Lucy Aikin was the first woman biographer in England to base her writing on extensive research in original documents. In long and scholarly volumes on Queen Elizabeth I, King James I, and King Charles I she illuminated not only royal figures and their courts but also the relationships between their reigns and the evolving culture of the English nation; in her biographies of English writers she linked her subjects' creative work to their education, their experiences as children, and the circumstances of their adult lives. She declined to follow a set theory of biography: "Every life should be written on the plan suited to itself," she asserted in The Life of Joseph Addison (1843). At a time when serious education for women was a controversial issue, even in her own family, she argued for equality of education for the sexes. Her work is overtly didactic; its objective is to...