From Moral Life to Material Being: Julia Francesca and Women's Periodical Writing in the Early Nineteenth Century

To Julia Francesca. Is thy harp unstrung? Is the field of Apollo barren? Why not invoke the muse? May we hope to be favoured with more of thy delightful strains?" ("To Julia" 93). So read the Lady's Weekly Miscellany, one of the first New York magazines dedicated to women readers, on 3 December 1808. Throughout the previous two years, contributions under the signature "Julia Francesca" had appeared in the magazine with increasing regularity. For nearly a month, however, Francesca had been silent, prompting the above appeal. While these lines attest to the frequency and popularity of Francesca's writing for the Miscellany, they obscure the range of her work. As often as not, her contributions resemble less the neoclassical verses suggested by this interlocutor than the tradition of satirical urban writing made famous in London's Tatler and Spectator and taken up in early national New York City by Washington Irving and James Kirke Paulding. Salmagundi, Irving and Paulding's colorful periodical satirizing city life, came out in 1807, and since its final issue that January, Francesca had published in the Miscellany more topical commentary than serious poetry. The address "To Julia Francesca," then, serves both to chide Francesca for her literary hiatus and to appraise her conventional verses above the experimental, distinctly modern strain of writing that she explores in the Miscellany's pages.

"Julia Francesca" was the pseudonym of Frances Eliza Ellis, an English transplant to New York who arrived in the city in 1806.¹ Little is known today about her life and writing, although periodical editors across the Atlantic at one time recognized Francesca's name and valued her contributions. From 1804 to 1810—and likely before and beyond those dates—her poems, puzzles, anecdotes, and essays appeared internationally in publications ranging from the Lady's Weekly Miscellany to the London Courier, the Quebec Mercury, the Philadelphia Port Folio, and the New-York Weekly Museum.² During this period she was one of the Miscellany's most frequent contributors and also repeatedly the first of its correspondents to be thanked in the magazine's annual address to its patrons. Although the major facts of Francesca's life remain unknown, her contributions to the Miscellany, along with the responses they elicit, comprise a rich archive for studying women's periodical writing in the early nineteenth century, offering new directions for thinking about writers' engagement with issues of gender, authorship, public life, and material being. At a time when women's magazines emphasized the moral and spiritual condition of their readers, Francesca's writing presented a remarkable exception. Her works give expression to the minutiae of women's everyday experiences, describe and satirize life in the growing city, and position women's writing and the stuff of women's lives as integral parts of a public literary sphere of global scope. Yet the Miscellany's editors and other correspondents, and sometimes even Francesca herself, tend to interpolate her contributions in terms of the "elegant and chaste productions" that typified more traditionally acceptable models of female authorship (Whitely, "To the Patrons" 415). As this essay and the following selections will show, Francesca's writing and reception in the Miscellany not only dramatize contemporary debates about the nature of women's literary production, but also present a popular female writer at once highlighting, negotiating, and exploiting such tensions, during the period when magazines for female readers gained prominence.

The details of Francesca's life, as they emerge from her writing, are sparse but intriguing.³ She identifies as an "Englishwoman" who is "proud of [her] country," disdains Napoleon, and celebrates a view of the expanding British Empire ("Mr. Editor" 412).⁴ Poems to regiments and commanders of the British military as well as a poem "Written previous to a voyage to the East Indies" imply her family's involvement in the British imperial apparatus, along with the extent of her own world travels. Several works suggest that by the time Francesca arrived in the United States she had married and become a mother. In "My Own...