Shortly before she died, Harriet Martineau began erasing herself.
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In an autobiographical obituary published two days after Martineau’s death in 1876, the writer dismissed her own popular and well-respected fictions. Speaking of the novellas that made her famous, she insisted that “there is no merit of a high order in the work… none of [my] novels or tales have, or ever had, in the eyes of good judges or in [my] own, any character of permanence.”
Martineau’s self-effacement may have been her most successful venture of all. Today, nearly two centuries after she rocketed to literary stardom, she is mostly forgotten. If few people now recognize her name, even fewer have read the works that made her a celebrity. And those bibliophiles (academics, mostly) who do study Martineau’s nine-volume collection Illustrations of Political Economy seem to admire her unlikely achievements more than the stories themselves.
Nevertheless, Martineau’s work deserves a second look. A shocking number of advances in Anglo-American culture—everything from realist fiction to ecology to economic policy—would look different, or might not even exist, if she’d never put pen to paper. And the meticulously plotted structures of her earliest fictions deserve their own kind of respect: they defy our sense of what makes great literature great.
In the process, they remind us of what’s lost in the heavily voice- and character-driven craft that has dominated highbrow literary fiction from the Victorian era to the present.
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Martineau was born to a well-to-do manufacturing family in Norwich, a city northeast of London. But Martineau’s shot at a quiet, respectable middle-class life evaporated during a series of disastrous events that struck her family in the first few decades of the 1800s. A financial depression left her father teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.
A shocking number of advances in Anglo-American culture—everything from realist fiction to ecology to economic policy—would look different, or might not even exist, if she’d never put pen to paper.
The engagement that might have rescued her from poverty ended when her fiancé developed a severe illness; both her father and her future husband died within a year of each other. The only standard career options available to an educated woman at the time—teaching or working as a governess—were both out of the question, because Martineau was stricken with a mysterious progressive form of deafness that began when she was twelve.
Martineau’s desperate need for money might have driven her to depression or worse. Looking back on those days in her Autobiography, however, she remembered them as strangely liberating. Expelled from the smothering confines of bourgeois respectability, Martineau was free to try her own hand at making a place for herself in the world.
By day, she followed the course of many working-class women, taking on needlework to scrape together enough money to survive. By night, she wrote.
It was probably her own experience at the mercy of larger economic systems that led her to compose the fictions that made her famous. Convinced that the reading public needed to understand how such dynamics shaped everyday life, she pitched publishers on a series of short novellas structured around the life lessons provided by an economic education.
After many rounds of rejection, she found a publisher who agreed to the offer—albeit with little enthusiasm. Foreseeing minimal sales for such a dreary project, her press planned a relatively low print run of 1,500 copies.
They could not have been more mistaken. From the moment her first story, “Life in the Wilds,” was released, the public was hooked.
Lay readers followed along as Martineau’s characters struggled with difficult choices about family, business, and love. Political economists were delighted to see the ideas from their dry, jargon-ridden treatises finally catching on with a wider audience. Forward-thinking members of parliament eagerly touted the series as a way of teaching people how markets worked and why the industrial revolution called for large-scale economic reform.
The Illustrations transformed Martineau from an unknown scribbler and needlewoman to a household name overnight. The stories’ success led to further commissions for more novellas on economic topics; the whole series extended over twenty-two stories published regularly over the course of the next two years.
Before long, her little volumes outsold those of her contemporary Charles Dickens. Soon she was meeting her own idols among the political economists and hobnobbing with the likes of the Darwin family and the British peer Lord Brougham.
Over the coming decades, Martineau would prove more than a one-hit wonder. Her work on political economy helped garner support for the waves of economic reform that would chip away at longstanding social inequalities in Britain throughout the mid-1800s.
A lecture tour in the United States inflamed her staunch abolitionism and led her to write several books on American society that—along with her later translations of the French thinker August Comte—helped crystallize and spread the principles of the emerging field of sociology. Her memoir Life in the Sick-Room offered an honest and important account of living with disability in the modern era.
Martineau had continued success in the world of fiction as well. Her 1839 novel Deerbrook is still considered a classic of Victorian literature, albeit a minor one.
Marian Evans, who became a famous novelist herself under the pen name George Eliot, considered Martineau a “trump—the only English woman that possesses thoroughly the art of writing.” Even those who disagreed with her pro-market ideas admired her: the author, naturalist, and Christian socialist Charles Kingsley counted her among the “good and wise people” of the age.
By the time of her death, then, Martineau’s reputation would seem to have been secure. But as Martineau knew well, the actions and characters of human individuals are rarely the sole determining factors in their fates.
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Ironically, Martineau was among the first and most eager volunteers to drive nails into the coffin of her literary reputation. In her autobiographical obituary, she brutally dismisses her own fiction as lacking “artistic aim and qualifications,” “power of dramatic construction,” “poetic inspiration,” and “critical cultivation.” Later critics would follow her lead, finding little merit in the Illustrations of Political Economy in particular.
For many critics, the most damning sign of the Illustrations‘ literary failure was Martineau’s inclusion of a “Summary of Principles illustrated in this volume” at the end of each story. These tidy morals reduced each tale to a textbook lesson in early economic doctrine—a doctrine which was notoriously unforgiving in its vision of social order and its heartlessness toward the poor.
When academics writing a century after Martineau’s death began working to unearth the many female writers erased by a male-dominated version of literary history, they waffled on the question of how to assess Martineau. Yes, she was a wildly successful and influential writer. But the writings that made her famous also catered to a pro-market ideology that seemed subservient to male economists and oppressively conservative in its outlook.
By the time I began to study Victorian literature seriously in the early 2000s, Martineau was still a marginal figure—someone you should know about, but probably not bother reading. Even in this specialized little nook of literary study, graduate students were more likely to be assigned scholarship that talked about Martineau than to encounter her work directly.
It was not until later, when I was teaching full-time and casting around for overlooked books that might relate to my own research, that I began to wonder what Martineau had to say and picked up the Illustrations myself.
I was astonished. I began reading the way we often do, with some sense—in this case, a disparaging one—of what the work would be. That assurance gave way, as the pages turned, to genuine curiosity and excitement. Yes, there were plodding and preachy moments, but that’s true of many great novels from the 1800s. What surprised me were not the plodding elements but the plotting elements.
Better known and more beloved Victorian writers like Dickens and Eliot are famous for their plots. Their stories display intricate, compounding, networked plot structures, dramas that ripple across society as they unfold in order to reveal just how connected and interdependent all members of a community really are.
Victorian novelists effectively pioneered the use of storytelling to reveal interwoven social networks, a strategy that would later be deployed in critically acclaimed books, TV shows, and movies from Zadie Smith’s White Teeth to David Simon’s The Wire and the “hyperlink cinema” of twenty-first-century directors like Alejandro Gónzalez Iñárritu. What astonished me was that the famous Victorian multiplot structure was already on display in Martineau’s Illustrations, a work that both pre-dated and influenced the more critically acclaimed novels associated with such plots today.
In Martineau, though, the plots were much weirder.
It’s common, in a Dickens or Eliot novel, for one person’s unthinking action or local relationship to dramatically influence the fate of someone seemingly unconnected with them. Highlighting such connections was an integral part of the moral work of Victorian fiction, which sought to remind readers how all members of society depended on one another to survive and thrive.
In Martineau’s work, though, these uncanny networks of connection did not stop at the borders of society. Her stories involved lives upended by unexpected patterns of rainfall, by the felling of trees, by the importing of new crops, and by the movements of fish.
Martineau’s work wasn’t just social or sociological. It was ecological. She put far more thought into the entanglements that draw the fates of humans together with those of trees, water, grain, cattle, and fish than any English-speaking novelist I could find before her—or after her, for that matter.
It wasn’t until the late twentieth century and the rise of environmentalism that novelists began, slowly, to reconnect their stories of human lives to the material changes in the nonhuman world around them. In many ways, Martineau still has today’s most ecologically attuned fiction writers beat when it comes to her sheer astuteness about the surprising ways interspecies connections affect us all.
I spent the years that followed sleuthing through Martineau’s history to figure out just how, exactly, she’d come to this ecological plot structure—and why later novelists didn’t continue what she started. The explanation turned out to involve, among other things, her relationship to the aging political economist Thomas Robert Malthus and her friendship with a young Charles Darwin.
Eventually, those investigations grew into my book The Ecological Plot: How Stories Gave Rise to a Science. But they also grew into an even deeper admiration for Martineau’s writing, including an awareness of the literary trade-offs she had to make to achieve these expansive visions of cross-species communities.
Martineau’s Illustrations, I came to understand, are not for everyone. Some of the critical dismissals are valid: readers hoping to get lost in a compelling voice or gem-like lyricism will be sorely disappointed by her writing style. So will readers hoping for intimate psychological portrayals of the people around them. These are the traits we’ve come to consider central to highbrow literary fiction.
By defying these expectations, though, Martineau achieved something remarkable. There is an almost hypnotically addictive quality to her tales’ intricate interspecies plotting, something that far exceeds the simplistic moral and economic lessons she tags onto the end of each novella.
The stories don’t compel us by showing us glimpses of other individuals’ emotional and mental lives; she expends almost no time giving her characters a rich interiority. Instead, her stories force us to consider every individual’s exteriority: the extent to which all our lives are shaped by circumstances beyond our control, circumstances that arise from both human and nonhuman events unfolding around us.
We have long relied on realistic fiction to teach us empathy. A good novel helps us lessen or suspend our judgments of others by awakening our moral senses to the profoundly divergent ways people think and feel.
By downplaying all the widely glorified aspects of being human, Martineau refocuses readers’ attentions on all the ways humans are bound into much larger networks of beings.
But that focus on human hearts and minds still exaggerates the power and importance of individuals in determining their own fates. It also quietly consigns the nonhuman world to the margins, treating plants and animals as mere surroundings with little impact on the stories of our lives.
Martineau’s Illustrations might not give us the combination of deeply humane characterization and artistic bravado we associate with the greatest works in the humanities. But what she achieves by skirting those conventions is just as significant. The simplified economic morals she appends to her tales are not the most important things the Illustrations can show us today.
By downplaying all the widely glorified aspects of being human, Martineau refocuses readers’ attentions on all the ways humans are bound into much larger networks of beings. She reminds us that our individual and communal lives are not really so different from the lives of the animals and plants who share our planet. And in this age of extinction, that is a lesson we still desperately need to learn.
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The Ecological Plot: How Stories Gave Rise to a Science by John MacNeill Miller is available via The University of Virginia Press.