Mathews (née Kirkham Strong), Eliza Kirkham

Eliza Kirkham Mathews (1772–1802) was a novelist and poet whose work engages with issues of feminism, romanticism, and issues of class and poverty. Influenced by Charlotte Smith, Anne Radcliffe, and Mary Wollstonecraft, she is the author of the feminist novel What Has Been (1801), and is probably the author of the posthumously published gothic Griffith Abbey (1807), as well as two books of poems (1796 and 1802) and several children’s books. A number of other works have been falsely or improbably attributed to her. She was married to Charles Mathews (1776–1835), who became a famous comedian known for the “monopolylogue.” Most of what is known about her life comes from Anne Jackson Mathews’s (Charles’s second wife) extremely subjective account of her in The Memoirs of Charles Mathews, Comedian (1838); Mathews’s fiction and poetry tantalizingly verifies some of this account, providing what may be her own perspective on her grief and also her economic struggles as a writer. Most notably, What Has Been is a self-conscious novel about women’s authorship, marriage, and poverty that includes a character based on her own publisher, William Lane, proprietor of the infamous Minerva Press (1790–1820); the ending is a discourse among the characters suggesting that marriage is often a poor option for women. Minerva, which ushered dozens of new novelists (many of them women) into the market in the 1790s, was increasingly stigmatized by its critics as a factory for derivative novels (Blakey, The Minerva Press: 1790–1820. London: Oxford University Press, 1939, 26–47; McLeod, The Minerva Press. Ph.D. diss., University of Alberta, 1997, 52–53; Neiman, Minerva’s gothics: the politics and poetics of romantic exchange, 1780–1820. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 2019, 1–2; also 8–11). While What Has Been (like Minerva itself) was all but forgotten by the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf wrote a short piece about Mathews entitled “Sterne’s Ghost” (1925) based on an anecdote depicted in Anne Jackson Mathews’s biography (1967).