Reading the Past

Abstract

Recent scholarship has shown the ways in which biographical history could be used by eighteenth-century women writers in order to challenge women’s marginalisation within narratives of the past and contribute to contemporary debates regarding femininity and historiography.1 Lady Rachel Russell (1636–1723), wife of the Whig martyr Lord William Russell who was executed in 1683 for his suspected role in the Rye House Plot to assassinate Charles II and James, Duke of York, provides an ideal case study through which to consider questions of gender and genre. She was frequently discussed by women writers from the 1770s to the 1840s in political histories, poetry, biographies, editions of letters and collective biographies. The posthumous publication of her letters in 1773 provided a more intimate and complex portrait of a woman traditionally celebrated for her symbolic political value as a model of wifely devotion, piety and maternal duty. Subsequent narratives by Mary Scott, Catharine Macaulay, Mary Hays, Matilda Betham, Mary Pilkington, Lucy Aikin and Mary Berry among others retained some of these elements, but at the same time recognised the ways in which Lady Russell complicated ideas of domestic virtue, female heroism and women’s public participation.2 Her life also prompted reflections on sympathy, identification and exemplarity, and the interactions between history, biography and fiction, which were central to debates regarding historical discourse in this period.3