Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Harriet Martineau
-
Standard Name: Martineau, Harriet
Birth Name: Harriet Martineau
Pseudonym: Discipulus
Pseudonym: A Lady
Pseudonym: H. M.
Pseudonym: From the Mountain
Pseudonym: An Invalid
Pseudonym: An Englishwoman
HM
began her career as a professional writer, which spanned more than four decades in the mid nineteenth century, with writing from a Unitarian perspective on religious matters. She made her name with her multi-volume series (initially twenty-five volumes, followed by further series) of narrative expositions of political economy. One of the founders of sociology, who believed that social affairs proceed according to great general laws, no less than natural phenomena,
Martineau, Harriet, and Gaby Weiner. Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography. Virago.
2: 245
she produced several major contributions to this emerging field. She wrote broadly in periodicals and regularly for a newspaper on social and political issues, and produced three books of observations emerging from her foreign travels. Although her two three-volume novels were not particularly successful, her work had a great impact on later Victorian fiction. She also wrote history, biography, and household manuals. Her advocacy of mesmerism and her atheism made some of her later writings controversial. In her eminently readable autobiography and other writings she presents a cogent analysis of conditions shaping the lives of Victorian women. Although she became hugely influential—one of the most prominent women writers of her day—HM
eschewed notions of genius. Her crucial contribution to Victorian feminist thought has frequently been overlooked.
Chapman, Maria Weston, and Harriet Martineau. “Memorials of Harriet Martineau”. Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography, James R. Osgood, pp. 2: 131 - 596.
Harriet Martineau
, finding the work attributed to herself even by members of her own family, felt that the unknown author must know not only my books but myself very well. . . . With...
Literary responses
Anna Brownell Jameson
Critic Katharine Patterson
has constructed a database mapping through letters ABJ
's connections to many of her contemporaries, including Harriet Martineau
.
Patterson, Katharine Bassett. “Anna Jameson, Harriet Martineau, and Their Friends”. Simon Fraser University Library: Electronic Document Centre: Victorian Women Writers’ Letters Project.
Reviews of the novel were generally positive, though several remarked on a sense of bitterness about women's lot or found the representation of women inadequate. Harriet Martineau
's review in the Daily News criticized the...
Literary responses
Anna Letitia Barbauld
ALB
was a presence in the early poetry of Wordsworth
and Coleridge
, though they later distanced themselves from her so emphatically. Her work appeared in magazines in the USA before the end of the...
Literary responses
Isabella Beeton
IB
received an early letter of commendation from political economist Harriet Martineau
, who had published books—such as Household Education—along the same lines. Although she disliked the sections on manners and (as a homeopath)...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Sewell
Her autobiography has received the most recent critical attention of her writings. Critic Valerie Sanders
compares it with other autobiographies (by Harriet Martineau
, Fanny Kemble
and Margaret Oliphant
), and notes ES
's conflicted...
Literary responses
Evelyn Sharp
Beverly Lyon Clark
, who wrote an introduction to this book and thought extremely highly of it, argued that the neglect of it stemmed from its belonging not just to one but to several under-appreciated...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Smith
Among the Victorians, Harriet Martineau
concluded Female Education in The Monthly Repository of December 1822 (second part of her first published work) with a word of praise for Smith, and Margaret Gatty
as a young...
Literary responses
Anne Marsh
In 1851 the Athenæum reviewer of Ravenscliffe still thought of The Admiral's Daughter as having heralded a remarkable addition to the phalanx of English authoresses.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
1255 (1851): 1198
The preface writer for the cheap reprint...
Literary responses
Florence Nightingale
Notes on Nursing has remained FN
's most influential work, in part because it was written on the assumption that nurses were capable of writing their own textbooks.
Dolan, Josephine A. Nursing In Society: A Historical Perspective. Saunders.
209
In 1860, the Quarterly Review observed...
Literary responses
Louisa Anne Meredith
Critic Dale Spender
, however, has celebrated her as a writer: it is the wit and the entertainment value of her writing which help to capture some of the (often incongruous) elements of early colonial...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
EBB
's ballads have proved of particular interest to feminist critics. Dorothy Mermin
argues that in this apparently most innocent, retrogressive, and sentimental of female genres, she was exploring what was to become her central...
Literary responses
Jane Williams
A short review in the Athenæum remarked that the idea of the book is good and droll but that it is carried too far—very much too far. Referring to Harriet Martineau
's theories of population...
Literary responses
Mary Ann Kelty
Reviewers praised this novel for its depiction of character and its intimate knowledge of the human heart.The Monthly Magazine singled out its impeccable morality, suitable for a young and female readership.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.