Bridget Hill: The Republican Virago [1992]

Catherine Macaulay represented everything the 18th century abhorred in a women. She was learned, politically-minded, actively engaged with public and philosophical issues of the day. Her private life, and especially her "imprudent" second marriage to a man 26 years her junior, led to much malicious gossip. Yet in her life time she also won considerable fame. The author of an eight-volume history of England in the 17th century, a republican,a follower of John Wilkes, and a political polemicist who engaged with Edmund Burke, not only did she influence the nature of 18th-century radicalism in England, but she played an important contributory role in the shaping of American revolutionary ideology. Among her American friends and correspondents were Mercy Otis Warren, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Ezra Stiles, and George Washington. Long before the revolution she was also closely concerned with events in France. Both Mirabeau and Brissot were familiar with her history and much influenced by it; translated into French it was welcomed by patriots as an effective response to the counter-revolution influence of Hume's history.