‘Now, dear, leave it to other women to make shirts and darn stockings, and you devote yourself to this (writing)’ – Letter to Harriet Martineau, 1823

Journalist, writer, traveller, translator, abolitionist, feminist and social reformer. Harriet Martineau may be the most famous Victorian woman you’ve never heard of. She broke boundaries with her work Illustrations of Political Economy and other writing including Society in America and The Hour and the Man.

Her friends and fans (and sometimes foes) included Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Queen Victoria, Charles Darwin and George Eliot. Despite being deaf since childhood, she rebelled against the restrictions on contemporary women’s lives. Martineau travelled to America, Europe, Egypt and the Middle East, rejected traditional religion and was a radical free thinker.

So why exactly was she so significant? What impact did she have? And why is she not as well-known as her contemporaries? Join us as we celebrate 150 years of Harriet Martineau – a woman ahead of her time.

A partnership event with Chawton House, Charles Dickens Museum and Elizabeth Gaskell’s House.

Speakers:
Molly Maslen is Assistant Curator at Chawton House. Best known for its connection to Jane Austen; Chawton House is now home to women’s writing including new exhibition, Homemade Histories by women writers including Harriet Martineau.

Kirsty Parsons is Curator at the Charles Dickens Museum. The Museum’s current exhibition, Extra/Ordinary Women brings some of the women in his life out from Dickens’s shadow.

Jane Mathieson is a former Librarian and previous chair of Manchester Literature Festival. She coordinated a network of librarians across North West England and now volunteers with the collection, as a tour guide and in the garden at Elizabeth Gaskell’s House in Manchester.
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