FOREWORD
1 More widely available through the ten volumes of Shelley and his Circle with their authoritative commentaries.
PREFACE
1 Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark [1796], ed. Richard Holmes (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987), 97.
CHAPTER ONE.
MARY ROBINSON, EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ROMANTIC
1 There is some question about Robinson’s birthdate but it is clear that the one she gives in her memoirs, 1758, is false; 1757 is likelier. See Paula Byrne, “A Maniac for Perdita,” TLS, August 6, 2004, or Byrne’s forthcoming biography of Mary Robinson.
2 William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805 version), Book X, lines 693–94.
3 The Longman Handbook of Modern British History, 1714–1995, 3rd ed., ed. Chris Cook and John Stevenson (London: Longman, 1996), 151.
4 The first use recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary of “middle class” as a singular noun prefixed by “the,” rather than the adjectival “middling class,” or plural “middle classes,” dates to 1792; the source is the second part of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man.
5 Byrne, “A Maniac for Perdita.”
6 Laetitia Mathilda Hawkins, Memoirs, 2: 24, quoted in the Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. Mary Robinson.
7 The existence of another actress who also went by “Mrs. Robinson” has made the precise date of Mary Robinson’s retirement from the stage a matter of minor controversy.
8 Charlotte Smith, preface to the 6th ed. of her Elegiac Sonnets; quoted in Jacqueline Labbe, “Selling One’s Sorrows: Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, and the Marketing of Poetry,” Wordsworth Circle 25, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 68.
9 Robert D. Bass, The Green Dragoon: The Lives of Banastre Tarleton and Mary Robinson (New York: Henry Holt, 1957), 381, 398.
10 See Stuart Curran, “Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales in Context,” in Re-Visioning Romanticism, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 21.
11 Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805 version), Book XI, lines 308–11.
12 Coleridge to Robert Southey, January 25, 1800; Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 562; ampersands have been expanded to “and.”
CHAPTER TWO.
EXEMPLARY WOMEN: MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT, HANNAH MORE, AND THEIR WORLDS
1 Anne Stott’s Hannah More: The First Victorian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) is the standard biography of More. My account of More leans heavily on Stott’s work.
2 See, for instance, Anne K. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 18–19.
3 Virginia Woolf, “Mary Wollstonecraft,” The Common Reader, Second Series (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), 176.
4 More in a letter of 1783; quoted in Stott, Hannah More, 6.
5 Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 56.
6 Wollstonecraft to Henry Gabell, September 13, 1787; Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Ralph M. Wardle (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979), 161.
7 Stott, Hannah More, i.
8 Shelley and his Circle, ed. Doucet Devin Fischer and Donald H. Reiman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961–), 9: 1–24.
9 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman [1792], ed. Carol Poston (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 45.
10 Quoted from The Life of William Wilberforce, 1: 149, in Stott, Hannah More, 95.
11 Hannah More, Coelebs in Search of a Wife [1808] (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1835), 327.
12 Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education; with a View of the Principles and Conduct Prevalent Among Women of Rank and Fortune, in The Complete Works of Hannah More (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1836), 7.
13 More, Strictures, 2: 27, quoted in Stott, Hannah More, 221.
14 More, Strictures, 45.
15 Lines 63–64, quoted in Stott, Hannah More, 93.
16 Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Poston, 9.
17 Virginia Woolf, “Mary Wollstonecraft,” 176.
18 William Godwin, from Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), quoted in the prefatory note to Letters Written During a Short Residence in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (New York: New York University Press, 1989), 6: 238.
19 Wollstonecraft to Godwin, June 6, 1797; Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, 396.
20 Stott, Hannah More, 274; “rational delight” is from the novel’s epigraph and comes from Paradise Lost.
CHAPTER THREE.
NOT QUITE GOOD ENOUGH: THREE IMPERFECT LIVES
1 Hannah More, Hints Towards Forming the Character of a Young Princess, 3rd ed. (London: Cadell and Davies, 1805), 1: 17.
2 Stott, Hannah More, 261.
3 Letters of the Princess Charlotte, 1811–1817, ed. A. Aspinall (London: Home and Van Thal, 1949), 38.
4 Quoted in Christopher Hibbert, George IV: Regent and King (London: Allen Lane, 1973), 4.
5 Quoted in Alison Plowden, Caroline and Charlotte: The Regent’s Wife and Daughter, 1795–1821 (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1989), 95.
6 Plowden, Caroline and Charlotte, 20.
7 Plowden, Caroline and Charlotte, 69.
8 Plowden, Caroline and Charlotte, 87.
9 Aspinall, ed., Letters of the Princess Charlotte, xii. The picture in question was said to have been a caricature of Emma, Lady Hamilton (see Chapter Four).
10 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman [1792] (London: Penguin, 1992), 233.
11 Plowden, Caroline and Charlotte, 100, quoting from a letter of December 20, 1811.
12 Stephen C. Behrendt, Royal Mourning and Regency Culture: Elegies and Memorials of Princess Charlotte (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 38.
13 Margaret King Moore, “Lettera a Sua Figlie” (“Letter to Her Daughters”), autograph manuscript in the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, 1. There is some question over her date of birth; her most recent biographer, Janet Todd, thinks 1771 is most likely. See Rebel Daughters: Ireland in Conflict 1798 (New York: Viking, 2003), 20 and 341n.
14 Moore, “Lettera a Sua Figlie,” 2.
15 Margaret King Moore, Advice to Young Mothers on the Physical Education of Children (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1823), 172–73.
16 Edwin McAleer, The Sensitive Plant: A Life of Lady Mount Cashell (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1958), 147, quoting from Claire Clairmont.
17 Moore, “Lettera a Sua Figlie,” 4.
18 Moore, “Lettera a Sua Figlie,” 5.
19 Quoted in Alan Chedzoy, A Scandalous Woman: The Story of Caroline Norton (London: Allison and Busby, 1992), 60.
20 The Crim. Con. Gazette, November 10, 1838, 1.
21 See Jane Gray Perkins, The Life of Mrs. Norton (London: John Murray, 1909), 140.
22 See Perkins, The Life of Mrs. Norton, 44–45.
CHAPTER FOUR.
THE MODERN VENUS, OR, IMPROPER LADIES AND OTHERS
1 Gillian Russell, “‘Faro’s Daughters’: Female Gamesters, Politics, and the Discourse of Finance in 1790s Britain,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 33, no. 4 (Summer 2000): 481.
2 Amanda Foreman, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (New York: Random House, 1998), 178 ff.; Foreman gives the figure of £6 million, which I have translated conservatively into dollars.
3 See Russell, “‘Faro’s Daughters,’” 486 and 501n22.
4 On women’s participation in elections, see Elaine Chalus, “Women, Electoral Privilege and Practice in the Eighteenth Century,” in Women in British Politics, 1760–1860: The Power of the Petticoat, ed. Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), and Judith S. Lewis, “1784 and All That,” in Women, Privilege, and Power: British Politics, 1750 to the Present, ed. Amanda Vickery (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001). See also Renata Lana, “Women and Foxite Strategy in the Westminster Election of 1784,” Eighteenth-Century Life 26, no. 1 (2002): 46–69.
5 Quoted in Stott, Hannah More, 66.
6 For the classic exposition of this view, see Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977).
7 Information on the Duchess of Devonshire is based on Amanda Foreman’s Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.
8 Anna Clark, “Queen Caroline and Sexual Politics,” in Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 199–201.
9 On the symbolic aspects of Queen Caroline’s “trial” and death see, besides Plowden and Clark, Flora Fraser, The Unruly Queen: The Life of Queen Caroline (London: Macmillan, 1996).
10 Material on Harriet Shelley is taken from Kenneth Neill Cameron, “The Last Days of Harriet Shelley,” in Shelley and his Circle, 4: 774.
11 Shelley and his Circle,4: 774.
12 Shelley and his Circle,4:778.
13 Shelley and his Circle,4:805.
14 On the publication of the Memoirs see Frances Wilson, The Courtesan’s Revenge: Harriette Wilson, the Woman Who Blackmailed the King (London: Faber, 2003), chapters 19–21.
15 Wilson, The Courtesan’s Revenge, 225.
16 Wilson, The Courtesan’s Revenge, 198.
17 Harriette Wilson, Memoirs [1825] (London: Peter Davies, 1929), 1.
18 Granville Leveson-Gower, quoted in Flora Fraser, Emma, Lady Hamilton (New York: Knopf, 1987), 276.
19 See Fraser, Emma, Lady Hamilton, 313.
20 Shearer West, “The Public and Private Roles of Sarah Siddons,” in A Passion for Performance: Sarah Siddons and Her Portraitists, ed. Robyn Asleson (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1999), 5.
21 Quoted in Claire Tomalin’s excellent Mrs. Jordan’s Profession: The Story of a Great Actress and a Future King (New York: Viking, 1994), 245, from a letter of November 1811 to Mercer Elphinstone. I have expanded a contraction.
22 Quoted in Tomalin, Mrs. Jordan’s Profession, 268.
23 The still-standard work on lesbian history in this period is Emma Donoghue’s Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1688–1801 (London: Scarlet Press, 1993).
24 For the most complete coverage of this custom, see Rudolf Dekker and Lotte van de Pol, The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989).
25 Emma Donoghue found this extraordinary statistic in Sheridan Baker, “Henry Fielding’s Female Husband,” PMLA 74 (June 1959): 224; she quotes it in Passions Between Women, 74.
26 Baker, “Henry Fielding’s Female Husband,” 213.
27 The double “l” is flapped with the tongue; the easiest way to approximate the sound is to pronounce it with an “h” before the “l.”
28 Journal paraphrased in Elizabeth Mavor, The Ladies of Llangollen: A Study in Romantic Friendship (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1971), 57.
29 This and the previous quotation from Hester Thrale Piozzi are from Donoghue, Passions Between Women,150.
CHAPTER FIVE.
STRONGER PASSIONS OF THE MIND: WOMEN IN LITERATURE AND THE VISUAL ARTS
1 Cynthia Lawford is the discoverer of the story and the author of a biography of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, not yet published at the time of this writing. For a brief version of the story, and Lawford’s consideration of how the knowledge of Landon’s history might change the way we read her work, see “‘Thou shalt bid thy fair hands rove’: L. E. L.’s Wooing of Sex, Death and the Editor,” in Romanticism on the Net, Issues 29–30, February–May 2003. URL: <http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2003/v/n29/007718ar.html>
2 Lawford, “‘Thou shalt bid thy fair hands rove…,’” paragraph 21.
3 Lawford, “‘Thou shalt bid thy fair hands rove…,’” paragraph 20.
4 See Lawford, “‘Thou shalt bid thy fair hands rove…,’” paragraph 10.
5 Canto I, stanza 194, lines 1–2.
6 Quoted without source in the Dictionary of National Biography.
7 Quoted in E. J. Clery, Women’s Gothic from Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley (Tavistock: Northcote House in association with the British Council, 2000), 85.
8 See Ellen Donkin, Getting into the Act: Women Playwrights in London, 1776–1829 (London: Routledge, 1994), 170–72.
9 Dublin University Magazine 37 (April 1851): 529; quoted in Paula Feldman, ed., British Women Poets of the Romantic Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 23.
10 Nora Nachumi, conversation, September 14, 2004.
11 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey [1817], ed. Claire Grogan (Peterboro, Ont.: Broadview, 1996), 60.
12 The episode and more may be found in The Education of the Heart: The Correspondence of Rachel Mordecai Lazarus and Maria Edgeworth, ed. Edgar E. MacDonald (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977).
13 Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 275.
14 See Rictor Norton, The Mistress of Udolpho: A Biography of Ann Radcliffe (Leicester: University of Leicester Press, 1999), 220–21.
15 Mary Shelley, Introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein; cited from Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, ed. Susan Wolfson (New York: Longman, 2003), 189.
16 Shelley, Frankenstein, 191.
17 Quoted from a letter to Charles Lamb, ca. 1808, in Katharine Anthony, The Lambs: A Story of Pre-Victorian England (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945), 95.
18 Peter Rowland, letter, TLS, December 9, 2003, 17.
19 Austen, Northanger Abbey, 125.
20 The positioning of Kauffmann and Moser in Zoffany’s picture is pointed out by Whitney Chadwick in Women, Art and Society, 3rd ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 7.
21 The account of Lady Diana Beauclerk’s life that follows is drawn from Carola Hicks’s engaging biography, Improper Pursuits: The Scandalous Life of Lady Di Beauclerk (London: Macmillan, 2001).
22 Correctly pronounced, the last two-thirds of this name will sound as though spelled “Sinjun Bullingbrook.”
23 Hicks, Improper Pursuits, 247.
24 Hicks, Improper Pursuits, 248, 323.
25 Hicks, Improper Pursuits, 284.
26 Quoted in Hicks, Improper Pursuits, 319.
27 From an autobiographical fragment published in Rosamund Brunel Gotch, Maria, Lady Callcott: The Creator of “Little Arthur” (London: John Murray, 1937), 64.
28 Donoghue, Passions Between Women, 147.
29 Quoted in Donoghue, Passions Between Women, 147.
30 Callcott, quoted in Gotch, Maria, Lady Callcott, 64.
31 The incident is described in a letter from Damer to Mary Berry quoted in Frances Borzello, A World of Our Own: Women as Artists (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000), 104.
CHAPTER SIX.
RATIONAL DAMES AND LADIES ON HORSEBACK: SCIENTISTS AND TRAVELERS
1 Maria Edgeworth, Letters for Literary Ladies, quoted in Margaret Alic, Hypatia’s Heritage: A History of Women in Science from Antiquity to the Late Nineteenth Century (London: The Women’s Press, 1986), 175.
2 Patricia Phillips, The Scientific Lady: A Social History of Women’s Scientific Interests 1520–1918 (New York:St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 108.
3 Phillips, The Scientific Lady, 181.
4 Phillips, The Scientific Lady, 182.
5 Quoted in the Dictionary of National Biography.
6 Helen Ashton and Katharine Davies, I Had a Sister: A Study of Mary Lamb, Dorothy Wordsworth, Caroline Herschel, Cassandra Austen (London: Lovat Dickinson, 1937), 146.
7 Dictionary of National Biography, quoting from Caroline Herschel, Memoir and Correspondence of Caroline Herschel, ed. Mrs. John Herschel (London: John Murray, 1876).
8 Herschel, Memoir and Correspondence, 75–76.
9 Phillips, The Scientific Lady, 161.
10 Quoted from a letter from Miss Beckedorff, a friend of Caroline Herschel’s, to Herschel’s niece, December 1846, in Herschel, Memoir and Correspondence, 338.
11 “A Great Fondness for Botany,” biographical essay in Larry J. Schaaf, Sun Gardens: Victorian Photographs by Anna Atkins (New York: Aperture, 1985), 23–40. Schaaf’s essay gathers together most of what is known about Atkins’s life, and the account here is largely dependent on his.
12 Schaaf, “A Great Fondness for Botany,” 30.
13 As Carol Armstrong notes in Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843–1875 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 186.
14 Schaaf, “A Great Fondness for Botany,” 32.
15 Schaaf, “A Great Fondness for Botany,” 31. Schaaf points out that Atkins’s failure to note where she collected each specimen “would have been a source of frustration for serious algologists” (32), although this seems, a bit unfairly, to exclude her from this group.
16 Schaaf, “A Great Fondness for Botany,” 35.
17 Quoted in Alic, Hypatia’s Heritage, 159.
18 Doris Langley Moore, Ada, Countess of Lovelace: Byron’s Legitimate Daughter (London: John Murray, 1977), 316.
19 Moore, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, 231, quoting from a letter of April 4, 1835.
20 Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections from Early Life to Old Age (London: John Murray, 1873), quoted in Alic, Hypatia’s Heritage, 157.
21 Alic, Hypatia’s Heritage, 179–80.
22 Alic, Hypatia’s Heritage, 159.
23 Moore, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, 45.
24 Alic, Hypatia’s Heritage, 159.
25 Alic, Hypatia’s Heritage, 172. Somerville is quoting from St. Paul, 1 Corinthians, 15:47, playing on Paul’s words that “the first man is of the earth, earthy.” (Adamah is “earth” in Hebrew.)
26 Letter to Babbage, July 2, 1843, quoted in Moore, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, 157.
27 See Moore, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, 243.
28 Charles Meryon, Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope, as Related by Herself in Conversations with Her Physician (London: Henry Colburn, 1845), 2: 13.
29 Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope, 2: 5.
30 Virginia Childs, Lady Hester Stanhope: Queen of the Desert (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990), 179.
31 Pamela Neville-Sington, Fanny Trollope: The Life and Adventures of a Clever Woman (New York: Viking, 1997), 108.
32 Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans [1832], ed. Pamela Neville-Sington (New York: Penguin, 1997), 18.
33 Trollope, Domestic Manners, 27.
34 Pamela Neville-Sington, Introduction, Domestic Manners, xiii.
35 Trollope, Domestic Manners, 72.
36 Trollope, Domestic Manners, 92.
37 This and the preceding quotation are from Trollope, Domestic Manners, 56.
38 Maria Graham, Journal of a Residence in India (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, and London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1812), iii.
39 Lady Romilly, quoted in Elizabeth Mavor, comp. and ed., The Captain’s Wife: The South American Journals of Maria Graham 1821–23 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1993), 6.
40 Jane Austen, Persuasion [1817], ed. John Davie (London: Oxford University Press, 1998), 159.
41 “Lady Callcott,” obituary, The Gentleman’s Magazine, January 1843, 99.
CHAPTER SEVEN.
THE YOUNGEST ROMANTICS
1 Letter of July 22, 1842, in The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford, ed. Meredith B. Raymond and Mary Rose Sullivan (Winfield, Kans.: Armstrong Browning Library of Baylor University; the Browning Institute; Wedgestone Press; and Wellesley College, 1983), 2: 7. I have changed the ampersands of the original to “and.”
2 Margaret Forster, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 1988), 317.
3 Both quoted in Margaret Reynolds, “Critical Introduction” to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh [1857] (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992), 7.
4 Lyndall Gordon, Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994), 8–9.
5 Gordon, Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life, 60.
6 Quoted in Juliet Barker, ed., The Brontës: A Life in Letters (New York: Viking, 1997), 11.
7 Gordon, Charlotte Brontë, 31.
8 This came about largely because of the title of Susan Gilbert and Sandra Gubar’s now-classic work of feminist criticism, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979; 2nd ed., 2000).
9 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre [1847] (New York: Random House, 1943), 80.
10 Brontë, Jane Eyre, 61.
11 Lyndall Gordon in Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life.
12 Charlotte Brontë to George Smith (her publisher), quoted in Barker, The Brontës: A Life in Letters, 368.
13 There is much discussion of the question in recent historiography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but the locus classicus is Ruth Perry, “Colonizing the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth-century England,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, 2, no. 2 (October 1991): 204–34.
14 Quoted in Lynn Vallone, Becoming Victoria (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 5.
15 Vallone, Becoming Victoria, 43.
16 Entry for September 24, 1832; quoted in Vallone, Becoming Victoria, 25.
17 Vallone, Becoming Victoria, 40–43.
18 George Eliot, Selected Essays, Poems, and Other Writings (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 333.
19 Quoted in Jennifer Uglow, George Eliot (London: Virago, 1987), 196, from Gordon S. Haight, ed., The George Eliot Letters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954–56, 1978), 5: 58.