Produced by Delphine Lettau and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) _Famous Women._ HARRIET MARTINEAU. _Already published_: GEORGE ELIOT. By Miss Blind. EMILY BRONTE. By Miss Robinson. GEORGE SAND. By Miss Thomas. MARY LAMB. By Mrs. Gilchrist. MARGARET FULLER. By Julia Ward Howe. MARIA EDGEWORTH. By Miss Zimmern. ELIZABETH FRY. By Mrs. E. R. Pitman. THE COUNTESS OF ALBANY. By Vernon Lee. MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT. By Mrs. E. R. Pennell. HARRIET MARTINEAU. By Mrs. F. Fenwick Miller. RACHEL. By Mrs. Nina H. Kennard. MADAME ROLAND. By Mathilde Blind. SUSANNA WESLEY. By Eliza Clarke. MARGARET OF ANGOULEME. By Miss Robinson. MRS. SIDDONS. By Mrs. Nina H. Kennard. MADAME DE STAEL. By Bella Duffy. [Illustration: FAMOUS WOMEN] HARRIET MARTINEAU. BY MRS. F. FENWICK MILLER. BOSTON: ROBERTS BROTHERS. 1887. _Copyright, 1884_, BY ROBERTS BROTHERS. UNIVERSITY PRESS: JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE. PREFACE. The material for this biographical and critical sketch of Harriet Martineau and her works has been drawn from a variety of sources. Some of it is quite new. Her own _Autobiography_ was completed in 1855; and there has not hitherto been anything at all worth calling a record of the twenty-one years during which she lived and worked after that date. Even as regards the earlier period, although, of course I have drawn largely for facts upon the _Autobiography_, yet I have found much that is new to relate. For some information and hints about this period I am indebted to her relatives of her own generation, Dr. James Martineau, and Mrs. Henry Turner, of Nottingham, as well as to one or two others. With reference to the latest twenty-one years of her life, my record is entirely fresh, though necessarily brief. Mrs. Chapman, of Boston, U.S.A., has written a volume in completion of the _Autobiography_, which should have covered this later period; but her account is little more than a repetition, in a peculiar style, of the story that Miss Martineau herself had told, and leaves the later work of the life without systematic record. As a well-known critic remarked in _Macmillan_--"This volume is one more illustration of the folly of intrusting the composition of biography to persons who have only the wholly irrelevant claim of intimate friendship." But it should be remembered that when Miss Martineau committed to Mrs. Chapman the task of writing a memorial sketch, and when the latter accepted the undertaking, both of them believed that the life and work of the subject of it were practically over. I have reason to know that if Harriet Martineau had supposed it to be even remotely possible that so much of her life remained to be spent and recorded, she would have chosen some one more skilled in literature, and more closely acquainted