| This project traces shifting modes of writing the history of women from 1770 to 1870, in order to argue that women's history participates in the definition and gendering of both "modernity" and modern historiography. As a case study of generic tensions in women's history, I explore the constitutive yet conflicted relations between representations of gender in historical fiction and women's history. My evidence includes fiction, serial biography, philosophical histories, didactic literature, and periodical articles.; Chapter One shows that The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1771; 1773; 1779) by John Millar identifies modernity with the writing of women's history, thereby historicizing the "polite historian." Chapter Two demonstrates how Russell's enlargement of Essay on the Characters, Manners, and Genius of Women (1773) by Antoine Thomas and The History of Women (1779) by William Alexander redefine Millar's approach in pedagogical terms, aiming to reform modernity through readers' subjectivities.; Chapter Three investigates women's history during the Napoleonic Wars through Memoirs of the Life of Agrippina (1804) by Elizabeth Hamilton and The History of Women in All Ages and Nations (1808) by Christoph Meiners. Both works take as their goal the conservation of femininity against revolutionary upheaval; yet their Enlightenment project was perceived as an inadequate response to the crisis. Chapter Four turns to the transition between rationalist and "romantic" historiography with The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) by Sir Walter Scott. Scott appropriates the categories of women's history to map a failed transition from feudalism to commercial modernity, while helping to establish the Victorian "angel in the house" as a historical, modern figure.; Chapter Five analyzes Victorian popular women's history, showing that while the Victorian woman signifies an explicitly Christian modernity, these texts also locate womanhood's apotheosis outside of history itself. Chapter Six treats The History of Henry Esmond (1852) by W. M. Thackeray, which appropriates the anti-historical teleology of Victorian women's history, only to challenge its ability to generate a modern historical consciousness. I end with a coda on changes in women's history and the historical novel in the later nineteenth century, briefly exemplified by George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-72). |
