4Before Macaulay was cruelly ridiculed for this May-December marriage, she had changed the landscape for women and history writing. Her reception was built upon her status as « the female historian ». Kate Davies argues that Macaulay « occupies a culturally liminal position […] between masculine and feminine in Britain's gendered division of knowledge »10. Nowhere is this more immediately evident than in Macaulay's nickname. We must ask how Macaulay came to be seen as « the female historian », since – ¬as we know –¬ there were many others who came before her. Among them we might name Mary Astell, Elizabeth Cary (Viscountess Falkland), Margaret Cavendish (the Duchess of Newcastle), Lady Anne Clifford, Elizabeth Elstob, Ann, Lady Fanshawe, Lucy Hutchinson, and Sarah Scott. It seems likely that the reasons that many previous women writers – at least those who published – were not being called « female historians » had much to do with the fact that English history writing changed radically from the English Civil War to the mid-eighteenth century. During that period, the words « history » and « historian » were undergoing significant denotative and connotative shifts.
11 S. Staves, op. cit., p. 322.
12 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols., 2nd. ed., London, 1755–1756, I, n.p.
5The English felt they were behind the rest of Europe when it came to achievements in historiography. In the first half of the eighteenth century, it had become a source of national shame that the best historians of England were French, rather than English11. By mid century, the English seemed almost desperate for an accomplished historian from their own country. When Samuel Johnson published his dictionary in 1755, he would define the word « historian » as a writer of facts and events. He quotes in his definition a use of the word from Addison's Freeholder : « Our country », Addison is quoted as saying, « which has produced writers of the first figure in every other kind of work, has been very barren in good