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

Chapter of: Digital editing and publishing in the twenty-first century

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Metadata
Title‘The present therefore seems improbable, the future most uncertain’
Subtitletranscending academia through Charlotte Lennox’s Lady’s Museum (1760–1)
ContributorKelly J. Plante (author)
Karenza Sutton-Bennett(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.62637/sup.GHST9020.20
Landing pagehttps://books.sup.ac.uk/sup/catalog/book/sup-9781917341073/chapter/21
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
CopyrightKelly J. Plante and Karenza Sutton-Bennett
PublisherScottish Universities Press
Published on2025-04-29
Long abstractThe 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 labor 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 centering the previously forgotten labor of early modern women writers then, and DH coworkers 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 labor 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-centered 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.
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Kelly J. Plante

(author)

Kelly J. Plante, PhD (Wayne State University), specialises in long-eighteenth-century transatlantic literature and feminist digital/ public humanities. Her dissertation, ‘Death Writing: Gender and Necropolitics in the Atlantic World (1660–1840),’ received the 2024 Bibliographical Society of America (BSA) William L. Mitchell Prize for scholarship on British serials. She currently serves as Managing Editor for ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts (1640– 1830), Associate Reader for the Michigan Quarterly Review and, with Karenza Sutton-Bennett, PhD, as Co-Editor for the Lady’s Museum Project (ladysmuseum.com, 2021–present). She has served as Managing Editor for Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts (2021–3), Co-Chair for the American Society of Eighteenth- Century Studies Digital Humanities Caucus, Project Manager for the Warrior Women Project (s.wayne.edu/warriorwomen, 2020–1), Co-General Editor for The Poetry of Gertrude More: Piety and Politics in a Benedictine Convent (s.wayne.edu/gertrudemore, 2020–1), and as a Detroit-area journalist, writer/editor, and publisher. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Creative Nonfiction Magazine, ABO, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, and Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal.

Karenza Sutton-Bennett

(author)
https://orcid.org/0009-0002-5531-136X

Karenza Sutton-Bennett, University of Ottawa, Canada, completed her dissertation in 2022. It was titled ‘The Female Guise: the Untold Story of Female Education in English Periodicals’. Her research focuses on textual and visual representations of women learning in periodicals. Her research interests include history of education, xxviii Digital editing and publishing in the twenty-first century cultural studies, and women’s writing. Karenza’s publications include ‘Teaching the Lady’s Museum and Sophia: Imperialism, Feminism, and Beyond’, co-written with Susan Carlile in Aphra Behn Online: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts (1640–1830), and ‘Intellect versus Politeness: Charlotte Lennox and Women’s Minds’ in Eighteenth-Century Fiction. She is the co-editor of The Lady’s Museum Project with Kelly J. Plante, PhD. In 2023, the edition won the ASECS Women’s Caucus Editing and Translation Fellowship. Through LMP she has guest-lectured in several classrooms in Canada and the United States. When not researching or teaching, she works at Ontario Professional Planners Institute as Senior Manager of Education and Events where she develops their continuing education curriculum and annual conference.