“I shall leave my reader to Judge”: <i>The Female Spectator</i> as an Interpretive Model for <i>The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless</i>

This essay argues that Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator (1744-46) models dialogic exchange through its representation of a collaborative process of production and engagement with readers’ responses, and that attending to exchanges in the periodical about dress and the clothing industry, in particular, reveals how the periodical creates an interpretive model for the protagonist’s engagement with the clothing industry in The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751). The author demonstrates that applying the periodical’s interpretive model to the novel provides an alternative to a straightforward reading of the novel, producing a counter-reading that critiques not only the narrator’s maxims but standard representations of women’s attention to dress more broadly. Understanding The Female Spectator as a model for reading Betsy Thoughtless illuminates the relationship between formal innovation and changing reading practices in an expanding literary marketplace and contributes to the bourgeoning critical discussion of eighteenth-century consumerism.