Parenting Young Readers with The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines

In this article, Mary Cowden Clarke’s fictional accounts of the childhood and adolescent years of Shakespeare’s heroines are situated in several contexts: the nineteenth century’s emphasis on characterological criticism; the obsessive focus of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, Thomas De Quincey, and William Hazlitt on the heroines as indicators of the plays’ moral worth; and the efforts of Henrietta Bowdler, Mary Lamb, and Anna Jameson to impact how young women read Shakespeare. This article argues that Clarke empowers young women to read the plays by inventing parent-child relationships whose educational agenda she attributes to Shakespeare, positioning him as father figure and guarantor of the respectability of young women’s solitary reading of the plays.