Selected Letters

This is the first wide-ranging selection of letters by Harriet Martineau to a variety of correspondents, most of them major figures in Victorian literary and political history. Controversial because of Harriet Martineau’s lifelong resistance to the future publication of her private correspondence, the letters reveal her outspoken views on contemporary writers, the working classes, women, political change, illness, mesmerism, and her own writing. Her opinions on literary realism and George Eliot, biography and Mrs Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronte , and Elizabeth Barrett’s contribution to modern poetry are among the topics aired in these unashamedly forthright, often bigoted and opinionated letters. Yet in her Autobiography , Harriet Martineau agrees with her friends that it would be rather an advantage to her than otherwise, to be known by her private letters. They certainly enable the modern reader to enter into the spirit of Victorian social and literary controversy.