Abstract
Recent scholarship has shown the ways in which biographical history could be used by eighteenth-century women writers in order to challenge women’s marginalisation within narratives of the past and contribute to contemporary debates regarding femininity and historiography.1 Lady Rachel Russell (1636–1723), wife of the Whig martyr Lord William Russell who was executed in 1683 for his suspected role in the Rye House Plot to assassinate Charles II and James, Duke of York, provides an ideal case study through which to consider questions of gender and genre. She was frequently discussed by women writers from the 1770s to the 1840s in political histories, poetry, biographies, editions of letters and collective biographies. The posthumous publication of her letters in 1773 provided a more intimate and complex portrait of a woman traditionally celebrated for her symbolic political value as a model of wifely devotion, piety and maternal duty. Subsequent narratives by Mary Scott, Catharine Macaulay, Mary Hays, Matilda Betham, Mary Pilkington, Lucy Aikin and Mary Berry among others retained some of these elements, but at the same time recognised the ways in which Lady Russell complicated ideas of domestic virtue, female heroism and women’s public participation.2 Her life also prompted reflections on sympathy, identification and exemplarity, and the interactions between history, biography and fiction, which were central to debates regarding historical discourse in this period.3
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Notes
Devoney Looser has shown that ‘as a relatively fluid and immensely popular genre, history provided a rich area of discourse for women writers to mine’ while they also ‘participated, tangentially and head on, in debates about history writing that effected change’. Devoney Looser, British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670–1820 (Baltimore, M D: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), pp. 2–3.
Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Alison Booth has identified that from 1850 to 1900 Lady Rachel Russell appeared 21 times in ‘nonspecialized’ collections of female lives in English (compared to 17 appearances by Elizabeth I, 18 by Madame Roland and 18 by Florence Nightingale). There is a decline in interest in Lady Russell after 1900. Alison Booth, How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 394–6.
Lois G. Schwoerer, Lady Rachel Russell: “One of the Best of Women” (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), p. xvii.
Susan Wiseman, Conspiracy and Virtue: Women, Writing, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 343.
Paula R. Backscheider, Reflections on Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 60.
Thomas Gibbons, Memoirs of Eminently Pious Women, 2 vols (London: J. Buckland, 1777), vol. 2, p. 252.
Margaret J. M. Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 124–5.
Clare Brant, Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 247
Mary Scott, The Female Advocate (London: Joseph Johnson, 1774), p. 11.
Philip Hicks, ‘The Roman Matron in Britain: Female Political Influence and Republican Response, ca. 1750–1800’, The Journal of Modern History, 77.1 (2005), 35–69
Catharine Macaulay Graham, The History of England from the Accession of James I to the Revolution, 8 vols (London: A Hamilton, 1781), vol. 7, p. 446.
Claire Brock, The Feminization of Fame, 1750–1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 61.
David Hume, The History of England From the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, 8 vols (London: A. Millar sold by T. Cadell, 1767), vol. 8, p. 189.
Mary Spongberg, Writing Women’s History since the Renaissance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 127.
Mary Hays, Female Biography; or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of all Ages and Countries, 6 vols (London: Richard Phillips, 1803), vol. 1, pp. v–vi.
Matilda Betham, A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (London: B. Crosby, 1804), p. 764.
Jacqueline Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain, 17’50-1835: A Dangerous Recreation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 50.
Mary Pilkington, Memoirs of Celebrated Female Characters (London: Albion Press James Cundee, 1804), p. 313.
Susanne Schmid, British Literary Salons of the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 69.
Lewis Melville (ed.), The Berry Papers: Being the Correspondence Hitherto Unpublished of Mary and Agnes Berry (1763–1852) (London: John Lane, 1914), pp. 383–5.
Lady Theresa Lewis (ed.), Extracts of the Journals and Correspondence of Miss Berry from the Year 1783 to 1852, 3 vols (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1865), vol. 3, pp. 153–4.
Mary Berry, Some Account of the Life of Rachael Wriothesley Lady Russell (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1819), p. lviii.
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© 2014 Amy Culley
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Culley, A. (2014). Reading the Past. In: Dew, B., Price, F. (eds) Historical Writing in Britain, 1688–1830. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137332646_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137332646_3
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