Founded two years before Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, The Lady is Britain's oldest - and stateliest - magazine for women, with Alice In Wonderland author Lewis Carroll and Nancy Mitford among its contributors.
Its advertisements - traditionally placed by the nobility seeking domestic staff - have perhaps been even more celebrated than its articles, securing the magazine a mention in both Downton Abbey and, more unexpectedly, Coronation Street.
But this week the epic reign of The Lady has hit troubled waters, amid a shower of redundancy notices. 'The letter arrived on Saturday. It said that The Lady is insolvent and now in liquidation,' a contributor told the Daily Mail yesterday. The abruptness of the announcement has left many in shock. But it was, agreed another contributor, 'a surprise to everybody - apart from the owners'.
And it is the owners, the Budworth family, who, in recent years, have become the centre of attention - a development which was much to the regret of the redoubtable Julia Budworth, who died last May aged 92. Granddaughter of the magazine's 1885 founder, Thomson Gibson Bowles, and also a cousin of Nancy Mitford and her five sisters - Mrs Budworth had watched in dismay as The Lady, under her son Ben, attempted to adjust to the 21st century, most notably by hiring Rachel Johnson as editor in 2009.
Declaring that she wanted to make the magazine 'more hip, less hip replacement', Johnson seemed - to Mrs Budworth, at least - to have an entirely different anatomical interest. 'Rachel cannot speak about any subject without bringing the conversation back to penises,' she announced. 'All she thinks of is sex... Penis this, penis that. What is the matter with the girl?'
The first issue of The Lady was released on February 19, 1885. The magazine celebrated its 140th birthday a couple of months ago.
Johnson's decision to make the magazine the subject of a memorable television documentary, The Lady And The Revamp, did nothing to ease Mrs Budworth's distress.
Greater trauma was to come. Ben sold the magazine's Covent Garden offices in London's in 2019 for £12.4 million. Simultaneously, a number of staff received voluntary redundancy notices.
By then, Ben, who arrived at the offices in a chauffeur-driven car, had shelled out £1.9million for the sprawling Bylaugh Hall in Norfolk; living there with Helen Robinson, The Lady's managing director who subsequently became his wife - and editor of the magazine.
Yesterday, calls to Ben Budworth's mobile phone went unanswered.