Biography Martineau, Harriet: Harriet Martineau's Autobiography. v1, 7 Oct 2015

[AlexBell]

Harriet Martineau was born in 1802, the sixth of eight children, to a Unitarian family of Huguenot background. Despite being deaf for most of her life she was a prolific author and traveller, abolitionist, feminist, sociologist, and political commentator, and one of the first woman journalists. Her clear and simple style and ability to explain complicated issues and present her ideas in the form of stories gave her a wide readership and made her wealthy; her first major series outsold Charles Dickens' books. She was incapacitated by illness from 1839-44, became very ill again in 1855 and wrote her Autobiography. It was not published until her death in 1876 after she had written many of her major works.

Maria Weston Chapman was an American abolitionist and close ally of William Lloyd Garrison. She met Harriet Martineau during her visit to the US in 1834-6, and they became close friends. When Miss Martineau was writing her autobiography and expecting to die at any time she asked Mrs Chapman to complete it.

The Autobiography was finished by Miss Martineau in 1855, and put aside to be published after her death. The Memorials by Mrs Chapman cover Miss Martineau's whole life, and include an anonymous obituary written by her for the Daily News shortly before her death. The two books were combined and printed in 1877 in a three volume edition by Smith, Elder & Co. in London, and a two volume edition by James R. Osgood & Co. in Boston. The British and American editions differ somewhat, mainly in layout and headings.

The source text was taken from the Online Library of Liberty, and checked against the Smith, Elder edition. I have silently corrected typos and spelling mistakes, set off documents and quotations as blockquotes, collected foot notes together as end notes, put the names of ships, books, journals, and newspapers in italics, and made changes to spelling, punctuation, and hyphenation using oxforddictionaries.com. Annotations by Mrs Chapman are in square brackets; annotations by me are in curly brackets.

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