Biography Martineau, Harriet: Biographical Sketches. v1, 31 Jan 2016

[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, ability to explain complicated issues, and ability to 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, and 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.

Biographical Sketches consists of 46 memoirs of famous people (including Charlotte Brontë) written as articles in the Daily News from 1852 to the 1860s. They give a fascinating picture of life and opinions in that time, with some contrasts and similarities to those in our own time.

The text source was the djvu.txt version of the American 1869 Author's edition from the Internet Archive, checked against the pdf version. This ebook is not a facsimile of the original edition: it does not contain the original edition's
- wide margins on each page into which is inserted brief statements identifiying the accompanying text,
- spaces to the right of left double quotes and left of right double quotes etcetera,
- blank pages or pages containing only headings between sections, and
- many advertisements of other books.

Footnotes are numbered and collected together as end notes, with one annotation identified by a letter and square brackets. A link back to the table of contents has been placed after each sketch.

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