SOURCE: Broughton, Trev Lynn. “Making the Most of Martyrdom: Harriet Martineau, Autobiography and Death.” Literature & History 2, no. 2 (autumn 1993): 24-45.

In the following essay, Broughton examines what Martineau's Autobiography reveals about Victorian beliefs on death and the practice of autobiography.

In her Autobiography, Harriet Martineau twice claims, using almost identical phraseology, that she ‘hoped for, and expected early death till it was too late to die early’.¹ This has long struck me as a most elegant, economical way of expressing the autobiographical dilemma facing mid-Victorian, middle-class Englishwomen; indeed the trope it evokes so pithily—the trope of self as martyr manqué—is a common feature of women's literary self-representation.² The phrase haunts me. It seems to me that if our reading of Victorian women's autobiography could once fully accommodate its humour, while remaining faithful to its pathos, we would not only have a key with which to unlock a...