Yet the stridency of Martineau's instructions to friends, family and colleagues to destroy her letters - her willingness to give up a correspondence rather than compromise - bespeaks not just a stubborn disposition, or what W.

R. Greg called, in his memorial essay on Martineau published in The Nineteenth Century in 1877, a "too imperious and impetuous conscience", but also a long- standing struggle to exert control over her image and public reputation, despite many claims to the contrary. After "giving notice" to the phrenologist George Combe of her injunction against any preservation of her letters, she writes in 1843, "Suffice it now that it arises from no care in regard to my own reputation, - wh I never tried to gain or to keep, & shall not begin to trouble myself about now". But trouble herself she did, most famously by preparing her own obituary in 1855 (it wasn't published until after she died, in 1876). One cannot blame Martineau for seeking control of her image, given the malicious reaction her writings inspired in those unable to accept the fact of a woman daring to write on subjects deemed off-limits. She laughs off John Wilson Croker's characterization of her as "False, foul, and unfeminine" in the Quarterly Review, but one senses in much of the correspondence a careful and sustained counterattack, an entirely understandable desire to better those who questioned, criticized, or maligned. She chose the

Athenaeum as the outlet for Letters on

Mesmerism because it had previously ridiculed the practice; to Edward Bulwer

Lytton she explains, "I refused all papers that were on our side already, & preferred disarming an enemy".

Harriet Martineau was not nearly as cantankerous as that might imply, however, and given how many controversial topics she wrote about - American slavery, taxation, British India, among many others - it is remarkable how skilled she was at managing conflict among her correspondents. To be sure, she was inclined to make critical asides here and there. The publisher John Murray

III is condemned as a "censor of the press", the American newspaper Editor Horace

Greeley's "manners are detestable", the Revd Sydney Smith is "such a Mammon priest", the American statesman, and one-time

President of Harvard University, Edward Everett is "a wriggling worm as I always knew him to be". Nor was she immune to professional rivalry; she showed little patience with Carlyle's "bellowing", deplored George Eliot's "bad art" and was ready to take

Dickens to task both for his representation of the American people and for his treatment of his wife. If Martineau had an enemy, it was not an individual but an institution. The "wonderfully ignorant" Times newspaper comes under steady, sustained fire throughout her correspondence for "wickedly raising false alarms" and generally "villainous conduct". It is, in her summation, a "rotten old oracle". (Martineau's allegiance was to the Daily News, the paper that treated her as a "gentleman of the press" during her fourteen years of writing for it.)

While a few relationships fell by the wayside under the pressure of conflicting opinion, none was more affecting to Martineau than that with her brother James, described in early idolizing days as "glorious" and as "that wonderful personage, the Reverend James". Relatively few letters survive, but they document a steady erosion of feeling, intense pride in him giving way to more moderate respect, trust evaporating as feelings of betrayal come to dominate. No single calamitous disagreement was to blame; instead, differences over Martineau's restriction on the use of her letters (James destroyed them but secretly took notes in shorthand), over the questions dearest to Martineau's heart, especially abolition, and over James's ponderous disposition and his scornful response to her own rising fame took their toll. James's scathing review of Letters on Mesmerism (titled "Mesmeric Atheism" and published in the Prospective Review in 1851) was the final straw. "He has traduced & insulted Mr Atkinson", Martineau wrote to Frances Ogden. "Above all, he has forfeited my esteem irreconcilably; & the only honesty and decency are in silence."

One nevertheless comes away from the collected correspondence impressed with her many abiding friendships and strong working relationships, forged over years of shared work on pressing social problems, and surviving the inevitable strains. The

Unitarian minister William Fox, Editor of the Monthly Repository, served as a crucial mentor to Harriet Martineau in her earliest stages of authorship; she made no bones of her disapproval when Fox abandoned his wife to live with his ward, Eliza Flower, yet their friendship continued. While in America in the late 1830s for an extended tour,