ABSTRACT
Once seen as mere panegyric, Mary Hays’s “Catherine Macaulay Graham” is now considered among Female Biography’s most significant entries, and its longest based entirely on original research. Its richness of detail and insight has led to it becoming a crucial source for writers addressing Macaulay’s life and work. In this article, I situate Hays’s work by reading it against earlier and later biographical writing on Macaulay. I firstly compare Hays’s text to the early biographies “Memoirs of Mrs. Macaulay” (1771) and “Account of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Macaulay Graham” (1783), in particular for its new focus on Macaulay’s virtuous youth, her intellectual development and its much fuller characterisation of its subject. Following this, I shift focus to examine the great influence “Catherine Macaulay Graham” has held over subsequent biographical writing on Macaulay in England and America. This influence is especially visible in nineteenth-century collective biographies of women (a genre much indebted to Hays), in particular within Sarah Hale’s Woman’s Record (1854) and Joseph Johnson’s Clever Girls of Our Time (1862). While displaying individual variations, these biographies demonstrate the strong influence of Hays in narrating Macaulay’s life, through quotation and other textual strategies. Finally, I examine briefly the ongoing presence of Hays in modern writing on Macaulay, two centuries after the composition of “Catherine Macaulay Graham.”
