Women Writers and the Nation's Past 1790-1860

Mary Spongberg is Dean of Arts and Social Sciences and Professor of History at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. She has published widely on the history of women & feminism, gender, and the body. She is the editor of the Companion to Women’s Historical Writing (2005) and is on the editorial board of Women’s History Review.

• Introduction: Empathetic Historians - English Women Write the Nation’s Past 1. Short Lived Queens: Edmund Burke and the Gender of Whig Historiography2. The Ghost of Marie Antoinette: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Emergence of ‘Empathetic History’3. Jane Austen, Mary Stuart and the History of England4. Queen Caroline as Anne Boleyn: Dissenting Women Writers [Lucy Aikin & Elizabeth Benger] and the ‘Invention’ of Royal Biography 5. The Trial of Queen Caroline: Mary Hays’ Collective Royal Biography as Political Dissent 6. Agnes Strickland’s Mary of Modena: Empathetic History in the Archives7. Stuart History as Empathetic History: Mary Anne Everett Green and the Letters of Henrietta Maria

Mary Spongberg brilliantly reorients standard views of British women’s historical writings, arguing that they are direct responses to Edmund Burke and the French Revolution of the 1790s. If you care about the history of gender, authorship, historiography, and revolutions, you need to read this book.