Definition
Agnes Strickland (1796–1874) was arguably the preeminent biographical historian of the Victorian period. She published actively from the early 1820s, working in genres as varied as the popular natural history, religious fiction, and historical fiction. In her shift to historical writing, Strickland demonstrated that it was possible to meld commercial success with innovative archival research, paving the way for later female professionals such as Mary-Anne Everett Green.
Introduction
Agnes Strickland (1796–1874) was arguably the preeminent biographical historian of the Victorian period, achieving celebrity status with the Lives of the Queens of England (1840–1848) which she co-authored with her sister Elizabeth. Such celebrity was in fact belated: she had been active since the early 1820s, working in genres as varied as the popular natural history tale (The Moss-House [1822]; The Aviary [1824]; The Use of Sight [1824]); religious fiction (Tales of the School-Room[1835]);...
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
References
Ballstadt, Carl Paul Arthur. 1965. The literary history of the Strickland family: Elizabeth, 1794–1875; Agnes, 1796–1874; Jane Margaret, 1800–1888; Catharine Parr, 1802–1899; Susanna, 1803–1885; Samuel, 1809–1867. Ph.D. dissertation, University of London.
Booth, Alison. 2004. How to make it as a woman: Collective biographical history from Victoria to the present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Burstein, Miriam Elizabeth. 1998. ‘The reduced pretensions of the historic muse’: Agnes Strickland and the commerce of women’s history. The Journal of Narrative Technique 28 (3): 219–242.
———. 2014. Victorian reformations: Historical fiction and religious controversy, 1820–1900. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
Horne, Jackie C. 2011. History and the construction of the child in early British children’s literature. Burlington: Ashgate.
Laurence, Anne. 2000. Women historians and documentary research: Lucy Aikin, Agnes Strickland, Mary Anne Everett Green, and Lucy Toulmin Smith. In Women, scholarship, and criticism: Gender and knowledge c. 1790–1900, ed. Joan Bellamy, Anne Laurence, and Gill Perry, 125–141. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Lewis, Jayne Elizabeth. 1998. Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and nation. London: Routledge.
Linton, Eliza Lynn. 1885. The autobiography of Christopher Kirkland, 3 vols. London: Richard Bentley and Son.
Maitzen, Rohan. 1998. Gender, genre, and Victorian historical writing. New York: Garland.
Mitchell, Rosemary. 2000. Picturing the past: English history in text and image, 1830–1870. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Pope-Hennessy, Una. 1940. Agnes Strickland: Biographer of the queens of England, 1796–1874. London: Chatto and Windus.
Shteir, Ann B. 1990. Botanical dialogues: Maria Jacson and women’s popular science writing in England. Eighteenth-Century Studies 23 (3): 301–317.
Smith, Bonnie. 1998. The gender of history: Men, women, and intellectual practice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Soffer, Reba N. 1994. Discipline and power: The university, history, and the making of an English Elite, 1870–1930. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Spongberg, Mary. 2002. Writing women’s history since the renaissance. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
———. 2019. Women writers and the Nation’s past 1790–1860: Empathetic histories. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Strickland, Agnes. 1822. The Moss-house: In which many of the works of nature are rendered a source of amusement to children. London: William Darton.
———. 1835. The pilgrims of Walsingham, 3 vols. London: Saunders and Otley.
———. 1856. Lives of the queens of Scotland and English princesses connected with the regal succession of great Britain, 8 vols. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons.
———. 1862. Historical tales of illustrious British children. New ed. London: Jarrold and Sons.
———. 1866. The lives of the seven bishops committed to the tower in 1688. London: Bell and Daldy.
———. 1882. Lives of the queens of England, from the Norman conquest, 8 vols. London: George Bell and Sons.
Waller, Gary. 2016. Walsingham and the English imagination. Oxford: Routledge.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Burstein, M.E. (2021). Strickland, Agnes. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_227-1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_227-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-02721-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-02721-6
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Humanities