Access to the full content is only available to members of institutions that have purchased access. If you belong to such an institution, please log in or find out more about how to order.


Cover of The Collected Letters of Harriet Martineau

The Collected Letters of Harriet Martineau

Edited by Deborah Anna Logan

  • Published: 1 Mar 2007
  • DOI: 10.4324/9781851968046
  • Set ISBN: 9781851968046

Set Contents

Letters 1845-1855


The period marked by Harriet Martineau’s shift from confinement on the ‘prone-couch’ of her second-storey Tynemouth sickroom to ranging across the peaks of Lake District mountains and climbing the Great Pyramid is consistent with the general pattern of her health and invalidism. As a young woman with a history of chronic ailments stretching back to infancy, Martineau covered over 500 miles on a Scottish walking tour with her brother James, returning home to a comparatively inert lifestyle further tempered by a series of family tragedies and minor health crises. A decade later, the vigour she exhibited during her American tour was that of a hardy pioneer, flying over ‘corduroy roads’ as exuberantly as any frontierwoman; but within three years, she was rendered virtually immobile for nearly six years with uterine tumour. When she got up from her prone-couch, she confidently ordered that it be given away, as she had no further use for it. The period from 1845 through 1855 is remarkable for Martineau’s unprecedented degree of health, energy and well-being (‘I am now certain that I never knew before what health was’), prompting several questions – first and foremost, how can such a transformation be accounted for? As the result of a compelling coincidence of factors, she was convinced – for a time, at least – that all credit for her miraculous recovery was due to mesmerism, which seemed to cure her when Victorian medical science could not. How could a woman of such formidable intellect – second to few, arguably, in the nineteenth-century, a woman whose belief in the superiority of science was in place long before her work on Comte’s Positive Philosophy – advocate the healing powers of a pseudo-science? To what degree was her ‘cure’ circumstantial or serendipitous, real or imaginary? Although she asserts that human will alone cannot overcome illness, Martineau’s transformation from a fainting invalid to a ‘stout, brown farmwife’ who hikes five miles before breakfast, while maintaining her role as an intellectual force in the Victorian press, compellingly attests to an irrepressible energy extending far beyond any literary ‘need of utterance’.

Volume Contents

  • content locked
    Front Matter
  • content locked
    Introduction By Deborah Anna Logan
  • Letters 1845–1855 By Harriet Martineau
    • content locked
      1845
    • content locked
      1846
    • content locked
      1847
    • content locked
      1848
    • content locked
      1849
    • content locked
      1850
    • content locked
      1851
    • content locked
      1852
    • content locked
      1853
    • content locked
      1854
    • content locked
      1855
  • content locked
    Back Matter