Harriet Martineau : selected letters
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Harriet Martineau : selected letters
Clarendon Press , Oxford University Press, 1990
- cloth
- Uniform Title
-
Correspondence
Available at 6 libraries
Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Harriet Martineau, versatile woman of letters, philosopher, and economist, was at the heart of Victorian literary and social life. This is the first wide-ranging selection of her letters to a variety of correspondents, most of them major figures in Victorian political and literary history. Controversial because of Martineau's lifelong resistance to the future publication of her private correspondence, the letters reveal her outspoken views on contemporary writers,
the working classes, women's role in society, political change, illness, mesmerism, and her own writing. Her opinions on literary realism and George Eliot, biography and Mrs Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte, and Elizabeth Barrett's contribution to modern poetry are among the topics aired in these
unashamedly forthright and often bigoted letters. Yet in her Autobiography, Harriet Martineau agrees with her friends `that it would be rather an advantage' to her than otherwise, to be known by her private letters. They allow the modern reader to enter fully into the spirit of Victorian social and literary controversy.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- List of letters
- Chronology
- Biographical register
- The Letters
- Notes
- Index
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