Female utilitarian authors

I thought it would be useful to compile a list of female utilitarian authors. Here is the beginning of such a list. There may be disagreement over the political orientation of those in the list. That’s fair enough. It is only supposed to be a starting point, not an end point.

Another interesting list, which would cross over with this list, would be that of utilitarian novelists, or those novelists who specifically referred to utilitarianism in their works. (See here for the new post.) Apart from some of the novelists listed below, there are Dickens and Disraeli, both critical, and Bulwer-Lyttton. These three authors make an appearance elsewhere on this site.

If you know the names of any authors that you can contribute to either of these lists please add a comment below.

Lucie Duff-Gordon – Letters from Egypt. I don’t know if Duff-Gordon wrote as a utilitarian or as a social observer without any particular political perspective. However she and her family were intimately acquainted with the utilitarians. Her father was John Austin, who developed analytical jurisprudence. This is a small excerpt from the introduction to the 2007 edition of Letters from Egypt:

In 1819 [John Austin] married Sarah, the youngest daughter of John Taylor of Norwich, when they took a house in Queen Square, Westminster, close to James Mill, the historian of British India, and next door to Jeremy Bentham, whose pupil Mr. Austin was. Here, it may be said, the Utilitarian philosophy of the nineteenth century was born. Jeremy Bentham’s garden became the playground of the young Mills and of Lucie Austin; his coach-house was converted into a gymnasium, and his flower-beds were intersected by tapes and threads to represent the passages of a panopticon prison.

See also Three Generations of Englishwomen by Janet Ross (1888).

George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans). Eliot might or might not be classed as utilitarian. Jennifer Mary Bradshaw’s 1990 PhD thesis Concepts of happiness: The influence of Ludwig Feuerbach on the fiction of George Eliot, completed at the University of Ottowa is a useful source for the relationship between Eliot’s views and happiness. The precis for the thesis begins:

 The search for happiness is a vital theme in George Eliot’s fiction. Eliot’s treatment of this theme owes much to nineteenth-century utilitarianism, which stemmed from Jeremy Bentham’s “greatest happiness principle,” and the religious demythologization of the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who interpreted Christianity in terms of human consciousness. In 1854, Eliot translated Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christenthums, in which Feuerbach describes the components of man’s being as feeling, thinking, and willing. George Eliot saw an opposition between utilitarianism and Feuerbach’s humanism. This fact is fundamental for our understanding of the rhetorical structure of Eliot’s moral universe. In her fiction, utilitarianism as utility, the pursuit of pleasure, utility, avoidance of pain, and calculation of pleasure over pain (the “felicific calculus”) is shown by her, paradoxically, often to lead to wrongdoing, suffering, and even crime. For some of her protagonists, however, it contributes to a primary stage of their development…

See Felix Holt.

Millicent Fawcett.  Fawcett was a key agitator for the women’s vote. She was inspired by J.S. Mill. In her biography of Molesworth she displays a strong appreciation for the efforts of the utilitarians. Whether she herself can be identified as utilitarian, I am unsure.

Jane Marcet. Again, I am not sure whether Marcet can strictly be identified as utilitiarian, but she certainly promulgated the idea of political economy, and thus fits within the general milieu. One of her works on science inspired Faraday. Her didactic approach inspired Martineau. Her easy dismissal of the uneven distribution of land in Fairytale in Essays: Glamorgan Pamphlets is a bit of a worry!

Harriet Martineau – In Robert Lee Wolff’s introduction to Ireland by Harriet Martineau (New York : Garland Pub., 1979), Wolff observes at p.vii that Martineau’s novels in the series ‘Illustrations of Political Economy’ sold tens of thousands of copies each. Each title dealt with a separate aspect of political economy, and Martineau produced one title per month. The series was written 1832-4. For biographical material see for example Webb, Harriet Martineau: A Radical Victorian; Wheatley, The life and work of Harriet Martineau. Martineau’s readership included Princess Victoria.

Henry Handel Richardson - Click on the name to go to my post on a small excerpt from Richardson’s book, Australia Felix. Richardson might not be a utilitarian author exactly, but I’m pretty sure that this adaption of a page of two from the Aeneid is, at a minimum, a critique of utlitarianism.

Harriet Taylor. Taylor is famous for her authorship of works promoting the political and social empowerment of women, including The Enfranchisement of Women, originally attributed to J.S. Mill.  See Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, Sexual Equality: Writings by John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor Mill, and Helen Taylor (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1994).