The Collective Biographies of Women: Preface (original) (raw)

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  Joan of Arc as Victorian heroine: as if praying before battle with cross-like sword, crinoline and corset beneath armor.
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  Queen Elizabeth I tends to get better or worse press in comparison to her Catholic sister Mary or her captive, Mary Queen of Scots; Victorians begin to praise a great monarch who inspired a golden age.
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  Lady Jane Grey, queen regnant of England for less than two weeks, too little time to become a blameworthy ruling woman.
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  Pocahontas alone represents Native Americans in these books but she joins others as a leader's daughter, a Christian convert, and a rescuer of a man.
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  Lady Rachel Russell, now admired for letters and memoirs, served as clerk in her husband's trial for treason against Charles II; Victorians admired her wifely heroism.
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  [Hannah More](featured%3Fid=HANNAH MORE.html), bluestocking and eminent conservative educator, by any lights was a model for nineteenth-century women writers.
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  Caroline Herschel, astronomer, in some ways shares features with Mary Somerville.
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  Madame Roland in hopeful times; a heroine of the French Revolution admired in England for her sufferings in prison and the respect she earned from learned men.
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  Madame de Staël, preeminent woman writer, heroine of the French Revolution.
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  Frances Trollope, prolific novelist and travel writer, was the venturesome provider for her husband and sons, including Anthony, also a novelist.
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  Mary Somerville, mathematician, astronomer, and renowned science writer, one of the first women elected to the Royal Astronomical Society.
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  Elizabeth Fry, Quaker minister and prison reformer, defined the role of female philanthropist in the early nineteenth century.
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  Ann Hasseltine Judson, the most famous of the first American women missionaries to the "East," an eloquent writer and martyr.
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  Grace Darling, lighthouse keeper's daughter, became a celebrity for rescuing survivors of a shipwreck.
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  Charlotte Brontë, the famous novelist, became a Victorian ideal of self-sacrificing yet triumphant feminine genius, in contrast with sister Emily.
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  Queen Victoria reigns over Victorian collections of women's lives much as she represented an empire and an era.
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  Florence Nightingale defined the nursing profession and captured the public imagination.
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  Jenny Lind, world-famous as "the Swedish Nightingale," opera singer who rose from the people.
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  Frances Power Cobbe, incisive social critic, forerunner of lesbian feminist animal-rights activists today.
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  Adelaide Procter, renowned Victorian poet, daughter of the writer "Barry Cornwall"; a Catholic convert who died young.
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  Sister Dora emulated Florence Nightingale as a nurse-administrator but in an industrial hospital near Birmingham.