Biographies of women [History is Awesome!]

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I just finished Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë (published 1857) and am wondering -- is this the first major biography of a woman in English?

I can't think of any earlier ones. Memoirs and autobiographies, yes (especially by religious women), but no biographies. Although surely there were hagiographies, and Elizabeth I must have been the subject of a biography before the mid-1900s...

Maybe it's the first biography of a woman by a woman -- although certainly not the first biography by a woman, since I think it was fairly common, at least by the 19th century, for a surviving wife to write up her husband's life and edit his letters for publication.

Am I missing something obvious?

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There are 29 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

Didn't Gaskell write North and South?

Yes! Also Cranford and Wives and Daughters and a lot of others. I definitely want to read her novels now that I've enjoyed The Life of Charlotte Brontë so much.

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I didn't realize she wrote other things. I definitely want to read more by her.

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Surely there are previous biographies written about female monarchs? Elizabeth I? Also, would biographies of saints of the female variety be more extant in early medieval writings? Just thinking out loud here.

That makes sense to me -- I just can't think of any particular ones.

I also thought of another major category -- slave narratives. Of course those were all framed as autobiography, but many were actually written by another person (often a white abolitionist woman) when the former slave didn't have sufficient literacy to write her own story. In many of those cases the writer is thought to have altered the exact words for one reason or another. But I still wouldn't class that as 'biography' -- more like 'filtered autobiography.'

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I might be wrong but the first slave narrative about/by a woman that I can recall was of Mary Prince, so the "captivity narratives" of white captives of indigenous people in the Americas and before that captives of Barbary pirates would have been earlier.

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Hm, Mary Prince's was 1831. My edition says it's the first woman's slave narrative published in Britain, so yeah, there must definitely be captivity narratives that predate it. OTOH those are all still first-person narratives.

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They're almost all (?all?) presented as autobiography, yes, although I suspect neatly separated categories autobiography/biography/roman-a-clef/fiction don't rly exist before the 19th century.

I also have a nagging feeling that there is ONE publication, framed as what we would now call a biography, in English, of a woman who was enslaved by Barbary pirates and became powerful at one of the Muslim courts (17th/18th century?). I might be wrong though. It's been a while since I looked at that subject in general.

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I suspect neatly separated categories autobiography/biography/roman-a-clef/fiction don't rly exist before the 19th century

Yeah, that's part of the problem -- strictly defining the category seems to be important even for answering my casually-asked question! Now I want to read a History of the Biography somewhere.

a woman who was enslaved by Barbary pirates and became powerful at one of the Muslim courts (17th/18th century?)

That is reminding me of ... a bodice-ripper by Bertrice Small. Hmm.

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This happened to the Empress Josephine's cousin, who reputedly ended up as the Dowager Sultana.

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Aimée du Buc de Rivéry? I know the story but I'm not sure there's any/much historical evidence after she went missing at sea as a child?

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The evidence of a Western - specifically French - influence on Mehmet II is pretty strong on the evidence of the Dolmabahce palace (can't do diacritics, sorry) but where it came from, who knows?

But she was returning from boarding school, so hardly a child.

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Hee, I don't read bodice rippers but there are too many historical women for me to remember which one might have had a biography in English. In the last week I've discussed these three for starters:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roxelana

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kösem_Sultan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juliana_Dias_da_Costa

It does sound as if you need a history of biography, yes.

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I don't really recommend that bodice ripper, to be frank. However, I clearly need to be reading your journal. *adds*

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In fairness I should point out that two of the three weren't on my journal (or online at all, heh) and I'm just shamelessly using Black History Month to clear out my bookmarks. My journal is more usually a dull mix of nature photos, urban walks, and occasional leftie political ranting. Defriend at will, obviously. :-D

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Yes, hundreds, possibly thousands, of "lives" of women Christian saints exist. One of the first books Caxton printed in English was a translation of the Golden Legend. Although whether the OP would consider those to be "major biographies" is another matter.

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Godwin's Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft, maybe? That's 1798, and it's really a biography proper.

Aha! Thank you. That's exactly the sort of thing I was thinking of. I see Godwin was her husband -- that sounds typical, from what I've read (the surviving spouse or another close relative would be the one to write the biography).

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I'm not up on official classifications of biographies as opposed to other types of history books, but would Alison Weir's works qualify? She's written a bunch about Elizabeth I and related people.

This is by the C21st a well-established genre, within which Weir is writing.

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Not exactly -- I was asking whether there was anything before Gaskell's life of Brontë, which was published in 1857. It was really a question about the history of biography!

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This would be more or less contemporaneous with Agnes Strickland's multivolume lives of the queens and princesses of England and Scotland, from documentary sources, which were coming out during the 1850s.

Have a feeling that there were various narratives of e.g. Hannah Snell, the female soldier of the C18th, and similar, but that's probably more at the tabloid sensational end of things.

On a similarly sensationalist theme, I presume there were broadsheet biographies of women criminals (especially to be sold when they were executed) exactly like the men, although many of those were framed as autobiographies or "last words" (printed the day before, clearly...).

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Oh, thank you! Agnes Strickland definitely beats Mrs. Gaskell to being the first female biographer of a female subject, then.

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I'm also going to myself, 'surely the Bluestockings must have written about each other?' but maybe that was more along the lines of 'My reminiscences of Mrs Montagu', though I have a vague recollection that at least some of them had posthumous publications of their letters (probably expurgated of malicious gossip and heavy on the big thinkery). Don't have my Bluestocking sources to hand at the moment.

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posthumous publications of their letters (probably expurgated of malicious gossip and heavy on the big thinkery)

That makes sense. And surely some of the collected letters had biographical commentary.

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Mary Lacy, the female shipwright but that's autobiography so doesn't count for these purposes.

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Thank you for mentioning her, anyway -- that sounds very interesting!

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And, in the same vein, you may enjoy A Lady's Captivity Among Chinese Pirates (the lady in question was French, and I rather got the impression that she felt that while naturally being captured by Chinese pirates was somewhat alarming, thank God they could cook! Unlike the people on the British liners she'd been travelling by.

Translated from the French by Amelia B. Edwards, a near-contemporary.

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December