Publications
Books
'Pam Hirsch’s rigorously researched and riveting biography of the writer and political activist Phyllis Bottome makes a significant contribution to the ongoing project of creating a more inclusive and therefore fluid and comprehensive literary history of modern British culture…Theoretically informed but unencumbered by obfuscating jargon and abstractions, Pam Hirsch’s book makes Phyllis Bottome’s life and work matter.'
Phyllis Lassner, ‘Twentieth-Century Literature 56.4 Winter 2010
'Phyllis (I really can’t call her ‘Bottome’) was a heroic figure. The BBC news, announcing her death in 1963, called her ‘the champion of the underprivileged and the misunderstood’.'
'The Constant Liberal is impeccably researched and straddles that awkward line between general biography and a work of academia. There are nearly a hundred pages of notes and biographical references, and the plots of many of her books are exhaustively spelt out.'
'My immediate reaction to this excellent biography of an excellent woman was surprise. Why didn't I know more about her already?'
‘I have nearly finished reading your wonderful biography of Phyllis. B. and don’t want it to end – a considerable tribute to any book, and some indication of the success of all your work. It really is a great story and you’ve told it with the right degree of understanding and intelligent affection that your remarkable subject needs.’
John Pearson, biographer of Ian Fleming
‘Pulling off the rare trick of being scholarly and very readable, the book is ever mindful of the late Victorian context – a world dominated by social class where the very word “education” had a wide variety of meanings, depending on which social stratum was being educated.’
Gerald Haigh, Times Educational Supplement
'Together and separately, the authors raise important questions about class and gender.'
‘This study considers the educational ideals and achievement of Oscar Browning and Elizabeth Hughes, who played key roles in promoting teacher training in late Victorian Cambridge. …The authors explains that rather than adopting a top-down approach emphasising administrative structures or official policy making, they chose to emphasise how their subjects’ educational outlooks were informed by their “lived experience both inside and outside the classroom” and their “personal and emotional investments in their projects’
History of Education Quarterly
‘Pam Hirsch and Mark McBeth bring the skills of the biographer to bear in this study of the Victorian pioneers of teacher education at Cambridge. There are new insights here on the history of pedagogy and on the struggle to professionalize schoolteaching, and also vivid portraits of two powerful and contrasting personalities.’
Janet Howarth, St Hilda’s College, Oxford
‘In exploring the thinking of two nineteenth-century educators at Cambridge, Hirsch and McBeth reveal the important and forward-looking contributions that Elizabeth Hughes and Oscar Browning made to British teacher training. This thoughtful contribution to educational philosophy and practice underscores how the past can inform and enlighten current work on both sides of the Atlantic. By recovering Hughes’ and Browning’s initiatives as well as their disagreements, these authors point to the polemics of the teaching profession in our own century.’
Sondra Perl, Professor of English and Urban Education, The Graduate Centre of the City University of New York
‘Despite their presence in large numbers in the teaching profession, historians of education have largely ignored women educationists. The prevailing patriarchal framework of analysis has obscured the gendered nature of educational management…Mary Hilton and Pam Hirsch make useful connections between women who, hitherto, have been either ignored or considered in isolation’Stephanie Spencer, Women’s History Review
‘This attractively presented book has much to offer both specialists and the general reader’.
Janet Howarth, Women’s History Review
'Practical Visionaries is a book that belongs on the shelf of everyone who is interested in the history of education.'
‘The history of education in Britain has a dominant narrative that positions men centre-stage in policy-making, institutional leadership, theoretical ideas, and innovations in teaching methods. Since educational history has focused on parliamentary politics, this is hardly surprising; after all, women were not allowed to vote in parliamentary elections or stand for election as parliamentary candidates until 1918. But if we shift the lens away from parliament and take a broader view, we find a number of influential women who made their mark in education…this readable book helps us to rescue these women from obscurity’
June Purvis, Times Higher Education
'It is extraordinary that Barbara Bodichon is not a better-known figure in British history. Hirsch's totally absorbing biography opens up the life and times of one of the most charismatic women of the 19th century.'
‘Little has been written about Barbara Bodichon. Pam Hirsch rectifies this with gusto and a fine attention to detail…a full, affectionate, attentive biography’
Frances Spalding, Daily Telegraph
'It is clear that the young Barbara was someone who inspired adoration; her female devotees saw her as a goddess, Princess Ida, a modern Valkyrie, an inspiration in an enthusiastic cult mixing idealism and physical freedome, dancing without stays, bathing naked and reading political economy.'
Lindsay Duguid, Times Literary Supplement
'Hirsch’s biography does a good job of integrating every aspect of the many-sided Bodichon without becoming bitty. Here is the Algerian landscape painter, the London legal mind, the Cambridge benefactor and the Sussex lady (although she would have hated that tag), all pulling together. Perhaps the secret of Hirsch’s seamless narrative is the fact that Bodichon herself had already learned to deal fruitfully with the tensions in her life.’
Kathryn Hughes, Literary Review
‘A meticulous record of Barbara’s life …her spirit of adventure is admirably converyed , rehabilitating a woman recently described as “perhaps the most important unstudied figure of mid-century English feminism”’
Joan Smith, Daily Express
Book chapters
- Hirsch, P. (2000) 'Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon: Feminist Leader and Founder of the First University College for Women', in Practical Visionaries: Women Education and Social Progress (eds. Mary Hilton and Pam Hirsch). Longmans.
- Hirsch, P. (1996) 'Mary Wollstonecraft: a problematic legacy?' in Wollstonecraft's Daughters, (ed. Clarissa Campbell Orr). Manchester University Press.
- Hirsch, P. (1995) 'Gender Negotiations in Nineteenth Century Women's Writing' in Uses of Autobiography, (ed. Julia Swindells). Taylor & Francis, Gender Change and Society series.
- Hirsch, P. (1995) 'Barbara Bodichon: artist and activist' in Women in the Victorian Art World, (ed. Clarissa Campbell Orr). Manchester University Press.
Journal Entries
- Hirsch, P. (2005) Keynote Lecture at History of Education Conference 2004. Published as 'Apostle of Freedom: Alfred Adler and his British disciples' in History of Education volume 34 number 5 September 2005.
- Hirsch, P. (2004) The George Eliot Memorial Lecture, published as 'What's in a Name: Competing Claims to the Authority of George Eliot' in The George Eliot Review.
- Hirsch, P. (2001) 'Ligginitis, Three Georges, Perie-zadeh and Spitting Critics, or 'Will the Real Mr Eliot Please Stand Up?' in Critical Survey volume 13 number 2.
- Hirsch, P. (1996) 'Charlotte Bronte and George Sand: the Influence of Female Romanticism' in Bronte Society Transactions.
- Hirsch, P. (1994) 'Women and Jews in Daniel Deronda', The George Eliot Review.
Encyclopedia Entries
- Entry on Hertha Marks Ayrton in Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encylopedia. Jerusalem, Shalvi Publising Ltd, 2006.
- Entry on Phyllis Bottome in Encyclopedia of British Women's Writing, 1900-1950 (eds. Faye Hammill, Esme Miskimmin, Ashlie Sponebergh). Macmillan, 2006.
- Entries on Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, Anna Mary Howitt and Margaret Morris in Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2004.
- Entries on Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot in The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Literature (eds. Steven R. Serafin and Valerie Grosvenor Myer), 2003.
- Entry on Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon in the Oxford Reader's Companion to George Eliot (ed. John Rignall), 2000.
