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Harriet Martineau's Autobiography

Harriet Martineau's Autobiography

BiographyMemoir
Pages
1005
Published
1877
Language
English

Synopsis

Harriet Martineau wrote her autobiography in 1855, believing her life was nearing its end, completing it in just three months and holding its publication until after her death. It finally appeared in 1877.

She recounts her path through the reform movements of the mid-nineteenth century: becoming a reviewer and journalist in the 1820s after her family's fortune collapsed, publishing the best-selling Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-34) that made her name by the age of thirty, overcoming a severe hearing disability to become a literary lion of London society, touring the United States to write two founding texts of sociology, exploring North Africa and the Middle East, and writing editorials on slavery for the London Daily News through the American Civil War.

Composed as a hybrid of memoir and social commentary, it stands as one of the defining self-portraits of a Victorian woman writer working, unapologetically, in public life.

Prose complexity
7/10

Vibe

ReflectiveInspiringThought-Provoking

Genres

Biography Memoir

About the author

H
Harriet Martineau

Harriet Martineau was an English social theorist often seen as the first female sociologist. She wrote from a sociological, holistic, religious and feminine angle, translated works by Auguste Comte, and, rarely for a woman writer at the time, earned enough to support herself. The young Princess Victoria enjoyed her work and invited her to her 1838 coronation. Martineau advised "a focus on all [society's] aspects, including key political, religious, and social institutions". She applied thorough...