Summary
Georgiana Hill (8 December 1858 – 29 March 1924), was a British social historian, journalist, and women's rights activist.
Early life edit
Georgiana Hill was born on 8 December 1858, at 9 Mount View, Lambeth, London, the younger of two daughters of George Hill (1822–1897), a master printer, journalist, and newspaper publisher, and his wife, Emily, née Kitson (1815–1894).[1] George Hill was the founder and editor of the local newspaper, the Westminster and Lambeth Gazette, and was a local political activist, including being the representative for Lambeth on the Metropolitan Board of Works.[1]
Career edit
Neither Hill nor her older sister, Emily Hill (1851/52–1936) ever married, and they worked and lived together until Hill's death in 1924.[1]
Georgiana and Emily Hill were active in an extensive array of social and philanthropic movements, and actively participated in their father's business.[1] They worked as journalist, and also trained other women in composition, proof-reading, journalism, and such like connected matters. Georgiana and Emily wrote the "Woman's Page" in the Westminster and Lambeth Gazette up until their father's retirement in 1891.[1]
Georgiana published A History of English Dress from the Saxon Period to the Present Day in 1893, a "classic example of the cultural and social history publications characteristic of late nineteenth-century amateur women historians", in which she consistently criticised fashions that were uncomfortable, ostentatious or impractical.[1]
In 1896 Georgiana published Women in English Life from Medieval to Modern Times, which examined the experience of women of all classes over time, within an overall liberal and progressive viewpoint.[1] However, she noted that there was "no unvarying progress from age to age", and that there were losses as well as gains over time.[2]
Georgiana was a suffragist.[2] She has been called a "successor to the Strickland sisters and Mary Anne Everett Green, and the foremother of Alice Clark and Eileen Power".[1]
Publications edit
- A History of English Dress from the Saxon Period to the Present Day (1893)
- Women in English Life from Medieval to Modern Times (1896)
Later life edit
Hill died on 29 March 1924, at her home at 3 Blenkarne Road, Wandsworth, London, of pneumonia.[1] She is buried in Wandsworth Cemetery.[1]
Identity edit
For much of the twentieth century Hill's identity and work was conflated with that of her namesake, Georgiana Hill, the cookery book writer:[3] the historian Joan Thirsk, in her introduction to Women in English Society, 1500–1800 (1985) discusses the social historian as having "extraordinary success as an author [that] started with her cookery books which sold cheaply ... and in very large numbers".[4] In 2014 the historian Rachel Rich wrote the entry for Georgiana Hill (the cookery book writer) for inclusion in the Dictionary of National Biography.[5]
References edit
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j Mitchell, Rosemary (2004). "Hill, Georgiana (1858–1924)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). ODNB. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/46558. ISBN 9780198614111. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
- ^ a b Johanna Alberti (10 July 2014). Gender and the Historian. Routledge. p. 3. ISBN 978-1-317-87710-3. Retrieved 19 November 2017.
- ^ Rich, Rachel (2014). "Hill, Georgiana (1825–1903)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/106198. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
- ^ Thirsk, Joan (1985). "Introduction". In Prior, Mary (ed.). Women in English society, 1500–1800. London: Routledge. p. xvi. ISBN 978-0-4150-7901-3.
- ^ Braithwaite, Carrie (18 September 2014). "Victorian cookery writer's life revealed for first time". Leeds Beckett University. Retrieved 10 May 2020.