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IN 2016, the Wall Street Journal published an advertisement which supported the denial of the mass slaughter of the Armenians which had taken place a century before. I had been researching this genocide for the novel I was working on at the time, and was particularly drawn to the women that bore witness to the events, such as the nurse Ruth Parmelee, who wrote of the outrages that ‘they were too harrowing to try to describe’. On seeing the advertisement in the Wall Street Journal, a remarkable woman of Armenian heritage came forward and continued to bear witness. A successful businesswoman, she put her wealth and influence to use, and taking out a full page advertisement in the New York Times, wrote: ‘In 1939, a week before the Nazi invasion of Poland, Hitler said: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” We do. We must.’ In 2018, towards the end of May, dressed in sombre black clothing concealing her body from neck to wrist, this same woman met the President of the United States to plead clemency for Alice Marie Johnson, a 63-year-old Black woman serving a life sentence on non-violent drugs charges. The meeting took place on the incarcerated woman’s birthday; some days later, her sentence commuted, she was released.

I suppose if you were to picture to yourself this black-clad woman, pleading the case for social justice, you might easily enough furnish her with her voice, her demeanour, her clothing: a slight, determined person, perhaps, worn down by ambition and board meetings, or a formidable bluestocking accustomed to commanding a room with a deep stentorian voice. But this in fact is Kim Kardashian, the reality TV star whose fame began with a pornographic videotape released, as she said in court, against her will; whose body is perhaps more scrutinised, desired and despised than that of any other woman today; who arrived at the Met Gala in 2019 in a corseted latex dress designed to give the impression of dripping nudity.

I invoke her here because she is the Essex girl elevated to her purest form, displaced from Southend to Los Angeles: hypersexualised, irredeemably vulgar, a body presented to an avid and insatiable male gaze in a fashion which is somehow both gratifying and confronting; materialistic in a manner which can only repulse, when set against the economic and social inequalities that split the country of her birth; given to intricate and voluble familial squabbles, and adopting a manner of speech which is irritating to the ruling classes. The Essex girl is not bound by geography, but is a type, metonymous for a very particular kind of female agency, and a very particular kind of disdain: she contains a multitude of women.

Kardashian came again to my mind as I prepared to deliver a lecture which is held in Norwich each year in commemoration of Harriet Martineau, who had been born in the city in 1802. I had decided I would ask Martineau to walk out of Norfolk, to cross Suffolk without pausing, and to join me in the county of my birth: I wanted to introduce her to my Essex ghosts, and make the claim that she too had been, in her way, an Essex girl. Martineau was prone to illness all her life, and having lost her sense of taste and smell as a child was, by her late teens, so hearing impaired that she adopted the use of an immense ear trumpet (this object being weaponised later in life, when it would be withdrawn from use during conversations which bored or exasperated her).

Harriet Martineau, aged 54, shown at her needlework in a photograph by Moses Bowness, 1855–56.

At the age of twenty-seven, her family having become impecunious after the failure of their textile business, she began earning a living by publishing articles, and went on to produce a number of books on subjects including political economy and mesmerism. She was of a radical political bent, and by the 1830s had become a feted figure in London’s political circles. Matthew Arnold wrote of her that ‘no man of a certain delicacy of intellectual organisation’ could fail to have a just appreciation of her, and while more or less confined to her rooms by sickness (which in due course was cured, she said, by mesmerism and the application of magnets to the body) she wrote a biography of the Haitian slave rebellion leader Toussaint L’Ouverture, and several books for children. She advocated passionately for matters which remain both urgent and unresolved: for sustainable living and adequate and compassionate hospital provision, for racial equality and for the rights of women. She collaborated with Florence Nightingale, and was a friend to Dorothy and William Wordsworth, and to the Arnolds, and – though not always entirely happily – to George Eliot, of whose elopement with a married man she thoroughly disapproved.ⁱⁱⁱ In her collection of essays Life in the Sick-Room, she shows an acute engagement with the effects of chronic illness, and writes out of her own sick-room into those of women and men that she has never met, and will never meet, proposing a kind of secret communion of suffering:

At all events, there is something sweet and consoling in the fellowship. Though we would, if we could, endure anything to set the other free … yet, as this cannot be, we may make the most of the comfort of our companionship. In our wakeful night seasons, when the healthy and the happy are asleep, we may call to each other from our retreats, to know each how the other fares; and … it may be that there are angels abroad … who may bear our mutual greetings, and drop them on their rounds.

There is a humanistic quality to her work on suffering which anticipates a modern sensibility, and in fact she was a confirmed and practising atheist (in December 1850 Matthew Arnold wrote that he had ‘talked to Miss Martineau (who blasphemes frightfully)’). In 1851, she published Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development, in which she corresponded with Henry Atkinson, and together they more or less ridiculed conventional Christianity and the Genesis Record fully eight years prior to the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

But it is not easy for a woman to secure a lasting reputation, since this seems to me to be as much predicated on being liked and respected by peers, and by being assessed against a series of subtle and punitive social norms, as on her work. After the publication of Martineau’s correspondence with Atkinson, it was felt she had been duped by his malign influence, since certainly no mere woman could arrive at so anarchic a position as atheism on her own account. It was a ‘humiliating inversion of the natural order’, wrote her brother, after which he never saw or heard from her again.

On her death in 1876, Harriet Martineau – to the last a devotee of scientific inquiry and progress – offered both her brain and her ears as specimens for dissection and study: both were politely declined. Historians have declined also to make much of her reputation and her work,^iv and not always politely. In The Victorians, A. N. Wilson writes waspishly that her works were ‘wordy and cliché-ridden’, and accused her of having ‘all the right views – that is the views espoused by the metropolitan intelligentsia’ (as if being inquiring and educated, and living in an immense city drawing its citizens from all over the world, makes a woman less equipped to remark on current affairs, and not more). Dickens meanwhile wrote sardonically that she was ‘grimly bent upon the enlightenment of mankind’ – an ambition which would likely have been met with praise and not with censure had it been attributed to a man.

How to account for this diminution in her reputation? It seems to me to have been in some ways a matter of a failure to conform to what is expected – now as then – of a woman. In old age, Martineau – living by then in the Lake District – scandalised locals by wearing hobnail boots and smoking cigars. She professed no great interest in romantic attachments, so that some commentators have wondered if in fact she was a lesbian, perhaps because to contemporary sensibilities this is both more palatable and more credible than her simply having been more a creature of intellect than of romance. Nathanial Hawthorne wrote of her that she was ‘a large, robust (one might almost say bouncing) elderly woman, very coarse of aspect, and plainly dressed … And this woman is an Atheist, and thinks, I believe, that the principle of life will become extinct, when her great, fat, well-to-do body is laid in the grave.’

I suppose there were never two less likely companions than these two women. On the one hand we have Kardashian, whose brand was described in the New Yorker as being predicated on the possession of ‘a perfect (and perfectly unaffordable) female body’; on the other a talkative, intelligent, plain woman, fat, disabled and chronically ill, and heedless of the need to make herself attractive and agreeable to men. But were they to have joined me that evening in Chelmsford, beside the hospital wall where my Essex ghosts assembled – Martineau in fifteen yards of black bombazine; Kardashian in a corseted dress which will not permit her to sit down – I am minded to think they might have exchanged a nod of mutual recognition, and even perhaps of approval.