SOURCE: "Harriet Martineau's Autobiography: The Repressed Desire of Life Like a Man's," in A Poetics of Women's Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation, Indiana University Press, 1987, pp. 123-49.

In the following excerpt, Smith evaluates Harriet Martineau 's autobiography and discusses elements specific to Victorian autobiography.

 I fully expect that both you and I shall
occasionally feel as if I did not discharge a
daughter's duty, but we shall both remind
ourselves that I am now as much a citizen
of the world as any professional son of
yours could be.
—Harriet Martineau to her mother, July 8, 1833 

Charlotte Charke [in her autobiography A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke written in 1755] dons the clothes and gestures of the man as she sets out on her adventures, virtually erasing the signature of her mother on her life. The fictions of "woman" that she does attend to as...