‘The present therefore seems improbable, the future most uncertain’: transcending academia through Charlotte Lennox’s Lady’s Museum (1760–1)

The question of how digital scholarly editing and publishing can have an impact beyond academia has been widely debated in the digital humanities and literary/cultural studies fields. Kate Ozment in “Rationale for Feminist Bibliography” argues the field of feminist bibliography is “continuing work on women’s lives and labour by providing tools for feminist scholars to use in their work, while simultaneously building a framework that allows such work to flourish” (151). Tonya Howe has posited three interrelated areas for “Intersectional Futures in Digital History”: “theorizing the feminized labor of digital recovery, editing, and textual preparation,” “offering thoughtful and feminist approaches to digital pedagogy that are specific to the work we do in the period,” and “critically assessing the absences in existing digital projects'' (2). We build on Ozment’s and Howe’s visions for an intersectional future(s) in our digital scholarly editing project, The Lady’s Museum Project, which aims for a public readership beyond the academy to broadly publicize women writers’ contributions to the developments in education and citizenship for all genders and classes throughout the long eighteenth century. Our project continues the work of Jennie Batchelor and Manushag N. Powell’s Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690-1820s (2018)—the first comprehensive study of women’s periodicals in the eighteenth-century—by giving open-access to Charlotte Lennox’s periodical, The Lady’s Museum (1760-61). We advocate for centring the previously forgotten labour of early modern women writers then, and DH co-workers now, highlighting their importance and continuing impact for a present-day specialist and non-specialist, public audience.  

In this essay, we present the theory and praxis governing the Lady’s Museum Project to show how a digital-scholarly editing project can challenge the structural logics of print by creating a user-driven reading experience and social edition rather than a traditional, linear-based edition. We discuss the project’s focus on audiobook and social annotation functionalities in contrast to traditional scholarly publishing to reveal the importance of an intersectional-feminist approach for future editing projects. In framing our project within intersectionality, which, rooted in civic justice, transcends multiple academic disciplines, we strive to: reveal the feminized labour of digital recovery; use ethical means to represent multiply marginalized persons; capture the historical, oppressive structures in which The Lady’s Museum appeared in its context of eighteenth-century British imperialism; and, through consensus decision-making processes and implementing user feedback, create sortable categories and keywords that spotlight system-centred complexities.  

We argue that digital scholarly editing and publishing can have an impact beyond academia by recovering the textual authority of women writers such as Charlotte Lennox and supplying a basis for a public audience to engage with her work. In conclusion, this essay, by closely examining how marginalized women writers and texts had a pivotal impact on the foundational blocks of modern western culture, simultaneously shines new light on the benefits of aligning intersectional feminism with public-facing, transdisciplinary projects.