Harriet Martineau : selected letters

Bibliographic Information

Harriet Martineau : selected letters

edited by Valerie Sanders

Clarendon Press , Oxford University Press, 1990

  • cloth

Uniform Title

Correspondence

Available at  / 6 libraries

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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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