[ANONYMOUS.] Eccentric Biography; Or, Memoirs of Remarkable Female Characters, Ancient and Modern … Forming a Pleasing Mirror of Reflection to the Female Mind.

Remarkable Women Past and Present

[ANONYMOUS.] Eccentric Biography; Or, Memoirs of Remarkable Female Characters, Ancient and Modern … Forming a Pleasing Mirror of Reflection to the Female Mind. London: J. Cundee for T. Hurst. 1803.

12mo. Contemporary sprinkled calf, subtly rejointed and with restoration to central crack to spine and endcaps, flat spine gilt in compartments; pp. [xii], 349, 8 stipple-engraved portrait plates; small chip to upper joint, corners worn; some browning to first and last few quires, short closed tear to ff. Q3–4 not affecting legibility, small paperflaw to lower corner of f. 2E6 not touching text, lightly toned throughout; otherwise a good copy.

First edition of this compendious biographical dictionary of almost one hundred extraordinary women, intended for a female readership and contrasting ‘notorious Swindlers’ with ‘Ladies of Honour’, women of ‘Weakness and Credulity’ with ‘those of superior talents, or learning’, and those of ‘loose morals’ with those of the ‘strictest Chastity’.

The work opens with the biography of Alice of Dunk’s Ferry (d. 1802), one of the earliest oral historians of Black America, a one hundred and sixteen-year-old Philadelphia-born enslaved woman who recalled the days of William Penn (and could, at the age of ninety-five, be seen in full gallop on her daily trip to church). In the entry for Alice is a reference to a portrait depicting her ‘perfectly white’ hair (’[See the annexed engraving]’, p. 3) which is not listed in the directions to the binder and is only be found in the 1804, Worcester, Massachusetts edition printed by Isaiah Thomas (1749–1831), the New England pioneer politician, writer, publisher and printer to whom authorship of this text is sometimes ascribed.

Also featured are Joan of Arc, Aphra Behn, Mary Wollstonecraft (the longest and most laudatory biographical entry in the volume), Angelica Kaufmann, Charlotte Corday, and Catherine de’ Medici, as well as Phoebe Bown of Birmingham, a self-taught musician, broker of livestock, and weightlifter who lived largely on milk; the seventeenth-century Silesian astronomer Maria Cunitz; the Roma woman Anne Day, who, ‘having grown almost double’ in size, was carried around the country by three women and a donkey; the eighteenth-century poacher of fish Anne Simms; and the ‘remarkable impostor’ Mary Toft, who pretended to have given birth to rabbits.

A great deal of information is provided on the spy, diplomat, and soldier the Chevalier d’Eon (i.e. Charlotte d’Éon de Beaumont, 1728–1810), who passed as male in society from the age of six (by other accounts assigned male at birth) and had fought in the Seven Years’ War but lived as a woman for the second part of their life. The Eccentric Biography also devotes some nine pages to the non-binary preacher and founder of the Society of Universal Friends known as the Public Universal Friend (born Jemima Wilkinson, 1752–1819). Their appearance, gender non-conforming dress, and the layout of their room are described at length. This biographical dictionary was preceded by the 1801 Eccentric Biography; Or, Memoirs of Remarkable Characters, published by T. Hurst. It contained biographies of both men and women, but featured only about a fifth of the biographies of women collected here.

See Sabin 21754 for the later Boston editions..

SKU: 2125047