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
, JB
's comrade and frequent collaborator in the struggle against the Contagious Diseases acts, considered this an epochal publication.
Chapman, Maria Weston, and Harriet Martineau. “Memorials of Harriet Martineau”. Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography, James R. Osgood, pp. 2: 131 - 596.
2: 591
The reviewer for The Shield praised the book in March 1871...
Literary responses
Joanna Baillie
The Chief Justice of Ceylon, Sir Alexander Johnstone
, asked that two of JB
's last plays be translated into Singalese.One—The Bride, A Tragedy (published in summer 1828), had a Singalese subject.
Quarterly Review. J. Murray.
38 (1828): 602
Literary responses
George Henry Lewes
A hostile notice by T. H. Huxley
in the Westminster Review (owned by John Chapman
) dismissed Lewes as an amateur and ranked his book below Harriet Martineau
's recent abridgement of Comte. George Eliot
Literary responses
Hannah More
Sarah Harriet Burney
had high praise for it. The chapter on the smaller-scale faults and virtues, she said, merits to be written in letters of gold.
Burney, Sarah Harriet. The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney. Editor Clark, Lorna J., University of Georgia Press.
139
Around the same time Harriet Martineau
(in her...
Literary responses
Mary Delany
Harriet Martineau
nevertheless fastened with delight on the primary material here. She found the first three volumes an enormous treat,—perhaps the greatest in the book way for these seven years, and counted on the second...
Literary responses
Anna Letitia Barbauld
Miss Aikin's Poems sold five hundred copies in just over four months, and the second edition sold a similar number in a similar period. In September a third edition was announced.
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
111
The Monthly Review...
Literary responses
Anna Brownell Jameson
Reviewers noted the fact that it was a woman who had set out on this bold journey. Christian Isobel Johnstone
's review in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine was fairly typical in suggesting that that Winter Studies...
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.
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
Charlotte Brontë
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
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...