Abstract
The nature of the relationship between an author’s life, her works and the scholarship that surrounds them is one that has interested and vexed historians of women’s writing since at least the early eighteenth century when female biographies emerged as a popular textual form. The growth in the market for memoirs or dictionaries of illustrious and learned women over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a double-edged sword for women writers.1 At their best, female biographies then as now could recover the lives and revive interest in the works of unjustly neglected or forgotten figures. To ‘preserv[e] from oblivion’ the lives and accomplishments of learned women was, for example, the professed aim and one of the lasting achievements of George Ballard’s influential Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain (1752).2 More than two centuries before the feminist recovery project began in earnest, Ballard expressed incredulity that so ‘very many ingenious women of this nation … are not only unknown to the public in general, but have been passed by in silence by our greatest biographers’, especially when their lives ‘deserve[d]’ their readers’ ‘imitation’ and afforded ‘no inconsiderable entertainment’.3 Ruth Perry has described Ballard’s Memoirs as a ‘landmark [text] in the history of feminism’, but it was the next generation of female biographies that more fully realized the political implications of his project.4
The penalties and discouragements attending the profession of an author fall upon women with a double weight; to the curiosity of the idle and the envy of the malicious their sex affords a peculiar incitement: arraigned, not merely as writers, but as women, their characters, their conduct, even their personal endowments become the subjects of severe inquisition: from the common allowances claimed by the species, literary women appear only to be exempted[.]
Mary Hays, ‘Mrs Charlotte Smith’, in Public Characters of 1800–1801 (1801)
[I]t is evident that the welfare of society must be promoted by an extended knowledge of the lives, principles, and sentiments of the most eminent and excellent English authoresses.
Jane Williams, The Literary Women of England (1861)
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Notes
On the legacies of early eighteenth-century female biographies for literary history, see Paula McDowell, ‘Consuming Women: The Life of the “Literary Lady” as Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century England’, Genre 26 (1993), pp. 219–52.
I take this term from Patricia Duncker’s ‘Mary Shelley’s Afterlives: Biography and Invention’, Women: A Cultural Review 16.2 (2004), pp. 230–49 (230).
For an excellent survey of these debates and their implications, see Cheryl Walker, ‘Feminist Literary Criticism and the Author’, Critical Inquiry 16.3 (1990), pp. 551–71.
Susan Staves, A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 10.
This is one of the subjects of Susan Carlile (ed.), Masters of the Marketplace: British Women Novelists of the 1750s (Bethlehem, Pennsylvania: Lehigh University Press, 2011).
Kathryn R. King, A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012) and Jane Barker, Exile: A Literary Career 1675–1725 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).
Rachel Carnell, A Political Biography of Delarivier Manley (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008), p. 15.
For a summary of these noted comparisons see Jacqueline Labbe, ‘Narrating Seduction: Charlotte Smith and Jane Austen’, in Jacqueline Labbe (ed.), Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008), pp. 113–28 (115–16).
Charlotte Smith, The Banished Man, ed. M. O. Grenby, reprinted with The Wanderings of Warwick in The Works of Charlotte Smith, gen. ed. Stuart Curran, 14 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006), vol. 7, p. 107. On Smith’s perception of writing as work see Jennie Batchelor, Women’s Work: Labour, Gender, Authorship, 1750–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), pp. 67–107.
James Edward Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen and Other Family Recollections, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 77.
Julia Kavanagh, English Women of Letters: Biographical Sketches, 2 vols (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1863), vol. 1, p. 187.
Catherine Ann Dorset, ‘Charlotte Smith’, in Sir Walter Scott, The Lives of the Novelists (1825) (London: J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd, 1928), p. 326.
Charlotte Smith, The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, ed. Judith Phillips Stanton (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003), p. xiii.
Loraine Fletcher, Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography (Basingstoke: Palgrave, now Palgrave Macmillan, 2001 (1998)), p. 3.
Of Deirdre Le Faye’s numerous contributions to Austen scholarship, two are especially noteworthy: A Family Record (London: British Library, 1989); and Jane Austen, Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye, 3rd edn (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
John Wiltshire, Recreating Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 24.
Catherine Ann Dorset, ‘Charlotte Smith’, in Sir Walter Scott, The Lives of the Novelists (1825) (London: J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd, 1928), pp. 303–34 (332).
William Cowper to William Hayley, 29 January 1793, The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, ed. James King and Charles Ryskamp, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979–86), vol. 4, p. 281. Scott, Lives of the Novelists, pp. 333–4.
Florence May Anna Hilbish, Charlotte Smith, Poet and Novelist (1749–1806) (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1941), p. 564.
Kathryn Sutherland, Jane Austen’s Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 1.
Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 75–81.
Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998);
and Paul Keen, The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Stuart Curran, ‘Introduction’, in Charlotte Smith, The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. xix–xxvii (xxii–xxiii).
Carrol L. Fry, Charlotte Smith (New York: Twayne; London: Prentice Hall, 1996), p. 139.
Jacqueline M. Labbe, Charlotte Smith; Romanticism, Poetry and the Culture of Gender (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 8.
Edward Copeland, Women Writing about Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 47, 50.
Jane Williams, The Literary Women of England. Including a Biographical Epitome of all the Most Eminent to the Year 1700; and Sketches of the Poetesses to the Year 1850 (London: Saunders, Otley and Co., 1861), p. 224.
Jan Fergus, Jane Austen: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991);
Claire Harman, Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World (London: Canongate, 2009), p. 41; Sutherland, Jane Austen’s Textual Lives, p. 87.
David Selwyn, Jane Austen and Leisure (London: The Hambledon Press, 1999), p. 4.
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818), ed. Barbara M. Benedict and Deirdre Le Faye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 30–1.
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© 2012 Jennie Batchelor
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Batchelor, J. (2012). Jane Austen and Charlotte Smith: Biography, Autobiography and the Writing of Women’s Literary History. In: Cook, D., Culley, A. (eds) Women’s Life Writing, 1700–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137030771_13
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