Abstract
By the mid-nineteenth century there were so many women engaged in historical writing they were becoming the subject of hostile reviews bemoaning their abundance.1 J. M. Kemble wrote in Fraser’s Magazine in 1885: ‘we [men] must plead to a great dislike for the growing tendency among women to become writers of history’.2 Underpinning this hostility was concern that women were ‘feminising’ history, at a time when it was reasserting its manliness through professionalisation. In spite of criticism, women engaged enthusiastically with historical writing throughout the nineteenth century, although the types of history women wrote were somewhat constrained by gender prescriptions stressing women’s essential domesticity.
Although history is one of the most useful studies which a woman can pursue, her powers of mind are hardly fitted to enter this field for the sake of instructing others …. And this point we strenuously maintain, that it is not that woman is, in ordinary cases, deficient in judgment, and she is carried away by their power. She feels keenly, and then decides promptly, instead of calmly weighing facts and deciding upon evidence. The very reasons which make the study of history beneficial to her, are the reasons dissuasive from her ever attempting to be an historian.
M. A. Stodart, Female Writers: Thoughts on their Proper Sphere and on their Powers of Usefulness, 1843
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Notes
Rohan Maitzen, ‘“This Feminine Preserve”: Historical Biographies by Victorian Women’, Victorian Studies, 38, 3 (1995): 371–2.
Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘“Women’s History” in Transition: The European Case’, Feminist Studies, 3, 3 /4 (1975): 83–103.
Donna Dickenson, Margaret Fuller: A Woman’s Life (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993), p. xvi.
Joseph W. Reed, English Biography in the Early Nineteenth Century 1810–1838 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), p. 15.
Alison Booth, ‘The Lessons of the Medusa: Anna Jameson and Collective Biographies of Women’, Victorian Studies, 42, 2 (1999): 260.
Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 15001800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 384.
Mitzi Myers, ‘Ruin or Reform: A Revolution in Female Manners’, Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, 11 (1982): 200.
Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Their Fathers’ Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 11.
Nancy Armstrong, Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 60.
Barbara Miller Solomon, In The Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 16.
Hannah More, Coelebs in Search of a Wife (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995), p. 71.
Veronica Webb Leahy, ‘Women Who Have Dared but Deterred Other Women: Hannah More and Beverly LaHaye’, in Ann C. Hall (ed.), Delights, Desires and Dilemmas: Essays on Women in the Media (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), pp. 137–52.
Hannah More, Hints towards forming the character of a young princess (London: T. Cadell & Davies, 1805), p. 191.
Alison Plowden, Caroline & Charlotte, The Regent’s Wife and Daughter 1795–1821 (London: Sidgwick & Plowden, 1989), p. 104.
Katherine M. Rogers, ‘The Contribution of Mary Hays’,Prose Studies, 10, 2 (1987): 132.
Mary Hays, Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous (London: T. Knott, 1793), p. iii.
Elizabeth Hamilton, Memoirs of Agrippina, Wife of Germanicus (London: G. & J. Robinson, 1804), pp. 18–19.
Jane Rendall, ‘Writing History for British Women: Elizabeth Hamilton and the Memoirs of Agrippina’, in Clarissa Campbell Orr (ed.), Wollstonecraft’s Daughters: Womanhood in England and France 1780–1920 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 84.
Mary Hays, Female Biography, or memoirs of illustrious and Celebrated Women of All Ages and Countries, Vol. 1 (R. Phillips: London, 1803), p. 4.
Jerry C. Beasley, ‘Politics and Moral Idealism: The Achievement of Some Early Women Novelists’, in Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (eds), Fetter’d or Free?: British Women Novelists 1670–1815 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1986), p. 217.
Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 4.
George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985), p. 8.
Robert A. Colby,’ “Rational Amusement”: Fiction vs. Useful Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century’, in James R. Kincaid and Albert J. Kuhn (eds), Victorian Literature and Society (Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1984), p. 51.
Mrs John Sandford, Lives of English Female Worthies (London: Longman, 1833), p. x.
Martha Vicinus, ‘Models for Public Life: Biographies of “Noble Women” for Girls’ in Claudia Nelson and Lynne Vallone (eds), The Girl’s Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl 1830–1915 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994), p. 55.
Lucy Aitkin, ‘Memoir of Miss Benger’, in Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger, Anne Boleyn: Queen of Henry VIII (London: Longman, 1827), p. ix.
Deirdre David, Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy (London: Macmillan, 1987), pp. vii-viii.
Hannah Adams, A Memoir of Hannah Adams (Boston: Gray & Bowen, 1832), pp. 34–35.
Miriam Elizabeth Burstein,’ “The Reduced Pretensions of the Historic Muse”: Agnes Strickland and the Commerce of Women’s History’, Journal of Narrative Technique, 28 (1998): 220.
Rosemary Mitchell, Picturing the Past: English History in Text and Image 1830–1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 150.
M. A. Stodart, Female writers’ thoughts on their proper sphere, and on their powers of usefulness (London: Thames Ditton, 1842), p. 128.
Anonymous, Select Female Biography, or Eminent British Ladies (London: John & Arthur Arch, 1821), p. vii.
Una Pope Hennessy, Agnes Strickland: Biographer of the Queens of England (London: Chatto & Windus, 1940), p. 67.
Cited in Mary Delorme, ‘“Facts, Not opinions”: Agnes Strickland’, History Today, 38 (1988): 47.
Alison Booth, ‘Illustrious Company: Victoria among other Women in Anglo-American Role Model Anthologies’, in Margaret Homans and Adrienne Munich (eds), Remaking Queen Victoria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 72–7.
In Britain one of the first ‘patriotic’ or nationalist collections was published in the revolutionary year of 1848. See Elizabeth Starling’s Noble Deeds of Woman (London: Bohn, 1848).
An American supplement appeared several years later. See Jesse Clement’s Noble Deeds of American Women (Buffalo: Derby, 1851).
Jeanne Moskal, ‘Gender, Nationality, and Textual Authority in Lady Morgan’s Travel Books’, in Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley (eds), Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices (Hanover: University of New England Press, 1995), p. 178.
Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 131.
Ina Ferris, ‘Narrating Cultural Encounter: Lady Morgan and the Irish National Tale’, Nineteenth Century Literature, 51, 3 (1996): 287–303.
See, for instance, Conrad, Perish the Thought, pp. 93–133; and Scott E. Caspar, ‘An Uneasy Marriage of Sentiment and Scholarship: Elizabeth F. Ellet and the Domestic Origins of American History’, Journal of Women’s History, 4 (1992): 10–35;
Nina Baym, ‘Onward Christian Women: Sarah J. Hale’s History of the World’, New England Quarterly., 63, 2 (1990): 249–70;
Nicole Tonkovich, Domesticity with a Difference: The Nonaction of Catherine Beecher, Sarah J. Hale, Fanny Fern and Margaret Fuller (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1997).
Elizabeth Ellet, Women of the American Revolution, Vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner, 1852), p. 23.
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© 2002 Mary Spongberg
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Spongberg, M. (2002). ‘Heroines of Domestic Life’: Women’s History and Female Biography. In: Writing Women’s History since the Renaissance. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-20307-5_6
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