author
Eugénie Hamerton
b. 1838
A little-known 19th-century novelist and memoirist, she is best remembered today for preserving the life and work of her husband, the artist and critic Philip Gilbert Hamerton. Her surviving books suggest a writer moving between fiction and literary remembrance, with a strong connection to Victorian literary culture.
1 Audiobook
Philip Gilbert Hamerton An Autobiography, 1834-1858, and a Memoir by His Wife, 1858-1894
by Eugénie Hamerton, Philip Gilbert Hamerton
About the author
Eugénie Hamerton, sometimes listed as Eugénie Gindriez Hamerton, was a French-born writer active in the Victorian period. Reliable catalog and reference records connect her with novels including Jeanne Laraguay (1864), The Mirror of Truth and Other Marvelous Histories, and Golden Mediocrity, showing that she wrote both fiction and shorter imaginative pieces.
She is most often identified as the wife of the English artist, critic, and author Philip Gilbert Hamerton. After his death in 1894, she wrote the memoir portion of Philip Gilbert Hamerton: An Autobiography, 1834–1858, and a Memoir by His Wife, 1858–1894, a substantial work that helped shape how later readers understood his life.
Some biographical details remain a little uncertain in easily available sources, including her exact birth year, which appears as 1838 in some records and 1839 in at least one Victorian fiction database. What is clear is that she was an author in her own right as well as an important literary witness to the circle around Philip Gilbert Hamerton.