SOURCE: “‘As Easy as a Chimney Pot to Blacken’: Catharine Macaulay ‘the Celebrated Female Historian,’” in Prose Studies, Vol. 18, No. 3, December, 1995, pp. 78-104.

In the following essay, Mazzucco-Than argues that the principal fame Macaulay's History of England garnered in the eighteenth century as well as its subsequent neglect during the past two centuries is due to a single cause—-a continuing emphasis on the gender of the historian herself.

There is nothing so bad for the face as Party-Zeal … I would therefore advise all my Female Readers, as they value their Complexions, to let alone all Disputes of this Nature; though, at the same time, I would give free Liberty to all superannuated motherly Partizans to be as violent as they please, since there will be no danger either of their spoiling their Faces or of their gaining Converts.

(Addison, The Spectator No.57, 5 May 1711, 252-3)

It having been...