It launched in 1885 as a “journal for gentlewomen”, a place where classified advertisements always attracted the right calibre of domestic staff: one who was savvy enough to buy and read The Lady.
Today, the classified ads for housekeepers and butlers remain, accompanied in the April edition by horoscopes, puzzles, a column praising nightingales, a recipe for grapefruit creams and an article on how to help dogs enjoy road trips.
But not for much longer. Despite claiming to have a “robust” readership of 11,000 “affluent” subscribers, The Lady – one of Britain’s longest-running magazines – is expected to close imminently after the Times and Daily Mail reported that it was going into liquidation.
Far from heralding the end of women’s magazines, however, publishing experts believe the demise of The Lady after 140 years actually highlights the remarkable success of print titles that continue to attract female readers in a digital age.
“In today’s world, you need to address your niche – and the problem for The Lady is that their niche evaporated,” said Jeremy Leslie, founder of magCulture, which stocks more than 700 magazines at its London shop. “We have plenty of examples here which are specialist, have a loyal readership and encourage the belief that there’s a very bright future for magazines.”
During its heyday in the late 19th and early 20th century, The Lady was a classic example of a beautiful magazine with a clear-cut community of readers, he said – rather like the women’s magazine The Gentlewoman today.
“The Gentlewoman is the perfect foil to a magazine like The Lady,” he said. “The name implies that it’s perhaps part of the same milieu as The Lady once was. But it couldn’t be more different. Their readers are younger, self-motivated, successful women who enjoy fashion while also having a serious career.”
Penny Martin, editor in chief of The Gentlewoman, said: “I’m sorry to see any women’s title go. At the same time, I don’t know any woman who would want to be addressed as a ‘lady’.”
The Gentlewoman, which has a circulation of 90,000 copies per issue, does not see its readers as consumers who fall into a particular lifestyle category or class, Martin said, but as people who share a “mutual interest in the same subjects and a love of quality journalism and print culture”.
She added: “I think publications that continue to deliver that magazine craft will continue to thrive.”
The first periodicals marketed at female readers were published in the 1690s, but it wasn’t until the 1770s that they began to resemble modern women’s magazines, according to University of York professor of English Jennie Batchelor. “That’s when you can have a high-calorie recipe on one page and an article on how to keep yourself looking gorgeous on the next.”
The readership of women’s magazines, which has always included men, greatly expanded during the 18th and 19th centuries as women became more literate, she said. “Magazines played a hugely important role in giving women access to information and knowledge they couldn’t get in other forms.”
Female writers managed to make a name for themselves in women’s magazines, before journalism was considered a viable profession for women.
By the 1880s, editors were vying for readers in an “incredibly overpopulated, really competitive” marketplace. “One of the ways they succeed is by specialising and finding their readers – and that could be by special interest, like gardening or literary fiction, or it could be along class lines,” Batchelor said.
Just as The Lady once did, new women’s magazines thrive today when they can speak to a “really quite specific” target market about their interests and ideas in a “very authentic way that nobody else can”, said Steven Watson, director of Stack, a magazine subscription service that surprises readers with a different independent title each month.
The best magazines make readers feel part of a community of people who share the same worldview, enabling their publishers to charge higher prices and still retain a loyal subscriber base, said Watson.
Mother Tongue, a biannual print magazine which interrogates and celebrates modern motherhood, charges £20 per issue. Worms, a female-led literary magazine dedicated to amplifying marginalised voices, charges £17.50.
By contrast, a subscription to the monthly Stylist magazine, the second most popular women’s magazine in the UK after Good Housekeeping, costs £5.75 a month.
“When your audience can see that you care about the things she cares about, and you’re using your platform to do something about that, it really makes sense why you exist in her life,” said Stylist editor-at-large Alix Walker. The title recently ran a campaign to improve support for women who suffer miscarriage and baby loss. “There’s so much content coming at all of us today, you’ve got to fight for your bit of her attention.”
Walker said that knowing your reader is crucial to a magazine’s survival. “As soon as you lose sight of who she is, you lose her.”
The journalist and author Rachel Johnson, a former editor of The Lady from 2009 to the end of 2011, said last week that she had tried – and failed – to halve the average age of the magazine’s readers, which was 78 when she started her tenure.
“It’s very hard to keep reinventing something, endlessly, to adapt,” Leslie said. “In the case of The Lady, perhaps the surprise is that it’s managed to last this long.”
