"Those Historical Laurels Which Once Graced My Brow Are Now in Their Wane": Catharine Macaulay's Last Years and Legacy (Critical Essay‪)‬

IN HER A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN (1792), MARY Wollstonecraft praises her predecessor, Catharine Macaulay. Wollstonecraft deems Macaulay, who had died the previous year, "the woman of the greatest abilities" ever produced by Great Britain and expresses grief at her passing: "When I first thought of writing these strictures I anticipated Mrs. Macaulay's approbation, with a little of the sanguine ardour, which it has been the business of my life to depress; but soon heard with the sickly qualm of disappointed hope; and the still seriousness of regret--that she was no more!" (1) Angry that there has not been "sufficient respect ... paid to her memory," Wollstonecraft expresses confidence that where Macaulay is concerned, "posterity ... will be more just" (Vindication 105). Recent critics have made much of Wollstonecraft's prediction, particularly because for many years posterity was not just. Those who remembered Macaulay moved from excoriating her to lamenting her having been forgotten, a process that Wollstonecraft also endured. Wollstonecraft, at least, has found justice. Her complete works were published a decade ago, and it is difficult to open any anthology or encyclopedia of the romantic period without locating extended reference to her life and writings. (2) Macaulay's re-emergence has been more belated, despite the fact that the two women had much in common. (3) Both espoused radical politics. Both published angry responses to Edmund Burke and treatises on women's education. Both led lives that engendered public scandal. Wollstonecraft's is famously filled with daring and disastrous events, tragically cut short, but Macaulay's, which also had its share of infamy, seems in comparison more stable and less pitiful. She wrote a history of England that reached 3,549 pages, and she reached 60 years of age, dying on 22 June 1791 after "a long and very painful illness." (4) Although she was frequently in poor health, she was apparently never poor. After her first husband's death, Macaulay surrounded herself with a band of toadies whose fulsome actions on her behalf are difficult to embrace. Her defying act of love was to marry again, at the age of 47. The surprising choice was William Graham, a 21-year-old surgeon's mate who was the younger brother of her quack doctor. The match was, by all indications, a happy one, but it has proved difficult for subsequent critics to package as a heroic act.