Mapping the intellectual self

Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography (1877) has been celebrated as radically transforming the autobiographical genre, most particularly in regard to the nineteenth-century female autobiography. The self-shaping that autobiographical writing involves, alongside the agency of the author to narrate their own tale, provides a powerful space for articulating individual and social identity. Most critics have read the Autobiography as a continuation of Martineau’s conviction that it was her duty to teach the nation, as well as further evidence of her desire to maintain control over her public persona. Linda Peterson, in her introduction to the Autobiography, emphasises Martineau’s deliberate self-shaping, from her ‘interdicting the publication of her letters and asking friends to burn private correspondence’, to writing her own obituary in the third person, arguing that she ‘in effect prevented others from shaping her life story, and thus … maintained the power to tell it her own way.’ ¹ Similarly, Lucy Bending writes that Martineau’s Autobiography came out of her ‘desire to put forward her own case, to represent herself in a way that was not inflected by the interpretations of others whose desire for Martineau to be what they expected her to be was at times overwhelming,’ ² while Jill Ker Conway observes that ‘Martineau, a woman who had become one of the leading educators of her society on social and economic matters … wanted the world to know how she had become such a phenomenon.’ ³