FEMINISM - Eccentric Biography; Or, Memoirs of Remarkable Female Characters, Ancient and Modern. London: Printed by J. Cundee … Sold by T. Hurst, 1803.
12mo. Contemporary worn sprinkled calf with restorations; pp. [xii], 349, eight stipple-engraved portraits including frontispiece; occasional light spotting or browning, page 173 with flaw to lower outer corner; otherwise a good copy of a very rare work.
First edition of this anonymously published compendious biographical dictionary of remarkable women who defied gender roles, or led independent lives and had a positive impact on their societies and the perception of women. Almost programmatically, the volume opens with the biography of Alice, a 106-year old African-American slave in Pennsylvania, who remembered the days of William Penn and the first settlers. At the age of 95 she still could be seen in full gallop on her daily way to church. Alice of Dunk's Ferry, as she became known, died in 1802 in Bristol, Pennsylvania and is considered now to have been the formost local aural historian for the 18th centrury. In the entry for Alice is a reference to a portrait "See annexed engraving" (p. 3) which is not listed in the directions to the binder and strangely enough can only be found in the later, 1804, Worcester, Massachusetts edition printed by Isaiah Thomas (1749-1831), a New England pioneer politician, writer, publisher and printer, to whom this text is sometimes ascribed.
A precursor of this dictionary is the 1801 "Eccentric Biography; Or, Memoirs of Remarkable Characters" published by T. Hurst. It contained biographies of both genders; however, far fewer of women, about a fifth of the almost 100 biographies, collected in this first edition. Among them are biographies of the cross-dressing Chevalier d'Éon, Mme de Pompadour, Angelica Kaufmann, Mary Wollstonecraft (the longest and most laudatory biographical entry in the volume), Mary Astell, Catherine I and II, empresses of Russia, and other outstanding female lives from history.
See Sabin 21754 for the Boston edition of "Eccentric Biography of Remarkable Characters" and a Boston, 1825 edition.
SKU: 2125047