The woman and the hour : Harriet Martineau and Victorian ideologies / Caroline Roberts.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Roberts situates Martineau's controversial writing in its historical context and presents a sophisticated scholarly analysis of their predominantly hostile reception.

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CHOICE Review

In taking on this Victorian social critic, novelist, popularizer, and historian, Roberts (Univ. of Toronto) distinguishes herself from previous scholars by eschewing biographical analysis in favor of historicized interpretations of Martineau's most controversial texts. The author divides the main body of the book into seven chapters on individual works and their contemporary reception, beginning with Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-34) and concluding with Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development (1851), which Martineau coauthored with Henry George Atkinson. Martineau had wide-ranging interests--mesmerism, phrenology, historiography, atheism, literary realism--and Roberts touches on these subjects. The book draws from Foucault, but the prose is jargon-free. Roberts is a better interpreter of Martineau's nonfiction prose than of her fiction, and at times the reception histories overwhelm the texts themselves. Moreover, the sheer number of topics under discussion appears to stretch Roberts' own resources, most seriously in the chapter on Martineau's historical novel about Toussaint L'Ouverture, The Hour and the Man (1840): taking Georg Lukacs and Jim Reilly as her theoretical odd couple, Roberts misses nearly all of the key (and directly relevant) scholarship on historical fiction published in recent decades. For graduate collections. M. E. Burstein SUNY College at Brockport