Charlotte M. Yonge and the 'historic harem' of Edward Augustus Freeman

Women and the discipline of 'History'

In 1874 the 'historian' Edward Augustus Freeman commissioned the best-selling 'authoress' Charlotte Yonge to write a History of France fora series of textbooks of which he was General Editor. An analysis of the events leading up to this contract, together with the fraught years ofits fulfilment, throws a spotlight not only onto the particulars of their relationship but, more importantly, it demonstrates the complex, combined effects of Victorian gender politics and disciplinary professionalization on the evaluation of different kinds of historical writing. Two other significant friendships, as revealed through Freeman's correspondence, provide an important context to what took place between Freeman and Yonge: those with Edith Perronet Thompson, who wrote The History of England for his series, and with the younger historian John Richard Green. ¹ In different ways, Freeman regarded both as his protégés, steering each towards the kind of historical work which he believed they should be achieving. That Freeman ultimately fell out with Green over his style, subject-matter and the popularity of A Short History of the English People emphasizes another theme of this article: that historians' actual male or female identities, and preference for subject matter, did not neatly harmonize with the new gendered construction of professional, 'manly' History urged by Freeman.

Bonnie Smith has persuasively demonstrated the fundamentally gendered nature of the nineteenth-century evolution of the academic discipline of History. History came to be seen as a rarefied, masculine, authoritative form of knowledge, with the archetypical historian envisaged as an unproblematic (male) expert. ² This was accentuated by the elevation of certain categories of history – the political and diplomatic story of the 'public' past – above those concerned with the everyday and 'private' past, a hierarchy which also assumed that the higher branches would be out of the reach of women. Although by the end of the century some exceptional women such as Kate Norgate and, later, Eileen Power, would claim membership of this select club, their positions made little difference to the overall masculine gendering of the discipline: they were exceptions to the rule and most likely to be found labouring inthe muddy fields of Social History. This bald summary implies that the progression was a smooth, sequential process whereby History as a magisterial academic pursuit was divorced from history as a form of belles lettres, but the complicated reality was neither easy nor without anguish for the men (and women) involved in the actual process.My argument is that a focus on the particular intricacies of Freeman's dealings with Yonge, illustrates not merely the unpleasant, underhand methods whereby he belittled her work and undermined her confidence in order to bolster his own dubious authority. It also illuminates the wider manipulation of a discourse which posited that 'proper' history-writing was only achievable within the academy, so that the writings of those who worked outside – both men and women – were downgraded and feminized as flimsy, marketable commodities which 'pure' historians in their citadels scorned. Even in the twenty-first century we are still burdened with the legacy of this artificial division, yet neither Freeman nor Yonge could be neatly accommodated to it. Freeman longed to be an 'insider' and to be revered as a serious academic who could deserve to be bracketed with his friend, the constitutional historian, William Stubbs; but he was also jealous of the financial rewards (and fame?) which commercial history writing could amass for their authors. Yonge, although a 'popular' author, bears little resemblance in her attitudes or her work to other women writers ofbest-selling histories at that time. J.R. Green, as a man with an Oxford education, could have deployed the discourse of History; but Green rebuffed Freeman's patronage and baffled him by flouting the newly-drawn parameters in his championship of a more democratic telling of the nation's story told in a vivid narrative style.

The closer we scan the various types of historical writing in the nineteenth century, the more we apprehend that it was peopled by women as well as men. Joan Thirsk...