's essay on the Tatler offers an introduction to the material conditions of that magazine's publication that proves helpful in understanding material concerns surrounding the simultaneous publication of the Female Tatler.

In this collection of interrelated essays, Gallagher explores female authorship in conjunction with the rise of the novel. Of particular interest is her essay on Delarivier Manley, which traces the realignments that occurred between politics, commerce, politics, and the literary marketplace during the Restoration and the impact that realignment had on eighteenth-century writing by females.

In this selection of essays from the latter half of the Female Tatler's publication-those written "by a society of ladies"-the editor, M. M. Goldsmith, offers evidence for their authorship. Goldsmith painstakingly and convincingly argues that two of the writers of this supposed group, Lucinda and Artesia, were actually pseudonyms for a Dutch physician, Bernard Mandeville. Goldsmith goes on to offer a historical background for the publication history of the Female Tatler as well.

Kernan's work deals with the rise of print culture during the mid-eighteenth century. It explores the tensions inherent in the relationship between technology and culture, specifically as it is figured in one product common to both areas-letters. Focusing discussion on the rise of a market-based, "democratic" literary system no longer based on patronage, he notes that the reading public mushroomed to unparalleled numbers during this era and that the number of working writers also rose to meet such demand. Kernan includes discussions of the role of the writer, the creation of an aura for imaginative works (which we now know as "literature"), and the make-up of the audience.

This work concerns a group of eighteenth century Londoners that is often neglected in literary studies, which generally focuses on a privileged, educated, usually urban elite. Linebaugh's handling of the lower classes offers some insight into that area of London that is never explicitly mentioned in the Female Tatler but which is always implicitly present in the periodical's passing references to the undifferentiated lower orders.

Erin Mackie's recent book on the Tatler and the Spectator proves far more sophisticated and hip than most other work to date on eighteenth-century periodicals. Mackie positions Addison and Steele as arbiters of women's taste and deftly outlines the nuances of the ways in which fashion variously communicates class, national culture, and ethical virtue (or the lack thereof). The book includes a short discussion of the Female Tatler in Mackie's section "In the Very Sphinx of Fashion."

Mahl and Koon provide excerpts of works of British women writers from Julian of Norwich to Anna Seward, including Delarivier Manley. The book includes detailed headnotes on the life and work of each author and provides a useful bibliography on each writer.

A compilation of criticism on some particularly influential, male-produced periodical essays of the eighteenth century, this work offers necessary background for an engaged reading of the Female Tatler. Not only was the periodical essay a form unique to this century, but the Female Tatler was written as both a reaction against and as a complement to the Tatler's essays by Addison and Steele.

In this smart and pointed book, Maurer examines-through a feminist lens-eighteenth-century periodicals' construction of masculinity. Focusing mostly on the Tatler, the Spectator, and the Guardian, Maurer argues that periodicals of this period defined the roles of husband and father by outlining norms for "proper femininity." The end of her book takes up these concerns within magazines published by and/or for women, though discussions of the Female Tatler lay outside her purview.

Although a selective reading of serialized novels after 1740, this work is interesting for what it illustrates about the production of periodicals after the Female Tatler. Whereas most issues of the Female Tatler consisted of a single two-page essay, later magazines (including the Female Spectator) would begin to serialize the novel, indicating the growing popularity of the novel as a genre. Mayo's book offers an illuminating insight into the literary heirs of the Female Tatler as well as into the shifting tastes of an increasingly heterogeneous and fragmented reading audience throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century.

Those interested in reading and exploring the Female Tatler will appreciate this affordable (and currently in-print) reprint of the periodical. This edition includes all extant issues of the Female Tatler, as well as available issues of the "fake" version of the magazine and a small section on advertisements. Morgan's brief introduction provides a basic framing of the text.

By focusing on an eighteenth-century female writer who lived and worked in the provinces, Prescott hopes to correct the current trend in scholarship, which focuses all literary activity on the metropolis. Although a study of Elizabeth Rowe’s life, career, and connections with other writers of the period, Prescott offers a useful glimpse into female writing and into non-London based writing in the early eighteenth-century.

Clifford studies the historical and economic conditions that led to the public's increasing desire for novels and periodicals during the eighteenth century. He argues for the rise of the figure of "The Author" (which began with the characterization of the author as a person in the essays by Addison and Steele) as well as for the increasing professionalization of literary production.