Clio's Daughters: British Women Making History, 1790-1899 (review)

From competing representations of Elizabeth I to women's interest in domestic architecture to the historical force of narrative poetry, this excellent collection of original essays explores how women have practiced "history" and the multiple representations of women in history. Drawing on the pioneering work of Mary Spongberg, Devoney Looser, Rohan Maitzen, Rosemary Mitchell, and Miriam Elizabeth Burstein—all of whom have made critical interventions in the field of women and history and all, excepting Looser, contributors to this volume—these essays offer new readings of the relationship between nineteenth-century women and historiography. Though individual essays in this volume do not always sufficiently distinguish between "British Women Making History" and "British Women Making Gender," the collection is compelling and authoritative.

The volume is divided into four equally weighted sections. The two essays in "Women Revising Uprisings" tackle the Great Events model of history by examining how the poet Charlotte Smith and the novelist Flora Annie Steele represented revolutionary events in France and the 1857 Indian Mutiny, respectively. In this section, Stephen Bernstein argues that Smith's The Emigrants (1793) is "crisis historiography": the narrative poem form conveys the texture of quotidian detail that the writer sees as poetry's specifically historical contribution. Ann-Barbara Graff's chapter on Steele similarly appraises women's use of what Bernstein calls "inventive generic combinations" to query "History" (33). Graff treats Steele's decision to write a novel—not a factual account—about the 1857 Mutiny as a challenge to dominant schools of Victorian historiography. This busy chapter and the connections between its theoretical underpinnings and interpretations are occasionally too raw. Yet Graff's analysis of the ways in which Steele queried history as a form of knowledge recoverable only through official documents is compelling.

Part 2, "Queens of History," probes the limits of the Great People model of historiography in essays focusing on Marie Antoinette, Lady Jane Grey, Elizabeth I, and Mary Queen of Scots. Spongberg's chapter expands the recent attention to Victorian royal lives to explore how queenliness was "stripped of the sexualized political power" that characterized earlier representations (72). Her "prehistory" of Victorian royal biography includes Mary Robinson's astonishing defense of Mary Wollstonecraft, which employed terms connecting Wollstonecraft to Marie Antoinette, whom Wollstonecraft had earlier indicted in her own history writing. Maitzen's assured and rich essay further explores the problem of queenliness and womanliness in biographies of Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots by Agnes Strickland and J. A. Froude. Froude is the only male historian considered in this collection, and his inclusion is momentarily disorienting, but Maitzen's reading of his history of Elizabeth I is persuasive.

Part 3 considers how Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, religious novelist Sarah Holt, and Harriet Martineau appropriated the historian's profession by writing history in alternate textual forms. Here, Neil McCaw's useful essay on how to read historical fiction raises the critical question of the philosophy of history, or conception of historical change, that underwrote the work of Gaskell and Eliot. Here, too, Maria Frawley's excellent essay on Martineau's study of the Crimean War, England and Its Soldiers (1877), explores the rhetorical techniques Martineau employed to address her readers, a community she identified as requiring education about past events in order to respond properly to present exigencies. Frawley is one of the few contributors in this collection to consider audience as a vital element in making history and a necessary component of our understanding of how and why women work with the forms they do. She closes her chapter by warning against the view that women's efforts to write a range of histories are "narratives of (women's) progress" (211). Martineau's Crimean book, like much of her history writing, has not enjoyed a wide readership. Yet, her choices—of address, of materials—are historically significant nonetheless.

Part 4 extends the volume's overall interest in the alternate forms of history writing, exploring women's...