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"HOW MANY TRAVELLERS from all lands have visited this dwelling among the Westmoreland mountains as a shrine!" (377). So begins Maria Weston Chapman's 1877 homage to The Knoll, Harriet Martineau's Ambleside home. By the 1870s The Knoll had become a regular stop on literary tours of the Lake District. This was of course partly due to the fact that Martineau's literary reputation had established her as a central figure in most major political and social controversies of her day, including industrial relations, women's rights, and abolition. By the time she came to settle in the Lake District, Martineau had already published over a dozen successful works, including Illustrations of Political Economy , Society in America , and Deerbrook . She had also published numerous articles in literary periodicals such as the Westminster Review , Tait's Edinburgh Magazine , and the Monthly Repository .
Just as important to the emergence of The Knoll as a literary shrine were Martineau's own efforts at self-promotion. This essay will explore how Harriet Martineau participated in constructing her own public image as a literary icon by first building and then publicizing her Lake District home. Martineau facilitated the emergence of The Knoll as a tourist destination by publishing works focused on the landscape and culture of the Lakeland region. These efforts included her Autobiography , published posthumously in 1877; "A Year at Ambleside," published in Sartain's Union Magazine in 1850; "Lights of the English Lake District," published in Atlantic Monthly in 1861; and Complete Guide to the English Lakes , published in five editions from 1855 to 1876. In these texts, Martineau traces her own rise to fame and domestic fulfillment and tells the stories of other Lakeland settlers-William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Frederika Bremer. Working both inside and outside notions of domestic femininity and Wordsworthian fame, Martineau provided a model of how women could capitalize on the emerging industry of literary tourism as a way of enhancing their status as literary celebrities. At the same time, she drew attention to the ways that women could assume positions of agency and independence through their engagement with the natural world.
Martineau used her Lake District publications as a means of fusing her identity with the local geography, which was already...