Memoirs of Women Writers, Part I (set)

Part I Frances Sheridan’s biographer, the novelist Alicia LeFanu, was also her granddaughter. Born in Dublin in 1791, LeFanu never met her grandmother, but adopted a meticulous approach to using the latter’s correspondence to build an accurate picture of a woman much admired amongst eighteenth-century literary society. LeFanu’s novels are written in an ironic style which is at odds with the more reverent tone she adopts in telling the life of her relative...
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Part I

Frances Sheridan’s biographer, the novelist Alicia LeFanu, was also her granddaughter. Born in Dublin in 1791, LeFanu never met her grandmother, but adopted a meticulous approach to using the latter’s correspondence to build an accurate picture of a woman much admired amongst eighteenth-century literary society. LeFanu’s novels are written in an ironic style which is at odds with the more reverent tone she adopts in telling the life of her relative – a fact picked up on by reviewers who saw her as too partial to provide a truly accurate account.

By contrast, when Roberts published his four-volume Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs Hannah More (1833) he was considered not to have known his subject well enough. Roberts was the brother of More’s good friends Mary and Margaret Roberts. The first edition of Roberts’ biography contained over 400 letters written by More, which Roberts selected to favour his preferred of More’s acquaintance. More’s goddaughter, Marianne Thornton, was outraged and thought the letters – instructed by More to be burned – were unrepresentative of her godmother’s character and style.

Sarah Trimmer was an educationalist, critic and author. She published widely on the importance of female education and on children’s literature. Aided initially by her father’s appointment as tutor to the Prince of Wales, she was widely accepted into society. Samuel Johnson was impressed by Trimmer when he met her in her mid-teens and she was also a friend to Sir Joshua Reynolds. Her friendship with Hannah More was one based on mutual respect and interest in each other’s work. More considered Trimmer ‘the author whom I venture most to recommend.’

Parts II and III

Mary Hays was a radical feminist whose writings brought her to the attention of her contemporaries William Blake, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. This edition of Mary Hays’s Female Biography is the first modern scholarly edition since its publication in 1803. When it appeared, Female Biography was the first history of women since Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies (1405), the first in English, and the first compendium of women by either male or female compilers since Thomas Heywood’s Generall Historie of Women (1624, 1657) to include rebellious and impious figures, as well as learned ones.

The edition calls attention to Hays’s ambitious design for her six volumes: that is, to address the glaring absence of women in the catalogues by major Enlightenment thinkers that recorded the lineage of almost exclusively male thinkers and their contributions to canonical knowledge. Female Biography attests to the existence of active, learned, and powerful women, who produced new knowledge and made genuine, if unheralded, contributions to cultural capital. This edition honors Hays’s pioneering method, the extraordinary scope of her sources and the correctives she makes to traditional narratives to reveal an alternative human history.

A full list of contributors to Parts II and III can be found under the 'sample pages' tab.