The Life of Harriot Stuart, Written by Herself

Written in the popular memoir form, The Life of Harriot Stuart is also intriguing to us for what it reveals, via the use Lennox herself made of it later in her life, of the struggles of an ambitious, shrewd, independent-minded woman writer to be at once professionally accepted and thus economically secure, and yet to maintain her identity. Faced with a literary marketplace where professional well-being necessitated female deference to such influential male writers as Johnson and Richardson, and a marriage that required the same of her as a wife, Lennox allowed the facts of Harriot's life to be viewed as autobiographical. The life of her first heroine seems to have provided Lennox with an escape, serving as a kind of wish-fulfillment later in a life that did not give her opportunities for strong, passionate, individualistic behavior.