Along with sins of omission it is regrettably certain that there must be sins of commission. In individual instances the discovery of further material might result in a somewhat different evaluation of the literary or historic significance of the person concerned. And certain it is that fuller records would reveal force and charm in many a woman presented now by but a meager array of unsuggestive biographical facts.
A final difficulty results from a carelessness as to dates in contemporary records of the period studied, especially with regard to minor people, so that chronology is sometimes led into a dim and confused region of conjecture and approximation.
Women in literary biography
Omission of important persons, mistakes in emphasis, an occasional dubious chronology, are due in part to the general condition of literary biography till long after the middle of the eighteenth century. The details regarding men were often meager and inexact, but much more so was this the case with regard to women. When Ballard began the preliminary studies for his memoirs of learned ladies he found the utmost difficulty in getting any reliable data. He refers to Leland, Bale, Pits, and Tanner as men whose works he had studied for general method. But from none of these could he get direct aid in his own field of research. Various records of Oxford and Cambridge could render but incidental service, Edward Philips's Threatrum Poetarum (1675); John Aubrey's Brief Lives (known as early as 1680); William Winstanley's Lives of the most famous English Poets (1687); Gildon's edition of Langbaine's Dramatic Poets, with a second volume on Poets in 1688, were somewhat more helpful. But in all these put together there were only a few pages devoted to women. John Shirley's Illustrious History of Women (1686) and Juncker's Catalogue of Learned Women (1692) have practically nothing to offer towards a history of learned English women. John Evelyn's Numismata (1697) gives a list of renowned persons "worthy the honour of Medal," in the course of which he mentions some instances of the "Learned, Virtuous and Fair Sex," beginning with Boadicea. Thirteen Englishwomen are in the list, but with only the briefest notice. Giles Jacob's Poetical Register (1724) goes more into detail, but in his two volumes there are only fifteen pages of female biography. Mrs. Cooper includes no woman in her Muse's Library (1737) and Hayward in his The British Muse (1738) makes but one quotation from a woman. John Wilford's Memorials and Characters (1741) was compiled with the idea of presenting examples of piety and virtue. Of the eighty-one women noted only a few come within the category of learned women. Thomas Birch in his Illustrious Persons of Great Britain (1752) includes no women but Queens.
The meager gleanings from the best biographical records before 1752 put stronger emphasis on the importance of George Ballard's Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain as a book of original research, and as the first source of detailed and ordered, and, in general, accurate information concerning the learned women of England.[505]
Of later sources the first is Theophilus Cibber's Lives of the Poets (1753). Rather full accounts of fourteen women are given by Cibber, eight of them being names not included in Ballard's book.[506] The Eminent Ladies (1755) was but a weak compilation of poems with brief and perfunctory comment. In the New and General Biographical Dictionary, published in 1761, the most imposing biographical work of the period, out of more than five thousand names less than twenty English women of letters are listed.
The first book after Ballard to take up female biography exclusively appeared in 1766 and is entitled: Biographium Femineum. The Female Worthies: or, Memoirs of the Most Illustrious Ladies of all Ages and Nations, who have been Eminently distinguished for their Magnanimity, Learning, Genius, Virtue, Piety, and other excellent Endowments, conspicuous in all the various Stations and Relations of Life, public and private. Containing (exclusive of Foreigners) The Lives of above Fourscore British Ladies, who have shone with a peculiar Lustre, and given the noblest proofs of the most exalted Genius, and Superior Worth. Collected from History, and the most approved Biographers, and brought down to the present Times (1766). This book is based on Ballard, Cibber, and Eminent Ladies, but also, unfortunately, accepts Amory as an authority.
In 1779 William Alexander published The History of Women, in two volumes. Mr. Alexander has comparatively little to say about learned women. He wrote, he said, to "amuse and instruct the Fair Sex," hoping thus to lure them from poring over novels and romances. He avoided technical and foreign terms and all citation of authorities as being "perplexing to the sex," and while his book professes to be a sort of propagandist tract for female education, he so abhors female pendantry and so laments fair eyes dimmed by severe and intense study that his book is a distinct reaction from the dignified earlier ideals. Dr. Johnson admits no women into the society of his fifty-two English Poets (1779-81). The Biographia Britannica (1778-93) includes Mary Beale and ten literary women. All of these except Mrs. Delany had appeared in Ballard or Cibber. Mary Hays's Female Biography, published in England in 1803 and in America in 1807, in three volumes, includes celebrated women in "all Ages and Countries." It is based on Ballard and the other authorities already indicated. The uncritical character of the book is indicated by the remark of Miss Hays, "My book is intended for women and not for scholars." Robert Southey, in 1809, in his Specimens of the Later English Poets, begins with the time of James II. Out of two hundred and twenty-three poets represented, seventeen are women. In the thirty-two volumes of Chalmers's General Biographical Dictionary (1812) about thirty English learned ladies are briefly noted. In Campbell's British Poets (1819) there is but one woman, Katherine Philips, among the one hundred and seventy names he gives. Alexander Dyce, in Specimens of British Poetesses, in 1827, gives brief extracts in chronological order from eighty-three authors, but with only the slightest possible apparatus of notes and dates. The purpose of Mr. Dyce was to exhibit the progress of English women in poetry, and his book was planned and partly executed before he happened upon the Eminent Ladies, a reprint of which appeared about 1780. On a perusal of that book he found it so unimportant a precursor as not to interfere with his plan. Over half of Mr. Dyce's work is given to women after 1750. Of the forty-nine before that period, beginning with Juliana Berners and ending with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, very few are represented by more than two or three pages of quotation. Lady Winchilsea, owing doubtless to Wordsworth's recent eulogy of her, is given eleven pages. Mr. Dyce did considerable independent research, for he quoted from a good many poems by women not mentioned by previous authors. Wordsworth had planned a similar work and had made extracts for it, "lucid crystals," he says, "culled from a Parnassian Cave seldom trod."
About the middle of the nineteenth century various books, such as Miss Costello's Memoirs of Eminent Englishwomen (1844), Mrs. Hale's Woman's Record (1853), Jane Williams's Literary Women of England (1861), Julia Kavanagh's English Women of Letters (1863), with other compilations treating especially of late eighteenth-century fiction but recognizing also the works of Mrs. Behn, Mrs. Manley, and Mrs. Haywood, seemed to indicate a recrudescence of interest in the work of women. But in most of these books the treatment is so vague and popular as to be of little use.
Of more value than formal condensed statements in biographical compilations are autobiographies, letters, contemporary allusions, works in prose and verse, prefaces, and early individual biographies. Thanks to a steadily growing interest in the period 1660 to 1800, there has been an accumulation during recent years of special critical editions of early works, of manuscripts published after long years of oblivion, and of reprints of valuable productions. It is in particular to this class of material that the student must go in an attempt to evolve personalities from scattered facts.