1 Catharine Macaulay : The ‘Female Historian

1It would be difficult to have a meaningful conversation about women historians of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries without mentioning Catharine Macaulay (1731–1791). She has been called « the most widely admired and most controversial woman intellectual of her time » and « the first English woman historian »1. The author of an eight-volume History of England, Macaulay published a work of more than 3500 pages over the course of twenty years, from 1763 to 1783. Susan Staves writes, « It could be argued that no book written by a woman between 1660 and 1789 was more impressive or more influential » than Macaulay's History of England2. Macaulay's history focused on the period from the accession of King James I to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Today it is considered « the first comprehensive, anti-royalist work of its time » as well as « the first history of the eighteenth century with an avowed republican outlook »3. Some of us may be skeptical of calling Macaulay the first English woman historian, but is clear that both her history writing and her great fame were groundbreaking.

4 Devoney Looser, British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670–1820, Baltimore, Johns Hopki (...)

5 Karen O'Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 2009 (...)

6 The late Bridget Hill published her biography of Macaulay, The Republican Virago, in 1992. Shortly (...)

2I have previously written about Macaulay in the context of British women's history writing and of British women writers in old age4. In this essay, I investigate the ways in which Macaulay labeled herself and was labeled by her peers as a « female historian » and what we might learn from that branding. Although speaking of Macaulay as a « female historian » might seem an obvious thing to us today, the term was not in wide circulation in the first half of the eighteenth century, as I argue. Indeed, it appears that Macaulay was among the first authors to be referred to as a « female historian » in eighteenth-century Great Britain. The phrase « female historian » preceded Macaulay's spectacular career, but it was not regularly used in the sense we employ it today. We ought to do more to consider the ways in which Macaulay's fame changed how women historians before and after her were labeled, perceived, and treated. We must seek more reasons why, for a time, there were so few women whose careers followed in Macaulay's wake. As Karen O'Brien explains, Catharine Macaulay « remained almost a unique figure for the rest of the century as a writer of grand narrative history »5. Several scholars have offered us theories as to why, but there remains a great deal yet to interpret and assess both in newly discovered letters and in newly available full-text databases6. It is this context of labeling Macaulay, and of further examining her position as a trailblazer in a male-dominated genre, that I work to reconstruct here.

7 Mary Hays, Female Biography. Or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of All Ages and Count (...)

8 B. Hill, Republican Virago, op. cit., p. 23.

9 On Macaulay for Parliament, see George Colman, Prose on Several Occasions, 3 vols, London, 1787, II (...)

3In her own day, Catharine Macaulay was an international celebrity on a scale we have yet to grasp fully. Just decades after her death, however, she had become little more than a footnote to history and history writing. During her lifetime, she was famous for her detailed, popular, and contentious history of England, as well as for her political activism among the supporters of John Wilkes and the so-called Real Whigs. From the 1760s to the 1790s, Macaulay was beloved, feared, worshipped, and detested. As Mary Hays would later put it, « A female historian, by its singularity, could not fail to excite attention : she [Macaulay] seemed to have stepped out of the province of her sex ; curiosity was sharpened, and malevolence provoked. The author was attacked by petty and personal scurrilities, to which it was believed her sex would render her vulnerable »7. Throughout the 1760s and 1770s, Macaulay's name appears regularly in newspapers, with reports on her health, where she has dined, and who has visited her. It was said that Macaulay's portrait was sold on every print seller's counter ; her figure was made into porcelain ; and she was ultimately represented in a life-sized coloured wax figure8. Macaulay was mentioned in jest as a future candidate for Parliament, as the next royal historiographer, or as the person who could best impersonate the Muse of History in an imaginary pageant9. She corresponded with the notable literary and political figures of her day in England, France, and America. Always controversial, Macaulay became infamous for allowing herself once to be worshipped like a queen by male admirers, despite her republican political views. What most injured Macaulay's reputation, however, was her second marriage, at age 47, to William Graham, a 21-year-old surgeon's mate whose famous brother, James Graham, had been her quack doctor.