In recent years, historians such as Bonnie G. Smith and Mary Spongberg have recovered the lives and contributions of women historians in the West since the early modern period and have explored the relationship between gender and historiography. Other scholars have researched women historians in specific national contexts, including Rosemary Mitchell and Rohan Maitzen, who have focused on the role played by British women in historical writing during the nineteenth century. Clio's Daughters: British Women Making History, 1790–1899, an interdisciplinary collection of essays edited by Lynette Felber, widens the range of sources to include travel literature, historic homes, and historical costumes, revealing new perspectives on nineteenth-century British women and historiography.

The book is divided into four parts, following a helpful introduction by Felber that outlines the development of the interdisciplinary subfield of women and historiography and its related theoretical and thematic issues. Part I, “Women Revising Uprisings: Revolution and Mutiny,” includes an essay by Stephen Bernstein on Charlotte Smith's poem “The Emigrants,” which addresses the French Revolution and its aftermath and represents “a narrative attempt at crisis historiography, and … participation in historiographic crisis” (29). Ann-Barbara Graff analyzes Flora Annie Steel's novel of the Indian Mutiny, On the Face of the Waters, within the context of Mutiny fiction, and argues that Steel, who also wrote on Indian history, “raises questions about the nature of causality and the function of historiography to reclaim the events of the past” (44). Part II, “Queens of History: Sovereigns and Subjects of Royal Biography,” features essays by Mary Spongberg on Marie Antoinette, Rosemary Mitchell on Lady Jane Grey, and Rohan Maitzen on the contrasting perspectives on Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I in the works of Agnes Strickland and J. A. Froude. In Part III, “Appropriating a Profession: Women Writers, Historical Fiction, and Historiography,” Miriam Elizabeth Burstein analyzes the underresearched genre of the “evangelical historical novel” through an examination of the novels of Emily Sarah Holt, while Neil McCaw explores the links between the realist fictions of Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot and the philosophy and practice of nineteenth-century social history. Maria Frawley's essay discusses Harriet Martineau's England and Her Soldiers, as well as Martineau's significance as a writer of contemporary history. In Part IV, “History in Other Venues,” May Caroline Chan examines Victorian travel writer Isabella Bird's The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, while Alexis Easley and Nanette Thrush respectively address the role of women in historic preservation in Britain and Victorian women's interests in historical costumes and fancy dress balls, interests shared by Queen Victoria herself.

Particularly strong essays include those by Rosemary Mitchell, Rohan Maitzen, and Alexis Easley. Mitchell's “The Nine Lives of the Nine Days Queen: From Religious Heroine to Romantic Victim,” analyzes the changing images of Lady Jane Grey in nineteenth-century literature and art. Lady Jane, executed in 1554, was initially viewed as a martyr for Protestantism. By the eighteenth century, she was increasingly perceived as a “sentimental and Romantic heroine,” although some writers stressed the Gothic elements of Lady Jane's story. While these interpretations of her life continued to resonate during the nineteenth century, other images came into play, including “Grey as domestic exemplar for middle-class young women.” (101). By the 1860s, Grey's academic achievements were invoked by feminists to bolster arguments in favor of higher education for women. Mitchell concludes that “like many other historical female figures, Grey's representation in nineteenth-century texts and images offers an insight into the debates on and the construction of gender identities and roles for women” (120).

Rohan Maitzen's “Plotting Women: Froude and Strickland on Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots” analyzes the portrayals of the two queens by nineteenth-century historians J. A. Froude and Agnes Strickland. Maitzen outlines the difficulties faced by Victorian historians and biographers in fitting the lives of queens, “public women and often women with real power … within the plots and narrative structures most readily available in Victorian culture” (124). Strickland and Froude were more adept at representing the conventionally feminine Mary within Victorian literary frameworks than at representing Elizabeth, whose life and public persona seemed especially resistant to such frameworks. Strickland sought to stress Elizabeth's femininity and altruism, attributing her more ruthless actions to the influence of manipulative male advisers. Froude downplayed Elizabeth's power and achievements, giving greater credit to her ministers and “the genius and daring of her Protestant subjects” (148). Mary was portrayed by Strickland as an ideal woman and a tragic heroine, while Froude depicted her as deceitful and manipulative, an especially negative model of femininity.

Alexis Easley's essay, “Rooms of the Past: Victorian Women Writers, History, and the Reconstruction of Domestic Space,” discusses women's involvement in architectural reform and historic preservation in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, highlighting the role played by women in restoring and interpreting writers’ homes and maintaining them as tourist attractions. Easley shows how the house of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, opened to the public in 1895, became a site of contested, gendered interpretations. While the house was widely viewed “as a symbol of the great author's genius, others preferred to ‘read’ the Carlyle House as a signifier of another history—the story of Jane Carlyle's emotional and physical suffering” (246). The Brontë Society established the Brontë Museum in 1895, and female members of the society played a central role in interpreting the museum in addition to publicizing women's scholarship on the Brontës through conferences and the society's Transactions. Easley concludes that the historic preservation movement helped to carve out a space for women as “managers of the emerging cultural heritage industry” (253).

In sum, Clio's Daughters is a valuable contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship on women and historiography, and its wide-ranging essays will especially appeal to historians, literary scholars, and art historians.