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Gender, Genre, and Victorian Historical Writing (review)

Rohan Maitzen charts new territory in Gender, Genre, and Victorian Historical Writing, introducing readers to works of a range of historians little considered by Victorianists trained in literary study. Addressing the issue of how Victorians broached the thorny issue ofwhat constituted historical significance, she argues that women writers — a group that includes not only George Eliot, but also Agnes Strickland, Elizabeth Stone, Frances Palgrave, Annie Forbes Bush, Julia Kavanagh, and Hannah Lawrence, among others — capitalized on instabilities in existing models of history to "broaden the range of meanings that could be articulated" (xiii). Among the book's considerable virtues is Maitzen's consistent attention to the relationship of these writers, and the issues raised by their approaches to historiography to a more canonical and male-dominated tradition represented most visibly by Macaulay, Carlyle, and Froude. Far from arguing that women's historical writing constitutes a separate tradition, Maitzen instead uncovers a range of ways that both amateur and professional historiographers grappled with the vexed Victorian idea (1) of feminine "influence." While in her introduction Maitzen calls attention to a "new category of facts" about women that emerged in the nineteenth century and altered the landscape of historical writing, her subsequent chapters appeal to domestic ideology more generally. Chapter One, "The Victorian Discourse of History: Problems of Gender and Genre," sets the stage for understanding conflicts within historiography that underwrote the histories produced by women, and provides a convincing overview of how Victorian historians and critics advocating new criteria for history writing "almost certainly without meaning to" enabled women writers to enter the field (24). I found her discussion of the "valorization of details" as both aesthetic