Biographies of women

[dorothean]

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?

Comments

[legionseagle]

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.