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Harriet Martineau's Irish romance: The Lady Oracle and the Young Repealer

Advancing Gender Research from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Centuries

ISBN: 978-1-84855-026-1, eISBN: 978-1-84855-027-8

Publication date: 30 August 2008

Abstract

Harriet Martineau's writing about Ireland spanned over 35 years of her career and, as a topic of socio-cultural, political, and economic interest, was second only to her prolific writing on the United States. Through the contexts of her writing (fiction and nonfiction) and of 19th-century Anglo-Irish history, this discussion examines a singular episode in Martineau's life and work, one that highlights her complex views on Ireland and challenges her assumptions about the relentless conundrum popularly termed “the Irish Question.” Martineau's brief epistolary relationship with the young repeal advocate, Mr. Langtrey, helped shape and clarify her thinking about Anglo-Irish relations; subsequently, she produced some of the best writing of her career as a traveling correspondent for the Daily News, reporting on post-famine Ireland. Although on a par with her better-known sociological analyses of America, Martineau's writing about 19th-century Ireland remains comparatively unexamined by scholars of the British Empire, of Victorian intellectual and social history, and of the enduringly contentious Anglo-Irish relations.

Citation

Logan, D.A. (2008), "Harriet Martineau's Irish romance: The Lady Oracle and the Young Repealer", Texler Segal, M. and Demos, V. (Ed.) Advancing Gender Research from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Centuries (Advances in Gender Research, Vol. 12), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 23-41. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1529-2126(08)12003-3

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2008, Emerald Group Publishing Limited