ABSTRACT
Elizabeth Hamilton's Memoirs of the Life of Agrippina accommodates both the male and the female reader, or both a sentimental and a rational reading style and associated reader to engage in a new form of historiography. When Elizabeth Benger notes in her Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton that Hamilton's Memoirs of the Life of Agrippina: Wife of Germanicus is preposterously classed with novels she points us, once more, to the contentious correlation between genre and gender in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. Historical biography introduces wider philosophical questions. As she explains in her Preface, historical biography engages the reader's sympathetic interest and makes a deep moral impression because it conveys a truth. The critical reception shows that the Memoirs of the Life of Agrippina was either read as a rational discourse or as a sentimental discourse but no one seemed willing or able to consider it as a serious merging of the two.
