...whose The Woman's Bible caused controversy in the 1890s. But there is an earlier tradition of female-centred Bible interpretation, which is to be found in collective biographies written by British and American women across the nineteenth century. These writers constructed "lives" of female characters in scripture in ways that anticipate some of the strategies of feminist scholarship of recent times, while addressing their own contemporary concerns abut the role of women. It would be inaccurate to classify these biographers as "feminist" in today's terms because they maintained a belief in essential male and female characteristics and differentiated gender roles. And, unlike modern feminist scholars, they took at face value the whole of scripture as the word of God. However, the nineteenth-century writers shared with their later counterparts a desire to read the Bible self-consciously from a woman's perspective and thereby to "bring their own experience into the public formation of the tradition" (Ruether 112). The biographers bypassed male-centred interpretive traditions and recast female Bible characters as powerful role models for themselves and their readers. John Stuart Mill, an advocate of women's liberation, conjectured in his 1861 essay The Subjection of Women that, if given the freedom, female authors would write "a literature of their own," distinct from the traditions of male discourse (77). In the form of collective Bible biography, nineteenth-century women created what may be termed "a scripture of their own."

The genre of collective biography flourished during the nineteenth century, during which hundreds of titles were published in a bid to highlight the qualities and achievements of women of the past, both ancient and modern. These works included series of short life accounts united around a common theme, biographical dictionaries, and a few panoramic histories of "woman" with some focus on key individuals. Most were in prose, a few in verse, and virtually all were prefaced with an introductory essay in which the author outlined her theme. The genre was, as the reviewer Margaret Oliphant quipped, a uniquely "feminine preserve," since it was written by women, about women, and primarily for women readers and formed a self-enclosed genre in which women could debate their role, safe from any "male intruder" (qtd. in Maitzen 374). Biography has long been important to the formation of political identity, and Alison Booth and Judith Johnston have both in recent years recognized collective biography's importance in providing role models for women at a time when their social role was the subject of much debate (Booth, "The Lessons of the Medusa" 263; Johnston 20). Rohan Maitzen in her 1995 work considered the biographies from a historian's perspective as an incursion into the male-dominated realm of historiography: "as supplements to the historical master-narratives ... they vigorously assert a feminine place in history" (372). This article, by focusing on biographies specifically of Bible figures, reveals how the nineteenth-century writers were able also to enter the male-dominated territory of Bible criticism, to reclaim women as important figures within their religious heritage, and to claim scriptural authority for their liberating perspectives on women's place.

Given the sheer number of collective biographies published, this study is necessarily selective, focusing on examples from across the century that find in the Bible resources to challenge cultural restrictions on women. Some works to be discussed focus exclusively on the Bible, such as Clara Lucas Balfour's Women of Scripture (1847) and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Women in Sacred History (1873). Other texts, such as Lucy Aikin's Epistles on Women (1810), Grace Aguilar's Women of Israel (1852), Sarah Hale's Woman's Record (1853), and Elizabeth Charles's Women of Christendom (1889), feature scriptural characters among others, as the first figures in a continuing spiritual tradition. The writers were from a variety of denominations, although they demonstrated a common Protestant sensibility in their confidence to approach the Bible directly and interpret it without the mediation of any guide or expert training. They also shared the evangelical belief that the scripture speaks directly, and with authority, to contemporary readers. Lucy Aikin, a Unitarian, held this view as much as her Anglican counterparts. Grace Aguilar, a Jew, wrote in part against the commonly held view that Christianity granted women a higher status than did Judaism, but her work is included because she was widely read by a gentile audience and her interpretation of women of the Hebrew Bible has much in common with the Christian discussions of Old Testament role models. British and American writers are discussed together, since, as Booth points out, female collective biography was a "decidedly transatlantic" discourse ("TLM" 262). Hale and Stowe's works were published in London at the same time as in North America. All these authors were already established writers on women and on religion, whether through essays, fiction, or devotional works. They brought their imaginative skills and opinions to their construction of Bible "lives." This article first considers what the genre of biography offered to nineteenth-century women as a method of Bible interpretation, given a cultural context that was hostile to females claiming spiritual authority. Secondly, the biographers' findings are discussed, both in terms of how they addressed gender issues of their own times and also how they anticipated the viewpoints of some later feminist Bible interpreters.

I

In the nineteenth century, collective biography allowed women a way into Bible hermeneutics at a time when formal Bible exegesis was denied them. The cultural hostility against female spiritual authority prevailed, denying women theological training and the liberty to offer original Bible interpretation and doctrinal opinion. Even John Wesley, generally in favor of women as preachers, allowed them to exhort and to share spiritual experience but not to give original exegesis of a scriptural text (Krueger 58). Hannah More, who became the model for many nineteenth-century women writers, demonstrated feminine anxiety in the preface to her 1815 work An Essay on the Character and Practical Writings of St. Paul, in which she assured her reader that she would comment only on Paul's "practical" and not his "doctrinal" or "controversial" points (1). This boundary continued well into the nineteenth century, in that women were encouraged to write "practical divinity"--applying Bible truths to experience through the media of fiction, tracts, and devotional exercises--but not to originate their own doctrinal ideas. They might adapt Bible scholarship for a general audience, but they did not formulate it themselves, since this would be an inappropriate assumption of spiritual authority (Kachur 33). As John Ruskin asserted in 1865, "theology" was widely considered the "one dangerous science" for women, which they touched "profanely" (127).

Thus, women's work on biography stayed safely within approved bounds. The focus on individual lives, and of only women, eschewed any wider discussion of what was held to matter in theology, that is, salvation doctrine. Biography focused, like fictional and devotional works, on the experiential dimensions of faith and on values applied to personal life and relationships. In the context of "separate spheres" for the sexes, women could claim exclusive expertise in interpreting their own kind: "woman alone knows the heart of woman," conceded a male reviewer of the genre (qtd. in Johnston 86). Maitzen notes of the historical biographies that the genre remained a marginalized discourse, which did not trouble the culturally authoritative male interpreters (381). Nonetheless, within its bounds,...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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