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COPYRIGHT 2003 Boston University
IN HER A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN (1792), MARY Wollstonecraft praises her predecessor, Catharine Macaulay. Wollstonecraft deems Macaulay, who had died the previous year, "the woman of the greatest abilities" ever produced by Great Britain and expresses grief at her passing: "When I first thought of writing these strictures I anticipated Mrs. Macaulay's approbation, with a little of the sanguine ardour, which it has been the business of my life to depress; but soon heard with the sickly qualm of disappointed hope; and the still seriousness of regret--that she was no more!" (1) Angry that there has not been "sufficient respect ... paid to her memory," Wollstonecraft expresses confidence that where Macaulay is concerned, "posterity ... will be more just" (Vindication 105). Recent critics have made much of Wollstonecraft's prediction, particularly because for many years posterity was not just. Those who remembered Macaulay moved from excoriating her to lamenting her having been forgotten, a process that Wollstonecraft also endured.
Wollstonecraft, at least, has found justice. Her complete works were published a decade ago, and it is difficult to open any anthology or encyclopedia of the romantic period without locating extended reference to her life and writings. (2) Macaulay's re-emergence has been more belated, despite the fact that the two women had much in common. (3) Both espoused radical politics. Both published angry responses to Edmund Burke and treatises on women's education. Both led lives that engendered public scandal. Wollstonecraft's is famously filled with daring and disastrous events, tragically cut short, but Macaulay's, which also had its share of infamy, seems in comparison more stable and less pitiful. She wrote a history of England that reached 3,549 pages, and she reached 60 years of age, dying on 22 June 1791 after "a long and very painful illness." (4) Although she was frequently in poor health, she was apparently never poor. After her first husband's death, Macaulay surrounded herself with a band of toadies whose fulsome actions on her behalf are difficult to embrace. Her defying act of love was to marry again, at the age of 47. The surprising choice was William Graham, a 21-year-old surgeon's mate who was the younger brother of her quack doctor. The match was, by all indications, a happy one, but it has proved difficult for subsequent critics to package as a heroic act.
It might be argued that Macaulay's reemergence has been slower than Wollstonecraft's, not only because her life is less easily romanticized, but because she chose genres that have not traveled well across the centuries. Macaulay "lacked but one claim to a central position" in the period, according to Margaret Kirkham: "she was not a novelist." (5) Nor was she a poet. Her historiography--perhaps wrongly--has not been lauded for its literary merit or its formal innovation. Additionally, she did not survive far into the 1790s, a decade during which her political views, though they would have brought her a great deal of trouble, might also have placed her in circles now lionized and scrutinized by scholars of the romantic period. Macaulay was certainly a kind of foremother for Wollstonecraft.
Several important essays have been published considering the immense influence of Macaulay on Wollstonecraft, most examining their respective positions on women's rights. (6) The recent emergence of two formerly unknown letters between Wollstonecraft and Macaulay definitively establishes what many suspected--that the two women were in contact. (7) Wollstonecraft also favorably reviewed one of Macaulay's last works, Letters on Education (1790). (8) These connections suggest Macaulay's importance to the French Revolutionary era, despite the fact that her life did not extend very far into it. But as new evidence illustrates, at the end of her life Macaulay felt her authorial power slipping away and despaired of maintaining an audience. Her later life and writings provide evidence to make sense of how she came down to us (and how she failed to) after her death--information crucial to understanding her authorship and to gaining insight into romantic women writers, aging, and reception.
Macaulay's reaching the age of 60 is rather unremarkable. Although life expectancy remained at around 35 years old until 1800, those who survived childhood stood a good chance of living to old age. (9) Historian Peter Steams defines the onset of "old age" during the period as occurring between 55 and 60; he notes that "Attainment of one's sixties, while impressive, was hardly rare enough to call forth outpourings of awe." (10) In early nineteenth-century England, people over sixty made up approximately seven percent of the population, though it is unclear at what point in history females began to outlive males (Thane 20, 22). We do know that many of Macaulay's female contemporaries lived and wrote much longer than she did--well into their eighth decades. Joanna Baillie, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Harriet Lee, Elizabeth Montagu, Hannah More, Hester Lynch Piozzi, Amelia Opie, and Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), to name a few, lived beyond their 80th years. (11) Yet little work has appeared considering these women in old age, determining whether ageism had an impact on their authorship or in their culture.
Gathering materials to make sense of Macaulay's later life and writings has, until recently, been quite difficult. In 1992 Bridget Hill published the first biography of Macaulay, The Republican Virago. (12) Hill reports that she failed to locate family papers and speculates that any surviving documents were burned in an estate fire in the early twentieth century (Republican I). She concludes that Macaulay's "movements in the last ten years [of her life] are obscure" ("Links" 178). Three years after her biography appeared, Hill describes being "appalled" to learn that a number of Macaulay-related documents had recently been sold at auction ("Links" 178). The tantalizing and frustrating part was that these documents had been sold to an unknown U.S. buyer. The Pierpont Morgan Library subsequently advertised that it had acquired the Catharine Macaulay Papers, consisting of some 190 pieces, including letters to and from John Adams, Horace Walpole, and Mercy Otis Warren, as well as dozens of letters to and from Macaulay's second husband and her only daughter, Catherine. (13) These documents put us in a much better position to understand Macaulay's concerns and challenges during her last years.
Macaulay's final publications were Letters on Education (1790) and Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, on the Revolution in France (1790). (14) She may have planned "to resume ... on a political subject," but Burke's Reflections "persuaded her to devote all her dwindling energies to a spirited reply" (Hill, Republican 128-29). Observations on the Reflections takes its cue from other English responses to the French Revolution, but it can also be seen as a continuation of Macaulay's earlier work. (15) In it, as in other texts, she argues that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was incomplete and warns against the dangers of the national debt (e.g., "the larger the debt, the greater will be the degree of evil" [33]). Her primary aim is to refute Burke and to insist that one cannot rush to judgment where the French Revolution is concerned. She argues for the lack of relevance of history as an interpretive guide in the case:
We cannot venture to establish an opinion on the state of a country not yet recovered from the convulsive struggles which every important revolution must occasion. We can gain no light from history; for history furnishes no example of any government in a large empire, which, in the strictest sense of the word, has secured to the citizen the full enjoyment of his rights. (Observations 42)
Macaulay maintains that, despite the lack of historical precedent, she has great hope for the future of France. In a darker moment, she predicts that if municipalities abuse their power that it will lead to "utter destruction" and if the army gains control, its members will unwittingly become enslaved themselves (Observations 42, 43). She concludes that, regardless of what the French do, the only legitimate government is by "the will of the people" (Observations 45).
When examining the final stages of Macaulay's career, however, the Letters on Education is arguably the more important text. As Jonathan Wordsworth has claimed, it is "the last of [Macaulay's] considered writings on which she hoped that her reputation would be based" (49). (16) Her obituary in the Gentleman's Magazine wrongly lists Letters on Education as her "last publication" (590). The Letters on Education is a bizarre and fascinating book, divided into three parts of 25, 13, and 38 letters respectively. More successfully executed than her previous epistolary work, History of England From the Revolution to the Present Time In a Series of Letters to a Friend (1778), the Letters on Education uses a fictional correspondent, Hortensia, as its addressee. Although it employs a conventional framework, the text is jarringly disconnected and seems rushed throughout its nearly 500 pages. It contains not just recommendations for education but serves as a fragmented how-to guide for contemporary life.
Letters on Education features a greater number of personal asides than is typical of Macaulay's earlier works. (17) When discussing the care of infants, she digresses to include her philosophy of talking about oneself:
I would rather have had an American savage for my nurse, than those to whose care my infancy was committed. Many a time has my pen been wrested from my hand by the tyranny of a headach; many a time have I deplored the influence of early habits; perceived mistakes which it was impossible for me to remedy, and lamented infirmities acquired before I enjoyed the privilege of a voluntary agency. But away with this egotism! one can never have a worse subject...
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