The History Girls
The History Girls
Charlotte Smith’s History of England and the Politics of Women’s Educational History
This chapter demonstrates how a wide range of women writers of educational history in the Romantic era transformed exemplary and instructive historical frameworks into a new kind of affective historicism, modelled on the sentimentalism of Adam Smith, David Hume, and other eighteenth-century historians but extending beyond individual character portraits into considerations of oppressed groups such as Jews, the Irish, slaves, and indigenous peoples. The chapter also argues that histories such as Charlotte Smith’s History of England (1806) strove to contain the excesses of sentiment associated with traditionally female modes of writing (the sentimental novel, epistles, memoirs) in order to produce a more active, public model of political agency. The chapter thus profitably complicates the role of sentiment in women’s historical writing by showing us how their commitment to an affective core of history did not mean retreating into a private world of sentimental indulgence but precisely the opposite.
Keywords: women’s history, educational history, sentimentalism, affect, exemplarity, political reform, Charlotte Smith, History of England
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