Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Catharine Macaulay
-
Standard Name: Macaulay, Catharine
Birth Name: Catharine Sawbridge
Married Name: Catharine Macaulay
Married Name: Catharine Graham
Self-constructed Name: Catharine Macaulay Graham
Used Form: Mrs Macauly
CM
is best known as a radical historian (the only historian of England from a republican point of view for almost two centuries after she wrote). The eight volumes of her History of England took her another twenty years of work from the publication of the first volume in 1763, and ran to 3,483 quarto pages.
Hill, Bridget. The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian. Clarendon Press.
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She also wrote memorable pamphlets on political and other topics, and treatises on theology and gender politics.
Her brother John
wrote of the Praises that resound on all Sides following the publication of this book, though he regretted that reviewers, in praising the moral content, had ignored the literary style.
Myers, Sylvia Harcstark. The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Clarendon.
The original press run of 1,018 copies had to be supplemented with a further 250. First of several more editions was the Dublin one of the...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Elizabeth Carter
Poems printed here include some which are movingly personal. To the Rev. Dr. Carter thanks her father for his unusual interpretation of the paternal role: Ne'er did thy voice assume a master's pow'r, ....
Textual Features
Frances Brooke
Brooke's advertisement to volume 3 says she gave up her plan for an essay on the writing of history, and settled instead on using notes to demonstrate how this work is, as all history ought...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Mary Matilda Betham
Catharine Macaulay
, she insists, was pleasing and delicate in her person, and a woman of great feeling and indisputable abilities, though the democratic spirit of her writings has made them fall into disrepute.
Feminist Companion Archive.
She...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anna Maria Bennett
Readers first encounter the young male protagonist, Henry Dellmore, bearing the nickname of Mumps, and suffering as a pupil at a Dickensian school, under the proprietor Mr Puffardo. Once taken up by benefactors, he...
Textual Production
Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
She wrote it before the death of Catharine Macaulay
, though it appeared afterwards. Lucy Aikin
said she wrote it at about fifteen, which exaggerates her youth by only a year.
The Monthly Repository. Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme.
1 n.s., 1827.126
Her...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
EOB
writes in terms of a women's tradition: for instance, she praises Barbauld
for praising Elizabeth Rowe
. She makes confident judgements and attributions (she is sure that Lady Pakington
is the real author of...
Textual Production
Anna Letitia Barbauld
For this her great support and encouragement was her brother
(as he, rather than her husband
, continued to be for her later publications). After he left home to pursue his studies, she sent him...
Textual Features
Anna Letitia Barbauld
She strikes a newly bold, almost an insurrectionary note here, calling upon revolutionary France, indeed, to provide a model. [W]hatever is corrupted must be lopt away, she writes, as people assert their long forgotten...
Intertextuality and Influence
Lucy Aikin
Her model for this genre was Elizabeth Hamilton
, but the influence of Catharine Macaulay
is discerned by Karen O'Brien
in Aikin's Whig positioning and in her self-confidently judgemental tone.
O’Brien, Karen. Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge University Press.
