Regendering history: Women and the genres of history, 1760--1830 (Catherine Macaulay, Helen Maria Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Porter, Mary Shelley)

The histories of England and of the classical period composed by late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women were ambitious intellectual projects that aimed to transform how history might be understood through a diverse range of narrative modes. In effect, through their history writing, these women sought to regender history. The differing modes of historiography in these works reveal that gender, or the particular cultural and historical location of these emergent women writers, inflects their conception of the past. Through a historiography mediated by sentiment and informed by cultural expectations of women, these authors create a civic forum on political issues. By shaping modern historiography, exploring the intersection of gender with literary genres, and investigating women's history, Catherine Macaulay's History of England (1763–1783), Helen Maria Williams' Letters from France (1792–1827), Mary Wollstonecraft's Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794), Jane Porter's The Scottish Chiefs (1810), and Mary Shelley's Valperga (1823) establish a new model for the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century female intellectual, one that situates her sphere of influence as public, political discourse.; Through her participation in the almost exclusively male field of history writing in the eighteenth century and through her reconceptualization of the notion of sympathy to promote her republican ideals, Macaulay not only shapes modern historiography but also participates in political discussions concerning the future of England. Within histories that broaden and complicate the generic forms of history writing, Williams puts forward the belief that sensibility can be a politically transformative force, which strengthens her radical project, while Wollstonecraft attempts to insert women into the debate concerning Enlightenment rights, seeking to change how women thought of themselves as historical subjects. In disengaging genre and gender, the histories by Williams and Wollstonecraft pave the way for the historical fiction of Jane Porter and Mary Shelley, whose novels openly unite history and imagination to envision politically viable communities. Thus, it is through these striking historiographies that these authors espouse their political viewpoints and open the civic sphere more fully to women writers.