I have been reading a selection of articles from The Female Spectator in an edition selected and edited by Mary Priestley and published in 1929. The introduction is by the writer J B Priestley (1894–1984), who was Mary’s brother. Generally, introductions tend to display at least some respect for the author whose work follows. Priestley takes a different approach: he uses his introduction to demolish Haywood’s credibility, deny her talent, and belittle her achievement. The Female Spectator was conceived, written and edited by Eliza Haywood (1693?–1756). It was modelled on the Spectator, a paper run by Richard Steele and Joseph Addison from 1711 to 1712, but it broke new ground in being the first magazine for women written by women. It was, says Priestley, the “ancestress” of modern women’s periodicals, although “like an ancestress, it is of course wildly different from anything we know now.” Eliza Haywood, Priestley tells us, had “tried her hand at many things” before she bec
Tyntesfield, near Wraxall, North Somerset This is the view from our picnic spot when we had a day out at Tyntesfield just outside Bristol recently. Tyntesfield is now a National Trust property , but was once the home of Bristol MP George Abraham Gibbs. George Abraham Gibbs (1873–1931) was the Conservative MP for Bristol West between 1906 and 1928. That meant he was in Parliament during the women’s suffrage campaign, and one of Bristol’s MPs at the height of suffragette militancy in the city. Gibbs, though, was opposed to women’s suffrage, and in 1910 voted against the Conciliation Bill which would have enfranchised some women. However, unlike his more unfortunate Liberal counterparts, he did not have to endure heckling and interruptions at his meetings, arson attacks on his homes, or thrashings such as the one suffragette Theresa Garnett gave Liberal MP Winston Churchill in Bristol in 1909. This was because the target of WSPU militancy was the government and its ministers, a