ABSTRACT
Between 1826 and 1831 Jameson had written three 'histories' of women: The Beauties of the Court of King Charles the Second (1828?) which has a complex publishing history.3 The Loves of the Poets (1829); and Memoirs of the Celebrated Female Sovereigns (1831). It was this culminating work on the female sovereigns, this 'important and troublesome' experience which led Jameson to begin formulating theories on the meaning of history, theorising which takes definitive shape in the Introduction to her next published work, Characteristics of Women (1832). The proximity of the two texts is in fact so close that at some stage she must have been working on both simultaneously,4 and her struggles with the Sovereigns produced a later critical reaction which
emerges in the dialogue preface to Characteristics which Jameson wrote after the main body of that work had been completed in July 1831 (Thomas, Love and Work, 3; Kemble, Records, 427). Thus on the topic of history she writes:
The riddle with which history confronts her rests in its prejudiced, partial, disparaging accounts of women. The only 'illustrious' women are also infamous. Jameson goes on to write 'there occur certain chasms which it is difficult to supply: and hence inconsistencies we have no means of reconciling' (Characteristics of Women, I: 19). Jameson here acknowledges a silence similar to that which Tom Conley, in the introduction to his translation of Michel de Certeau's The Writing of History, contends that today's historiographers take up, the very chasms 'formerly consigned to silence or set outside the frame of given disciplines' (Conley, xi). Jameson, however, like other nineteenth-century writers, would have found Conley's contention that the chasms could be taken up, an impossible concept. Emily Dickinson, in stating that 'abyss has no biographer' (Shurr, 60), only confirms a commonly held belief of the period.
