Women Historians and Acknowledgments: Scholarly Collaboration as Expression of Authorial Self in Alice Stopford Green’s Histories, c. 1880–1916

ABSTRACT Making historical knowledge is a social practice, and disciplinary etiquette encouraged Victorian historians to acknowledge their collaborators in publications. This essay argues that acknowledgments were not merely expressions of scholarly politeness but also crucial for historians’ self-fashioning. The meanings ascribed to the acknowledged names served as clues about a historian’s competence, methodological preferences, interpretative outlooks and cultural and ideological views, all of which constituted her scholarly self. The essay addresses the link between acknowledgments and self-fashioning by exploring how Anglo-Irish historian Alice Stopford Green (1847–1929) used the names of her collaborators to forge and express her competing and shifting scholarly selves. While her acknowledgments are reflections of her authorial selves, they also convey the impact that scholarly, gendered and ideological factors had on women’s historical endeavours and collaboration at the time.

Collaboration meant for historians the sharing of information and sources, help with proofing and editing, and mental encouragement.The idea of collaborative authorship, though, was unpopular among the emerging professional historians.They considered single-authored histories evidence of scholarly competence that awarded one membership in the scholarly community.Moreover, the subjective element in history writing discouraged joint authorship.Despite the appeals to detachment, historians recognised that history was not free from subjective judgement.Samuel Rawson Gardiner, champion of scientific history, explained how the production of historical knowledge entailed a selection of facts and an application of "constructive imagination", which meant that "it will never happen that any two men will be precisely agreed as to the relative importance of any set of facts". 8Consequently, those who ventured to engage in collaborative writing struggled to integrate diverging historical explanations into a seamless narrative.Frederic William Maitland who wrote with Frederick Pollock The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, confessed that he had quickly realised how "I wanted one thing while my yoke-fellow wanted another". 9Stopford Green, as I will show, made a similar discovery.
Stopford Green epitomises a late-Victorian woman historian who was pitched between amateurism and professionalism.She grew up in Meath but spent a large part of her life in London where she married the best-selling historian John Richard Green in 1877.She was widowed six years later, dedicating her life from then on to writing history and advancing cultural, social and political causes, first as a social reformer and then as a radical Irish nationalist.She became interested in the past when history was emerging in Britain as an academic discipline and a "branch of science".According to the common narrative of the professionalisation of sciences in Britain, it was a masculine project that validated men's expertise and restricted women's chances for engaging in research.Women were relegated to amateurism and rendered assistants to their male relatives. 10However, recent scholarship has begun to question this, and I agree with Heather Ellis, who has observed how the highlighting of women scientists' marginalisation quite ironically presented women "enjoying less agency than they actually had". 11n history writing, the late-Victorian era was a transitional period between amateurism and the formation of professional and disciplinary boundaries, and this indeterminacy facilitated women's historical research. 12Although the contours of the discipline were drawn by men with academic education, women were not entirely marginalised.They were encouraged to submit articles to the English Historical Review, their publications were noticed in the Review and other leading periodicals, their work was referred to in footnotes, and, as historians' surviving correspondence attest, women collaborated with the leading historians. 13While Stopford Green relished these opportunities, her brand of scholarship placed her among historians who oscillated between a disinterested commitment to facts and political partisanship.She is known today for her advocacy of Irish nationalism, which expanded from the pages of her histories to radical activism.Mixing history and politics was not extraordinary, but women had been perceived by their male peers as apolitical biographers of famous women, recorders of material culture or authors of nursery histories.However, as Mary Spongberg argues, women had used these "domestic" topics to discuss political questions already during the first half of the nineteenth century.14Stopford Green continued this tradition of women historians who mixed history and political engagement.The Town Life was inspired by her interest in social reform and liberalism, while the Making of Ireland advocated for Irish nationalism.As I will show, the different political modalities and the more explicit radical political intent in the latter work help to explain her distinct use of acknowledgments in the two books.
Stopford Green was an expert in the possibilities of networking, but there is a striking discrepancy between her actual collaboration and the deliberate sparseness of the acknowledgments in her books.Caoilfhionn Ní Bheacháin and Angus Mitchell have mapped her myriad scholarly, political, literary and cultural contacts and traced the societies and associations in which she was an active member. 15Within the field of history, her contacts included historians from multiple generations, showing how she updated her list of collaborators, which included eminent late-Victorian historians such as Stubbs, Gardiner, Mandell Creighton, Frederick York Powell, Lord Acton and William Edward Hartpole Lecky.After the turn of the century, she formed acquaintances with George Trevelyan and George Peabody Gooch.She also worked with Jean Jusserand, Eoin MacNeill and the famous Belgian mediaevalist Henri Pirenne.Yet, these eminent historians are barely mentioned in her acknowledgments.I would like to suggest that her mediated silences regarding her collaborators were an effective method for using acknowledgments in authorial self-fashioning.Historians did not necessarily need extensive lists of names for this exercise.A few carefully selected names in the prefaces and footnotes, pregnant with meanings, enabled Stopford Green to frame her divergent scholarly selves.
Indeed, Stopford Green's biography is characterised by competing, contradicting and shifting authorial poses.Brian Graham, writing about Irishness and mutability of identities, could just as well be describing her when he emphasises how "an individual may at one moment be identified as … a woman, elsewhere as middle class, sometimes as Irish, on occasion British and perhaps even European". 16Stopford Green became first known as the wife of John Richard Green, then as a young widow of a famous historian, a protector of his scholarly legacy, a social historian, a philanthropist and a hostess of a cultural and political salon in London.In the 1890s, she emerged as an ardent Irish nationalist and a proto-diplomat.As she reoriented her scholarly and political ambitions, her networks altered accordingly.These authorial modifications were inscribed in her acknowledgments, which betray her awareness of the significance names had in contextualising historical texts and endorsing authorial selves.expected their members to credit collegial assistance.Hence, my data of paratexts from 430 histories published in England between 1860 and 1900 shows the generosity of historians in acknowledging their colleagues and how Stopford Green deviated from this general trend through her cautious use of references to collaborators.Historians expressed gratitude not just to their colleagues, but also to archivists, librarians, college officials and owners of private papers who had allowed them to consult their collections.Unlike today, family members and editors went mostly unacknowledged.Historians not only inserted lists of names but prefixed them with brief explanations about the cooperation, thereby making visible the social construction of historical knowledge.17Acknowledgments tended to be "gender neutral" in that there were no noticeable differences in how those women and men who complied with the scientific method expressed indebtedness in prefaces and footnotes.Kate Norgate, for example, recorded in England under the Angevin Kings (1887) her collaborators and shortly described how they had contributed to her book.She credited her mentor John Richard Green, thanked the eminent historians Edward Freeman and William Stubbs for their help and advice, and explained how acknowledgments were also "due for some of the maps and plans" before enlisting the names of those who had helped her with these. 18he acknowledgments reflect the value that historians placed on the names of their collaborators because publishers rarely intervened with them.The records of Macmillan, which published Stopford Green's histories, betray no traces of editorial influence on historians' acknowledgments.The press secretaries for the Oxford University Press recommended only in a few instances revising or eliminating an acknowledgment they considered inappropriate. 19Historians, then, used their own discretion and guidance from the unwritten rules defining the use of acknowledgments in scholarly publications.It was this etiquette that rendered acknowledgments so effective for advertising expertise and fashioning authorial selves.
Two features of the established etiquette were critical to authorial performance.First, historians knew that names created expectations about authors and texts and shaped textual reception.As Mario Biagioli explains, the recognisable name of a scientist invokes associations with value, reliability and qualities such as truthfulness. 20The names of the acknowledged historians were similar purveyors of meaning and, according to Emily Apter, the "poetics of names operates as a currency of transference, enabling embodied self-properties to travel from one gifted subject to another". 21This kind of "scholarly celebrity gifting" created associations between the author and the intellectual qualities, skills, dispositions and moral character allocated to those being acknowledged.A proper name was shorthand for the sets of epistemic virtues, methodologies and scholarly practices that readers assumed the author then shared with those being acknowledged.Since names of the collaborators could lend distinction and place historians on the disciplinary map, it is not surprising that historians who worked together with Stubbs, the incarnation of a heroic historian, eagerly flagged his name in acknowledgments. 22The names of the collaborators, then, could lend distinction and place historians on the disciplinary map.The positive impact of this practice was not necessarily self-evident, as different groups of readers fostered rivalling ideas of what was considered good historical research and therefore ascribed contradictory meanings to the names mentioned in the acknowledgements.The reception of Stopford Green's Town Life will demonstrate how intensely readers used the acknowledgments to evaluate her and her book.
Another factor that made the acknowledgments attractive for expressing the scholarly self was the etiquette designed to prevent an improper use of names for selfish purposes.The guidelines were inspired by disciplinary ideals and Victorian notions of moral character.As the rules were grounded in honesty, selflessness, integrity and mutual respect, their violation would have implied a weak moral character.Two principles were particularly relevant to the promotion of scholarly selves: acknowledgments should have been selfless acts that profited both their senders and receivers and they should have entailed personal acquaintance and a shared understanding of history and its methods.The due regard and affinity inscribed in the acknowledgments meant that historians were deeply touched by the recognition.Their private collections abound with thank you notes that express delight after the colleagues had elevated them to the rank of "literary Peerage" in their prefaces. 23n indicator of the value of acknowledgments as designators of desirable qualities and peer validation was the fact that some historians ignored the etiquette.It was not uncommon that the names of leading historians circulated in books whose writers they either did not know or whose historical views they disapproved of.The misappropriation of the names suggests that the benefits of the names were so considerable that they outweighed the risks of the ensuing scolding for unsound scholarly conduct in reviews. 24ince historians and critics monitored the use of acknowledgments, especially younger historians could be anxious that their references to eminent historians were not falsely interpreted as opportunistic.Lewis Dibdin resolved this dilemma by soliciting permission from Stubbs for an acknowledgment, because otherwise it "might be misconstrued into an attempt to obtain the advantage of your imprimatur unjustifiably". 25ltogether, the meanings ascribed to the names and the etiquette of acknowledgments indicate that historians considered them as affirmations of their scholarly and moral character and convenient for managing impressions.

Spousal Collaboration: Disciple, Posthumous Assistant and an Advocate of Social History
The Town Life in the Fifteenth Century (1894) was Stopford Green's first major contribution to historical scholarship.She modelled herself in its acknowledgements as a 22 Garritzen, Reimagining the Historian, chapter 3. 23 Stubbs to Edward Freeman, 5 March [1867], MS.Eng.Misc.e. 148.Bodleian Library, Oxford; J. R. Green to Edward Freeman, 2 March 1867, in Stephen, Letters, 180;Frederick York Powell to Gudbrand Vigfússon, 1878, in Elton, Frederick York Powell, 45;Frederic William Maitland to Paul Vinogradoff, 12 June 1887, in Fifoot Letters, 32. 24 H. S. Maine to Edward Freeman, 3 January 1885, Papers of Edward A. Freeman, FA1/7/527, John Rylands Library; [Anon.],review of Early Britain, 607. 25 Dibdin to Stubbs, 10 April 1885, in Hutton, Letters, 268-9.disciple and widow of J. R. Green, as a champion of his historical visions and as a woman historian in her own right.The footnotes celebrated the alliance between women historians, while the front matter capitalised on her association with Green.She presented herself on the title page as "Mrs.J. R. Green", dedicated the book "In Memory of John Richard Green" and acknowledged only him in the preface.Her use of these paratexts suggest that she considered them as scholarly endorsements and as a genuine tribute to her late husband.For readers, the strong paratextual presence of Green was a cue to view her work as an extension of Green's own and regard her as his amanuensis who parroted his historical views.This corresponded with the pervasive image of history as a family venture where wives, daughters and sisters helped the historian in mechanical tasks.However, recent scholarship on marital collaboration in the sciences has encouraged a reassessment of this view of a scientist's wife as an able assistant.If anything, the myriad case studies that investigate the interplay of gender norms and the social, cultural and scientific structures shaping spousal collaboration and extending from amateur scientists to early social scientists and Nobel laureates betray a great variation in the forms of collaboration. 26Stopford Green, too, challenged the image of an amanuensis.First, her collaboration with Green was not fixed but evolved from that of a relationship between pupil and teacher to a complementary partnership and gained a unique quality when she carried on with it posthumously.Second, she resisted the role of an assistant alone.A closer reading of the preface to Town Life shows how she promoted herself also as the historian who spearheaded Green's mission to reform history writing in England and who assumed his role as the champion of social history at a time when professional historians focused on the history of political institutions, diplomatic intrigues, battles and powerful individuals.
Stopford Green had married Green in 1877, but his declining health had cast a shadow over their marriage, and she was left a widow in 1883 at the age of thirty-five.She became first known as Green's devoted assistant and then as "Mrs.John Richard Green, widow of the famous historian".But this was only part of the story; he had taught her the historian's craft, drilled her in the technicalities of publishing and introduced her to the historical community, to his friends in the radical liberal circles of London and to the Macmillan family. 27Indeed, the preface to Town Life documents what historians have observed more recently: the nineteenth-century "family-firms" in science and scholarship were not always premised on power hierarchies between a male genius and a female amanuensis.Rather, marital life could provide women with access to scientific work and chances to develop their skills. 28Stopford Green was certainly not a mere assistant, and just as with other scientific couples like Marie and Pierre Curie, and Beatrice and Sidney Webb, the Greens transformed their intimacy into a resource for intellectual creativity. 29Their collaboration came to rest on complementarity, and she grew into an important scientific role that not only enabled him to publish his work, but led to a co-authored publication, A Short Geography of the British Islands (1879).
Stopford Green used what she had learned from Green when she became increasingly absorbed in historical pursuits after his death.Macmillan commissioned her first to 26 Opitz, Lykknes, and Van Tiggelen, "Introduction," 1-4. 27Holton, "Gender Difference," 120-1; Garritzen, "Framing and Reframing Meanings," 185-6. 28Pycior, Slack, and Abir-Am, "Introduction," 4, 11-12. 29Pycior, Slack, and Abir-Am, "Introduction," 6-8; Yeo, "Social Science Couples," 229-32.complete Green's unfinished manuscript Conquest of England and then to revise the Short History of the English People, which had made him a household name.She was to repeat this task several times until the year 1916, when Macmillan issued the final revised edition of the book.She confined herself to the role of a widow in these early editorial projects and modestly acknowledged in the 1888 edition of the Short History the aid and counsel received from Stubbs, Creighton, Gardiner and James Bryce, not as a favour to her, but "out of their generous affectation for his memory". 30The editorial work labelled her a staunch admirer of her late husband, but the commemorative acts were not mere outlets for her sustained grief.As an astute businesswoman, she knew that the royalties from his books would provide her with a comfortable living and enable her to sponsor the social and political causes that were dear to her. 31 She arguably benefited from her status as the widow of a famous historian.Yet, it was not enough to satisfy her ambitions, as her friend Beatrice Webb observed, noting how Stopford Green longed for a position "to be gained by personal merit". 32Town Life was then the kind of historical project that enabled her to merge her widowhood and intellectual ambitions.It marked her as a historian in her own right and as an intellectual heir to Green.
The acknowledgments in the preface are characterised by Green's strong presence, as he was the only person whom she mentioned.She adopted a eulogising tone, and the preface was in many ways a continuation of the hagiographic and hyperbolic prefaces she had composed for the Conquest of England and for the first posthumous edition of the Short History. 33Town Life afforded her yet another opportunity to pay tribute to Green, but his name also had utilitarian value for her since she appropriated it to claim an authoritative status for herself and for her book.She introduced Green immediately in the very first sentence of the preface as the sole authority on the social history of mediaeval towns in England and then used his expertise to legitimise the topic and its historiographical value.He, according to her, had been the visionary historian who had recognised how profoundly the burghers and shopkeepers in mediaeval towns had shaped the course of history in England and ensured the continuity of English liberty.But the topic had not appealed to anyone else since Green, and the "overwhelming importance" of the growth of the municipal institutions "remained strangely neglected among us". 34This oversight allowed Stopford Green to relate herself as the only historian who had grasped the significance of the topic and enlarged upon it in her book.
Green, no doubt, shaped Stopford Green's historical outlook, but she also assumed a more assertive voice in the preface when she explained why historians had ignored mediaeval municipalities.She drew on her own reading of histories that had been published since "Mr.Green's day" to identify the reasons for this omission in English history writing. 35Antiquarians, according to her, had been drawn to "the buried relics of the Roman dominion" and mediaeval historians to "the monastery and cathedral tower", while historians of more general description had paid attention to towns only when 30 Stopford Green, "Preface," xvii; Green, "Introduction," xvi. 31Garritzen, "Framing and Reframing Meanings," 185-6. 32MacKenzie, Diary of Beatrice Webb, 289. 33Garritzen, "Framing and Reframing Meanings," 187-9. 34Green, Town Life, vii-viii. 35According to Stopford Green's footnotes, her reading included histories by John Horace Round, Maitland, Jusserand and Pirenne.She had also probed the series "Historic Towns," which Longman had been publishing since 1887.
their streets had "served as the stage for a critical scene in the national drama". 36She came forward here as a historian with a thorough knowledge of mediaeval history and historiographical traditions.By acknowledging Green's expertise and authority, and by combining them with her own explorations of mediaeval municipalities, she elevated the history of the common life in cities to an historically significant topic and herself as a paragon of social history.The preface's final paragraph readjusted Stopford Green's authorial self once more and consolidated her image as a devoted widow and an able assistant.She shifted the focus from the intellectual to the emotional and from the public to the domestic.As Helen Smith notes, dedications and acknowledgments can "make the private public", and Stopford Green's homage to Green laid bare the domestic side of history writing. 37Historians in general used the last paragraph of a preface to enlist collaborators, but Stopford Green composed an emotionally charged account of Green as her immortal guide.Drawing on the Victorian belief in eternal life, she let readers know that he had been spiritually present during the research process. 38She recollected their excursion to Ancona, where he had taught her to apply the topographical method by showing how to search for historical clues from a town's architecture.These memories of towns that told stories about the past had "unconsciously led me in the course of reading, to turn to the story of English boroughs", she now wrote. 39he concluding paragraph established Green as the driving force behind Stopford Green's historical work.She confessed that she would not have dared undertake such a research venture without his encouragement.With a sting of feminist critique towards the limited educational possibilities available to women, she recounted how she had suffered from a "lack of adequate preparation" for historical research.Her earlier education had been restricted to one year with a governess and the self-study of theological works in her father's library. 40She admitted that all the training in historical research she had received was due to her husband's abiding kindness.He had instructed her on the methods, skills and "temper" that a historian needed, and he had been confident in her skills. 41She used this story to persuade readers to trust in her abilities as an historian.It was also a message to the renowned historian Mandell Creighton and his wife Louise-and to anyone else-who had questioned her scholarly competence during the early years of her widowhood. 42If Green had found her skills adequate, that should have sufficed for everyone else as well, she seemed to profess.
Stopford Green corroborated the claim about Green's confidence in her in what can only be described as an emotional culmination to the preface.She painted a dramatic scene where he had begged her on his deathbed to promise that she would investigate the mediaeval municipalities.Since she had given her word to him, she had "felt bound by an imperative obligation to make the attempt".She drew the preface to a close by exclaiming how she had now made her "first beginning toward the fulfilling of that promise" and how "Such a work can only be closed with feelings of compunction and dismay". 43The eruption of emotions rendered this an exceptional closing for a preface in a book that was aimed at an educated audience.Unchecked emotions were considered a scholarly vice and a feminine trait.Prefaces and acknowledgments were no exception to this; legal historian Frederic William Maitland, after reading the draft preface that Mary Bateson had sent to him, advised her that if she wished to acknowledge him, "it must be in a simpler style" than what she had originally proposed. 44The emotional investment in Stopford Green's preface directed attention to the interlinking intimacy and intellectual creativity that had enriched their marital collaboration and made visible the joint effort of spouses.This challenged historians' habit of keeping domestic scholarly arrangements out of the public eye.
The acknowledgments opened several interpretive avenues to Town Life and invited critics to address Stopford Green's authorial poses.Their responses disclose how intensely readers scrutinised acknowledgments for clues about the text and its author.Several reviewers questioned her role as a pathbreaker.James Tait complained in the English Historical Review that there was too much pitching of novelty in the preface, as other historians had recently shown interest in the topic. 45The same point was stated more bluntly in the Bookman, where the reviewer Y.Y. mentioned Charles Gross's Gild Merchant; a Contribution to British Municipal History, which Stopford Green had "largely availed herself" of according to her footnotes.Her avowal of originality was therefore an exaggeration and "some acknowledgment" of Gross in the preface "would have been both just and graceful". 46While the reviewer Y.Y. did not ask her to acknowledge someone who she did not personally know, he encouraged her to add a courteous prefatorial credit to a historian whose work had benefited her greatly.References to important sources of inspiration that did not entail personal acquaintance were extremely common in prefaces, where they were rhetorically separated from the conventional acknowledgements.By limiting her acknowledgments to a minimum, Stopford Green had ignored the etiquette of scholarly politeness and the imperative of recognising the accomplishments of other historians.While her exclusionary strategy accentuated her originality, the omission of key names in her field exposed her to questions about her moral and scholarly integrity.
Another common theme in the reviews was to position Stopford Green beside her famous husband and to make gendered assumptions about her authorship.On the one hand, Green's name lent distinction to her book, but on the other its reception shows how the reliance on male authority for credibility could erode trust in women's scholarly autonomy.The idea of women historians' authority being subject to the guidance of a male mentor was commonplace. 47This mindset was not unique to men alone.Alice Law, in an acerbic review in the Economic Review, connected Stopford Green's work to Green's influence by reporting how scholars had been anxiously meditating for quite some time on what kind of history and theories Green's "widow and literary executor" would propound. 48The Athenaeum, for its part, wrote about Stopford 43 Green, Town Life, xii-xiii. 44Maitland to B. Fossett Lock, 17 July 1904, in Fifoot, Letters, 312. 45Tait, "Town Life," 157. 46Y.Y., "Town Life," 113. 47Garritzen, "Women historians," 655-8. 48Law, "Town Life," 365.
Green's promise to continue Green's research and concluded: "it is that genius and enthusiasm do not 'waste in the socket'; like other forces they are converted into light and heat for those who come after". 49This idea was pushed furthest in the Edinburgh Review, where E. S. Roscoe relegated her to a mere transmitter of Green's work in the very first sentences: The good that a man does lives after him is a saying of the truth of which this book is an instance.For though it is the work of Mrs. Green, it owes its being to the example and the bidding of her husband. 50e attributions in these reviews demonstrate, just as Bette London argues, that the gender norms were blind to women's authorial engagements in spousal collaboration and treated women mostly as helpmeets. 51Women were regarded as helpers even posthumously, as Roscoe proposed.A revealing illustration of the prevailing gender ideologies-and a contrast to the reception of Stopford Green's acknowledgmentswas the reaction to Edward Freeman's acknowledgment of his son-in-law, the archaeologist Arthur Evans.Freeman, a leading advocate of scientific history, made a confession in the preface to the Sketches from the Subject and Neighbour Land of Venice (1881): "how much I owe to his [Evans's] knowledge of South-Slavonic matters, words would fail to tell me". 52The Standard found this a "striking tribute", and the discomforted reviewer hastened to explicate that there was no reason to question the book's authorship.Freeman alone, the writer asserted, was the authority regardless of the gratitude he expressed to his son-in-law. 53he naming of Green in the preface enabled Stopford Green to forge authorial selves that both confirmed and contested the conventional idea of spousal collaboration.She emerged as a widow and the disciple of a great historian who had profoundly shaped her historical understanding and methodological preferences.This image was firmly planted in the minds of her readers, and William Barry still talked about her as "the widow of him who described 'The Making of England'" when reviewing The Making of Ireland in 1908-even though she did not acknowledge Green in the book. 54In Town Life, she moreover projected herself as a guardian of Green's scholarly legacy since historians were, according to her, either dismissive of or indifferent to social history.Finally, she articulated herself as an expert in the history of mediaeval municipalities and as someone who made an original contribution to historical knowledge.Most reviewers, however, treated the preface merely as an homage to Green and a confirmation of traditional feminine subordination.For other critics, the missing acknowledged names were an impetus to criticise her for violating the etiquette of polite acknowledgments and for making inflated claims about the uniqueness of Town Life.The acknowledgments in the book's footnotes added more depth to her disposition as an historian and an expert in municipal history.

Collaboration Between Women Historians: Promoter of Women's Research
The acknowledgments in the footnotes to Town Life in the Fifteenth Century claimed a stake for women's intellectual work.Stopford Green recognised in the notes the help that she had received from women historians and used these acknowledgements to promote herself as an advocate of women's historical endeavours.Stopford Green, just like many other literary and learned women, had signed the 1889 "Appeal against Female Suffrage", believing that men and women were endowed with different qualities.Yet, she later changed her mind on the matter.In an essay entitled "Woman's Place in the World of Letters" (1897), she promoted women's literary and scholarly work and urged the modern woman-too obsessed with the present, according to her-to turn her gaze to the past. 55By locating her references to women's collaboration in the footnotes, she was able to demonstrate how women historians had internalised the modern methods of historical research and produced trustworthy knowledge.Footnotes are considered first and foremost the storehouses of historical evidence or as repositories for digressions, but for the Victorian historians they were also a space where they denoted alliances and social hierarchies within the historical community. 56Indeed, as Joseph Bensman observes, footnotes should be conceived also as tools that help in demarcating scholarly coteries and placing writers within an academic field. 57Footnotes, then, serve both epistemic and social purposes, and it was precisely this dual role that made them an effective medium for Stopford Green to boost women's scholarly work.
In her footnotes, Stopford Green's style of acknowledgments was also distinctive.These footnotes did not mention any professional historians, but instead credited Mary Dormer Harris and Miss Greenwood, thereby calling attention to lesser-known historians who shared her interest in the social history of mediaeval municipalities. 58Miss Greenwood remains unidentified.Mary Dormer Harris (1867-1936) was a Warwickshire historian who had gone to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, in 1885 to study English. 59 She was conducting research for her first book, Life in an Old English Town (1898), when Stopford Green was writing Town Life.Dormer Harris's book was published in the series "Social England", which Kenelm D. Cotes from Oxford edited and Swan Sonnenschein published.According to the editor's preface, the series offered a corrective to the political and institutional histories that dominated the market in England. 60The preface echoed the historical credo of Green and Stopford Green and bracketed Dormer Harris as a social historian.Her most lasting historical legacy, however, was Coventry Leet Book (1907), which she edited for the Early English Text Society.She, too, corresponded with academic historians.One of her most important contacts was S. R. Gardiner, who for example offered to check on her behalf the Star Chamber 55 Stopford Green, "Woman's Place," 969. 56Bensman,"Aesthetics, Other historians whom she mentioned included Arthur Francis Leach, Mr Hudson and Mr Jacobs, none of whom were core members of the scholarly community either.59 Thirsk, "Women Local."60 Cotes,"Editorial Preface, records at the Public Record Office for details about the trial of the Protestant martyr Laurence Saunders. 61Two features in Stopford Green's acknowledgments enabled her to highlight the value of women historians' work: their location in the footnotes and the focus on research instead of the emotional support that women provided each other.Prefaces and footnotes appealed to different audiences and, as Genette puts it, reading footnotes is optional and they tend to be composed with a specific group of readers in mind.62 Victorian historians knew that the so-called general reader was likely to skip the notes, while the "serious student" scrutinised the bottom of the page with care.63 Consequently, prefatorial acknowledgments reached a broader audience than did acknowledgments in the notes.Even those who did not commit to buying a book might inspect the author's prefatorial greeting, at least before the dust jacket blurbs became popular during the first quarter of the twentieth century and replaced prefaces as the initial source of information about the book and its author. 64By acknowledging Greenwood and Dormer Harris in the footnotes, Stopford Green could direct the attention of a scholarly audience to women historians.
The paratextual location of the acknowledgments also helped Stopford Green to foster approval for women as experts when she combined the notes' epistemic and social functions, presenting Greenwood and Dormer Harris as reliable sources for specific pieces of information in her text.She explained in one footnote how Greenwood had supplied her with details about the social fabric of the Bridgwater townspeople.These facts derived "from her study of the muniments of the town". 65Another note credited Dormer Harris, describing how "All the materials which I have used in speaking of Coventry have been given me very kindly by Miss Dormer Harris, who has made a careful study of the town records on the spot, and will soon, it is hoped, publish the result of her research". 66By talking about Greenwood's and Dormer Harris's archival research, she subverted the gendered assumption of women as popularisers of historical knowledge and assured that women, too, were producers or original knowledge that rested on an exhaustive consultation of primary sources.As the example of Dormer Harris shows, she also crafted for herself the role of a mentor seeking to advance the careers of promising women historians by promoting their forthcoming books.
Moreover, Stopford Gren diverted attention from feminine affinity to an exchange of knowledge.According to Rosemary Mitchell, women abstained from presenting themselves as professionals in prefaces and rather portrayed their historical work as an extension of their domestic duties or as a matter of assisting their spouses. 67While Stopford Green's preface partially fits this description, she was reacting against the persistent image of domesticated and emotional women in the footnotes and instead celebrating women's competence and expertise.By talking about archival research and historical facts, she cultivated an image of women steeped in the culture of modern historical research.She knew that it was pivotal that women complied with the disciplinary 61 Dormer Harris, Life, 252. 62Genette, Paratexts, 324. 63Green to Freeman, 2 March 1867, in Stephen, Letters, 179. 64 Tanselle, Book-Jackets, 8-13, 64. 65Green, Town Life, 175-6. 66Green, Town Life vol.2, 202; for the other references to Dormer Harris, see pp. 15, 102, 104, 151. 67Mitchell, "Busy Daughters," 119.ideals, because they had to win approval from the "manly community" of professional historians. 68Without such validation, both women mediaevalists and the social life of mediaeval municipalities as a viable research topic could have been labelled marginal.Social history was considered in many quarters a feminine topic, insignificant, and a contrast to the manly field of political history with its societal relevance.Stopford Green certainly wanted to rebuke the image of social historians as futile women ever perusing "medieval washing-bills", as Andrew Lang disparagingly described them. 69he professional pose in the acknowledgments listed in footnotes becomes evident also when the notes are compared with Stopford Green's surviving correspondence with Dormer Harris or with her prefatorial acknowledgments of Kate Norgate.The intimacy absent in the acknowledgments was present in Stopford Green's letters to Dormer Harris.The letters, moreover, show how she assumed a role as Dormer Harris's mentor, advising the younger woman about publishing, spurring her to continue with her historical studies and rejoicing in her success. 70Dormer Harris repaid the kindness in Life in an Old English Town, recording in the preface how "Mrs.J. R. Green knows that I am grateful for the encouragement she gave me to continue the work, and for help which her wide knowledge in the subject of Town History made invaluable in the solution of many difficulties". 71nother contrast to the professionalism of the footnote acknowledgments is the recognition of Kate Norgate, which Stopford Green added to the preface that she composed for the first posthumous edition of the Short History of the English People in 1888.Norgate (1853-1935) was a historian, a friend and a disciple of Green.Her first book, England under the Angevin Kings (1887), was welcomed with enthusiasm, but perhaps because of her timidity she never established herself as a member of the professional community in the way that Stopford Green or Dormer Harris did. 72Stopford Green and Norgate worked together to compile a four-volume illustrated edition of Short History (1892-1894), and the difference in the way that she acknowledged Norgate first in the preface to the 1888 edition and then in the illustrated edition shows how she had repositioned herself from being Green's widow to an advocate of women historians.In 1888, she foregrounded Norgate's feminine attachment and devotion to an eminent historian by gratefully recognising her affinity both to Green and to herself.The preface noted that "throughout the whole work Miss Norgate has rendered services which the most faithful and affectionate loyalty could alone have prompted". 73he preface in the illustrated edition shifted the balance from emotions to professional dedication.Stopford Green first reported how the search for and selecting of illustrations for the four volumes had been a "laborious task" and then added how "Miss Kate Norgate has worked with a devotion and intelligent care for which I cannot render adequate thanks". 74By abandoning the sentimentality and intimacy characteristic of acknowledgments in the 1888 edition of Short History, and by focusing instead on women's scholarly endeavours, she emphasised women's intellectual abilities and commitment to such ideals of modern historical research as self-restraint and perseverance.This change in the modalities of her acknowledgments corresponded with the adjustment of her scholarly self.As a young widow preparing the first posthumous edition of a book that had made her husband a publishing sensation, she was struck by the outpouring of sympathy and kindness she had received from his colleagues and friends.She inscribed these feelings in the acknowledgments as well.When she transformed herself into a historian in her own right, her repertoire of authorial selves diversified to include authority as a social historian and a supporter and mentor of women historians.Locating recognition of the communal pursuits of women historians in the footnotes enabled her to accentuate women's accomplishments and challenge the persistent gender hierarchies that shaped the images of learned women.She indeed had her work cut out for her here!When the Penny Illustrated Paper wrote about her in 1894, the writer presented her both as Green's "secretary and helper" and as someone who displayed "great fondness" for historical studies, "usually regarded as of masculine character". 75llaboration Concealed: An Arbiter of Irish Nationalism When Stopford Green was applying the finishing touches to the Making of Ireland and its Undoing in 1908, she wrote to Macmillan about how "The point about this book is that it is not only historical but will be used politically". 76This captures well her metamorphosis into a social historian with a radical nationalist bent.If Town Life had carried subtle traces of her interest in social justice, her readers had no difficulty in situating the Making of the Ireland within its ideological context.She now applied her expertise in mediaeval and social history to Ireland and announced in the preface that her aims were to prove how Ireland had had a unique economic, social and cultural life before the Tudor conquest and to repudiate the supposed barbarity of pre-colonial Ireland.She boldly declared that her book would cure the Irish "hearts" damaged by the false histories that the English had imposed on them."It is in the study of their history alone that Irishmen will find this just pride restored, and their courage assured", she proclaimed. 77he Making of Ireland marked her departure from the lofty ideal of impartiality that professional historians had been propagating, and she claimed for herself a place among that strand of Irish women historians who mixed historical research and political engagement. 78She adjusted her acknowledgments to correspond with her new authorial image.This time, however, it is critical to ask whom she excluded from her acknowledgments rather than whom she included in them.
Stopford Green saw Irish history in terms of the present; collating the past and present was common among those who wrote about Irish history.But Irish nationalism was not for her merely an approach that she applied to history.She also assumed for herself a position as a mediator between British radical Liberals and nationalists in Ireland, and she supported the Irish cause financially, through her writings and lectures, and by participating in radical political action.She had a central role in the Howth gun-running in 1914, and she provided shelter for nationalists in Dublin and London.Her activism was rewarded in 1922 when she became one of four women elected to the newly formed Irish Senate. 79She was also involved in the Gaelic League, which was instrumental to the cultural revival of Ireland.Eoin MacNeill, the co-founder of the League, was one of her most important collaborators.The material paratexts to the Making of Ireland made her affiliation with the League evident, as two versions of it were produced: a costlier version for the English market and a cheaper adaptation for the Irish market with "For the Gaelic League" written on its spine instead of the name of the publisher. 80topford Green was once again sparse with her acknowledgments.The preface did not contain any expressions of gratitude or allusions to collaboration.She only added a brief paragraph after her prefatorial signature, where she informed readers about how H. Egan Kenny had helped her "both in suggestions and corrections".She acknowledged Kenny also once in a footnote. 81This was not much.Refraining from namedropping was not accidental, and it is possible to speculate on at least some of the reasons behind her strategy.
First, by withholding the names of her English collaborators, Stopford Green distanced herself from scientific history, which was associated with the inductive method and impartiality.She rebutted the ideal of impartiality as both impossible and impractical.The debates about Irish history had revealed to her the prejudices underlying the claims of English historians to "neutrality" and "fairness" in their writing: for them, a strictly impartial historian was loyal to "the fixed point, England" and Irish writers were doomed to fanaticism and dogmatism. 82Against this backdrop, impartiality appeared as a delusion.She, moreover, linked impartiality with unwelcome pedantry.According to her, the obsessive reliance on documents that impartiality entailed constrained the narrative techniques too much and turned history into a mere dry chronicling of events, which offput the general reader.She preferred the "picturesque" history, which was accessible to readers from different backgrounds but which the professional elite disdained as outmoded and unreliable. 83t was pivotal for Stopford Green's immediate political purposes that her book reached the widest possible audience in Ireland, England and North America.Foregrounding the proponents of scientific history could have undermined its success by sending the wrong message about its style and anticipated audience.This idea of approachable history was in line with her historical pursuits more generally.George Trevelyan, an opponent of scientific pedantry, was her trusted advisor, and she was a member of the British Historical Association and its first female president between 1915 and 1918. 84While the Royal Historical Society had undergone a change from being a community of dilettantes to a professional society around 1900, gradating towards more professional and masculinist membership, the British Historical Association nurtured an opposing policy and welcomed teachers and amateurs who had been barred from the RHS. 85econd, the muted acknowledgments allowed Stopford Green to repudiate Unionist interpretations of Irish history and saved her from giving prominence to historians whose ideas she rejected.As different fractions used the past to legitimise Englishness or a particular brand of Irishness, it was nearly impossible to write history that would have satisfied everyone.What they all agreed, though, was that the present politics were justifiable with historical examples. 86Stopford Green's preface was so explicit about her political goals that she would not have needed any further sanctions for expressing her nationalist views or for crafting her scholarly self as a "partisan" historian, as the Academy dubbed her. 87The withdrawal of any hints of her contacts with Unionist historians only further confirmed her loyalties.Instead of giving visibility to historians with rival viewpoints, she spotlighted Henry Egan Kenny who was interested in the social and economic history of mediaeval Ireland and lectured about Irish history at the Young Ireland Society in London and at the National Literary Society in Dublin. 88She gave prominence to him by explaining in the preface how he had "for some years made a laborious study from the first-hand sources on the commercial and industrial life of Ireland throughout the Middle Ages" and by referring to him in one footnote as a source of information, just as she had referred to Dormer Harris and Greenwood in Town Life. 89For Kenny, the recognition was valuable.His letters to Stopford Green indicate a great admiration for a charismatic and renowned woman and a delight for the prospect of having "a line" in the preface describing his collaboration. 90inally, while her exclusion of Unionist historians and the professional establishment was predictable, it is harder to explain why she did not promote her collaboration with any Irish scholars other than Kenny, even though she had extensive connections with academics in the world of Irish letters.It is likely that she knew that her revisionist view of Irish history would engender controversy and wanted to spare her allies from unfavourable publicity.Moreover, she might have just been modest.Four years after the Making of Ireland was published, perhaps emboldened by its success and her growing authority in Ireland, she disclosed her contacts with MacNeill in the preface to The Old Irish World.She not only acknowledged how he had allowed her to use "some of his researches", but audaciously urged one of the leading scholars in Ireland to "publish before long the results of his original work". 91Next to advancing women's careers, she now used her paratexts to promote Irish learning as well; first, she promoted Egan Kenny, who later became the principal librarian of the Irish Free State Parliament, and then she gently stirred MacNeill, a more seasoned scholar, to give to the public the results of his research.
As Stopford Green had predicted, the Making of Ireland provoked fierce criticism from English and Unionist historians. 92She responded to her critics in a revised edition issued in 1909.She defended herself in a new preface, where she modified the acknowledgments to endorse her interpretations and self-image.She replaced the reference to Kenny with an allusion to an ambiguous "Irish scholar" and recounted how he had suggested "that in the interest of goodwill I should omit some reflections of modern English versions of Irish history".Yet, this "gentleman" had retracted his suggestion after visiting England and witnessing "the effects produced in schools" by the textbooks, which only replayed the partisan English interpretation of Irish history. 93Since history played such a central role in stimulating nationalistic loyalty in English schools, Stopford Green had envisioned her book being used in classrooms as a corrective.The anecdote reinforced the importance of her endeavour since it demonstrated that she was not just a scholar with historiographical inclinations; her work was of broad practical significance to Ireland.
This was not the only occasion when Stopford Green relied on anonymous authorities to make a case.The unnamed figures were for her representatives of groups with collective expert knowledge that sanctioned her claims.She appealed to the opinions of anonymous booksellers and readers when she persuaded Macmillan to improve the paratexts in Green's books or her own books. 94She introduced in the preface to the illustrated edition of the Short History of the English People an "American" to demonstrate how the book had strengthened overseas readers' understandings of "the common tie that bound English speaking people together". 95Just as with the "Irish scholar" in the Making of Ireland, these anonymised contacts were important for Stopford Green's scholarly, ideological and commercial ambitions and highlight how historians were composites of the differing roles and selves that accompanied them.

Epilogue
The acknowledgments in Town Life and the Making of Ireland illustrate how mentioning names was a tool for fashioning scholarly selves and for indicating the historiographical and ideological contexts of scholarly works.Stopford Green fostered broad networks with historians, other scholars, literary figures and politicians, but the sparsity of the recognition of these contacts in her books convey an entirely different image of her networks.This silence about her collaborators is revealing; since names projected qualities and shaped readers' expectations about herself and her texts, she was careful with the names she chose to display.The deliberateness of her strategy becomes even more apparent in the final revised edition of Green's A Short History of the English People, which was published in 1916.
Stopford Green had agreed with Macmillan to expand the book's eight-page epilogue, which covered the nineteenth century and had been criticised from the start for its brevity.She was, however, hesitant to write the section about political history and solicited F. R. Harris to write the part about empire and foreign affairs.Their collaboration was strained by different historical views, and, according to her, she "radically corrected" the texts that Harris produced.She realised that acknowledging Harris would have exposed her to questions about their diverging notions of history. 96Garritzen,"Framing and Reframing Meanings, had saved her "from giving any names of helpers!" 97 Eventually she added a short line to the existing preface, explaining that "In the Epilogue, I gratefully acknowledge special assistance given me by Mr. F. R. Harris in the survey of continental problems throughout the middle of the nineteenth century".This was far from granting Harris a share in the book's authorship, and the impression was further enhanced by the title page, which stated that the book was "revised and enlarged, with epilogue by Alice Stopford Green".To Harris, she defended her ungenerous gesture by professing how this "will avoid your being implicated in any matters in which we do not agree".98 By 1916 she had become so secure in her authorial self that she was confident enough to both rework and at times elide the work of a male co-author whose historical views did not align with her own.It is not hard to see the irony in her paratextual decision.
The events that preceded the publication of the epilogue show how acknowledged names generated meanings that were used for shaping the textual reception and an historian's public image.While Stopford Green's collaboration with numerous historians attest to history writing as a social process, she was willing to hide those collaborators whose names she perceived harmful to her larger aims or self-fashioning.The strategic use of acknowledgments suggests that an author like Stopford Green could consider the shielding of personal interests to be more important than the adherence to the disciplinary etiquette of crediting collegial assistance.Historians' penchant for namedropping was then situational and contingent on the order of scholarly, ideological, commercial and other priorities guiding their texts and desired public image.