This is an exhaustive annotated bibliography of the more than 930 books published in English between 1830 and 1940 that collect three or more women's biographies in narrative form, with a selection of all-female collective biographies published before 1830. Prosopography or collective biography is a widespread genre of publication since the rise of print, as a convenient way to collect information about representative individuals in social, historical, or vocational categories, such as the learned men of Oxford, the founders of the United States, prominent African Americans, pioneers in cognitive science. For centuries, but more frequently with the increase of the reading public and publishing from the 1830s in Britain and North America, books have been published that collect women without men; these all-female collective biographies or prosopographies have been the primary means of recognition for women of all walks of life. The bibliography spans an extended century in which concerted attention to questions of women’s rights and roles, along with advocacy for the civil rights, education, and opportunities for other groups, generated many prescriptive and commemorative prosopographies. After World War II, a boom in publishing accompanies an inadvertent purge of many of the women honored in nineteenth-century collections.

There has been a surprising consensus in favor of praise of famous women as an appendix to the praise of great men. Over the centuries, it seemed that a nation or community was hardly worth its salt without its list of eminent women, and of women whose eminence was rarely due to selfless family devotion. As Christine de Pizan wrote in 1405, "All things which are feasible and knowable . . . are possible and easy for women to accomplish." The variety of female roles celebrated in these collections adds to the excitement of rediscovering many neglected books that serve as precursors to women’s studies. A search of this bibliography will lead to a wide array of examples of "how to make it as a woman," far beyond the nineteenth-century conventions that have become familiar from the study of contemporary advice literature or novels. Standards of feminine conduct are waived, more often than not, for the saints, queens, politicians, warriors, nurses, writers, assassins, mistresses, explorers, artists, reformers, farmers, entrepreneurs, celebrities, educators, and mothers, wives, or sisters of famous men—all types of "women in all ages and all countries," as a common phrase puts it. Of course the catalogues of women are highly selective. Most women have gone missing in history and have no printed memorial. But it is a salutary corrective to some generalizations about the lack of records of women in the past to search or browse through this bibliography and the contents of the books recorded here.

This is not a bibliography about women writers. Most of the books were written by men, and few of these men are well known today. Yet women writers are popular subjects of biographies in the collection; a user may readily search by name and find a list of the volumes that include a “life” of Charlotte Brontë, for example. Those interested in any particular historical woman, whether she was a writer or not, may locate a list of the entries in this bibliography that are known to include that woman’s biography. Currently it is possible to search by the author or the title of the publication, to search by word or phrase in the annotation, or to locate all works known to have been published in a given year. Further functions of cross referencing and sorting by topic are under construction.

This bibliography enhances and expands the printed bibliography published in How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (Chicago: U Chicago P, 2004); it includes annotations necessarily omitted from the book, adds new entries, and indicates publication data discovered since the book was published. Readers of How to Make It as a Woman may gain an understanding of ways to make use of this online bibliography, and will find there discussions many of the items in this bibliography. There readers also will find a Chronological Index of these items, synthesized in a graph of the Number of Collective Biographies per Year, as well as a "Pop Chart" that culls the most common subjects from nonspecialized collections during three twenty-year periods of heightened activism on women's rights and roles: 1850-1870, 1880-1900, and 1910-1930.

Many of the nineteenth-century publications remain in circulation in U.S. libraries. The History of Women microfilm series (New Haven, Conn.: Research Publications, 1975) makes many of the texts, including British publications, accessible in that limited medium. The University of Virginia Library owns many of these volumes and microfilms of more, and their Interlibrary Loan Service has been indefatigable in summoning beautiful, undervalued books from library stacks into my hands. Both the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and the British Library, London, hold an enormous but unaccounted wealth in collective biographies of women--distinct but often intersecting with American publications, and begging for more examination. Thorough dredging through OCLC WorldCat has yielded much (including some useful tables of contents); I would not be very surprised, and only a little sorry, if other prospectors panned new gold there or elsewhere in the future. This list, as complete as possible, nevertheless is offered as a starting point rather than a definitive study of the works in this mode. I do not claim to have seen or read all the entries.

With the support of Digital Scholarly Services, Special Collections, the Department of English and the editorial board of NINES, we are working on the documentation, markup, design, and substance of this site. A short-term goal is to provide links to available electronic texts of items in the bibliography. In 2007 we will launch a gallery of digital images of collections that include a life of the nursing reformer Sister Dora, followed by future galleries.

Please let us know if you have corrections or additions regarding book collections of short biographies of women published in English, in any country, before 1940: email Alison Booth at ab6j@virginia.edu.

-- Alison Booth, Professor, Department of English, University of Virginia