Portal:Feminism/Selected article/25

The Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men were five volumes of Dionysius Lardner’s 133-volume Cabinet Cyclopaedia (1829–46). Aimed at the self-educating middle class, this encyclopedia was written during the nineteenth-century literary revolution in Britain that encouraged more people to read. The Lives formed part of the Cabinet of Biography in the Cabinet Cyclopaedia. The three-volume Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain and Portugal (1835–37) and the two-volume Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of France (1838–39) consist of biographies of important writers and thinkers of the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries. Most of them were authored by the Romantic writer Mary Shelley. Shelley's biographies reveal her as a professional woman of letters, contracted to produce several volumes of works and paid well to do so. Her extensive knowledge of history and languages, her ability to tell a gripping biographical narrative, and her interest in the burgeoning field of feminist historiography are reflected in these works. Her political views are most obvious in the Italian Lives, where she supports the Italian independence movement and promotes republicanism. In the French Lives she portrays women sympathetically, explaining their political and social restrictions and arguing that women can be productive members of society if given the proper educational and social opportunities.