1. Devoney Looser has shown that ‘as a relatively fluid and immensely popular genre, history provided a rich area of discourse for women writers to mine’ while they also ‘participated, tangentially and head on, in debates about history writing that effected change’. Devoney Looser, British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670–1820 (Baltimore, M D: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), pp. 2–3.
2. Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
3. Alison Booth has identified that from 1850 to 1900 Lady Rachel Russell appeared 21 times in ‘nonspecialized’ collections of female lives in English (compared to 17 appearances by Elizabeth I, 18 by Madame Roland and 18 by Florence Nightingale). There is a decline in interest in Lady Russell after 1900. Alison Booth, How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 394–6.
4. Lois G. Schwoerer, Lady Rachel Russell: “One of the Best of Women” (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), p. xvii.
5. Susan Wiseman, Conspiracy and Virtue: Women, Writing, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 343.