Author: Martineau, Harriet
Biography:
MARTINEAU, Harriet (1802-76: ODNB)
An independent thinker and influential writer, Harriet Martineau seems to have been shaped as much by the disadvantages and adversities she encountered as by her talents and a superior education. She was born and raised in Norwich, Norfolk, the sixth of eight children in the nonconformist Unitarian family of Elizabeth (Rankin) and Thomas Martineau. She had her early lessons in French, Latin, and mathematics at home from her older siblings but attended a Unitarian girls’ school 1813-15 and a boarding school in Bristol 1818-19. Increasingly hard of hearing, she was almost deaf by the time she was twenty and used an ear trumpet for the rest of her life. Her father, a cloth manufacturer, suffered financial reverses and died in 1826; the business failed in 1829. Harriet’s engagement to a young divinity student ended after he was committed to a mental asylum and died in 1827. Precluded by her disability from other occupations, and having had some early success as an essayist for the Unitarian Monthly Repository, she turned to writing for a living. She wrote on serious social, historical, and economic issues in various periodicals, often collecting a series of articles for publication in book form under her own name. She also produced biographies, accounts of her travels, and analysis of issues of the day. Among her best known--in some cases controversial--works are Illustrations of Political Economy (1832), Society in America (1837), Life in the Sickroom (1844), Household Education (1849), History of the Thirty Years’ Peace (1850), and her Autobiography, which was written in 1855 when she thought she did not have much time to live and published in 1877 after her death. She was always a strong advocate of education for women and a fierce opponent of slavery, but other views evolved over time, as she abandoned religion and espoused the medical powers of mesmerism. Martineau was such a prolific and popular writer that she was able in 1832 to move with her mother to London and in 1845 to have a house built for herself at Ambleside in the Lake District, where she extended hospitality to family, friends, and literary visitors, and where she died on 27 June 1876. She was buried in the family plot at the Key Hill Cemetery, Birmingham. (ODNB 2 Apr. 2023; Orlando 2 Apr. 2023; findmypast.com 2 Apr. 2023)