| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 100.3

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| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 100.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews

The Hour and the Woman Harriet Martineau's "Somewhat Remarkable" Life

By Deborah Anna Logan

(De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002. Pp. xi, 332. Appendix, notes, works cited, index. $42.00.)

Many Americans know Harriet Martineau (1802–1876) because of the published account of her travels in the United States (including Kentucky and Michigan) during the mid-1830s. In The Hour and the Woman, Western Kentucky University associate professor of English Deborah Logan explores Martineau's journey from the deaf daughter of an English Unitarian textile manufacturer into a self-supporting writer and activist whose works and ideas spanned the Atlantic. The author's discussion of Martineau's involvement in the American antislavery movement, and of her interactions with such well-known figures as Charlotte Brontë, Florence Nightingale, and Margaret Fuller, leaves no doubt in the reader's mind that Martineau indeed led a remarkable life. The determined efforts of contemporary reviewers—so well documented in this work—to dismiss Martineau's work as the ramblings of a deaf spinster with limited education further testify to the political threat she posed in her time. Why, then, has she been overlooked for so long by literary and social historians? It is, Logan contends, because her inter-disciplinarity and nonconformity made it impossible for earlier critics and scholars to fit her into a neat category. This fascinating study goes a long way in establishing Martineau's significance as an influence on Victorian culture on both sides of the Atlantic.

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