Abstract

The English novelist Georgiana Fullerton belonged to a cosmopolitan circle of literary friends, including especially the French writer Pauline Craven, née La Ferronnays, who published a biography of Fullerton after her death. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857)—a work that similarly presented itself as a tribute from one author to another as well as testimony to an intimate friendship—offers significant context for Craven’s efforts. Departing from Gaskell’s emphasis on marriage and domesticity, Craven drew on the hagiography tradition that was enjoying a mid-nineteenth-century revival. She presented her subject as a saint in the making and affirmed that Lady Georgiana’s literary talents were central to her exemplary virtue. Broader analysis of the dozens of biographical subjects that Fullerton, Craven, and their friends chose indicates a desire to reintroduce Englishwomen to an international Catholic sisterhood that they had lost with the Reformation.

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