I think, contradictory as it may seem, she had the truest and deepest religious feeling I have ever known.... To the last, her religious feeling—in the sense of good working out of evil, of a Supreme Wisdom penetrating and moulding the whole universe; the natural subordination of intellect to purposes of good, even were these merely the small purposes of social or domestic life;—all this, which supposes something without ourselves, higher, and deeper, and better than ourselves, and more permanent, that is, eternal, was so strong in her—so strong that one could scarcely explain her (apparently only) losing sight of that Supreme Wisdom and Goodness in her later years.
Florence Nightingale: Letter to Maria Weston Chapman, published in the latter’s ‘Memorials of Harriet Martineau.’
“The Lady Oracle.”
Her form and features were repellent; she was the Lady Oracle in all things, and from her throne, the sofa, pronounced verdicts from which there was no appeal. Hers was a hard nature: it had neither geniality, indulgence nor mercy. Always a physical sufferer, so deaf that a trumpet was constantly at her ear; plain of person—a drawback of which she could not have been unconscious—and awkward of form; she was entirely without the gifts that attract man to woman: even her friendships seem to have been cut out of stone; she may have excited admiration, indeed, but from the affections that render woman only a little lower than the angels she was entirely estranged.
S. C. Hall: ‘Retrospect of a Long Life.’ New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1883.
Hawthorne’s account of Miss Martineau, 1854.
I saw Miss Martineau a few weeks since. She is a large, robust, elderly woman, and plainly dressed, but withal, she has so kind, cheerful and intelligent a face that she is pleasanter to look at than most beauties. Her hair is of a decided gray, and she does not shrink from calling herself old.... All her talk was about herself and her affairs; but it did not seem like egotism, because it was so cheerful and free from morbidness. And this woman is an Atheist; and thinks that the principle of life will become extinct when her body is laid in the grave! I will not think so, were it only for her own sake. What! only a few weeds to spring out of her mortality, instead of her intellect and sympathies flowering and fruiting forever!
Nathaniel Hawthorne: ‘Passages from the English Note-Books.’