Reconstructing W.H. Allen's 'Eminent Women': The Cultural Formation of a Late Victorian Biography Series

Abstract

Typically, a biography would be introduced as 'the most recent of the XXX series', but on occasions the primacy of the series over the volume was made very clear, both in format and content. [...]the 1886 Liverpool Mercury review of David Hannay's Admiral Blake in the English Worthies series has as its heading 'English Worthies, edited by Andrew Lang.', with 'Admiral Blake, by David Hannay. [...]he seems to have had a particular affinity with women: a semi-invalid for much of his life and a bachelor until he died, he engaged in long epistolary exchanges with a number of Poe's female friends in the 1870s,31 and was a strong supporter of the enfranchisement of women (as well as supporting a number of other progressive causes such as compulsory education, the abolition of capital punishment and the disestablishment of the Irish Church).32 Given this kind of cultural positioning crossing popular and serious literature, and particularly given his championing of Poe, the idea of a literary entrepreneur like Ingram editing a series on eminent women would have seemed attractive to a publisher struggling to make an impact in the market. [...]power lay almost entirely with the publisher and his editor. [...]while the number of books that were biographical collections about women had been growing steadily since the mid-century,73 the market for them was complex. [...]Juliette Atkinson, quoting Samuel Smiles to the effect that 'we do not often hear of great women, as we do of great men.