In 1840, Memoirs of Princess Daschkaw, Lady of Honour to Catherine II was published in England. The two-volume text included the personal memoirs of Russian noblewoman Ekaterina Dashkova (1743-1810), one of the most powerful, well-known and misunderstood women figures of the Enlightenment. The book made an important contribution to an emerging field of transnational biographies focused on the lives of royal women by including not only Dashkova’s own narrative but a voluminous collection of her personal correspondence with Europe’s leading intellectual thinkers of the eighteenth century. By posthumously offering a first-person narrative of her own life to readers, the text aimed to correct Dashkova’s long-maligned public persona, particularly her supposed role in the bloody 1762 coup d’état that had elevated Catherine II to Empress.

While Memoirs of Princess Daschkaw provided an enduring record of the author’s life, it also made available in print for the first time the significant writings of two little-known Irish women travel writers and editors, Katherine (1773-1824) and Martha (1775-1873) Wilmot, who played a significant and surprising role in the work’s publication. The Wilmot sisters had travelled from their home in Ireland to reside as long-term guests of Dashkova in the early nineteenth century, with Martha remaining for a period of nearly six years (1803-08), with Katherine later joining her (1805-07). The Wilmot sisters’ aunt had formed an earlier relationship with Dashkova during the noblewoman’s travels in the previous century. The friendship resulted in an invitation to travel to Russia as Dashkova’s special guests, offering an unusual opportunity for the two young, middle-ranking Irish women. Over their time in Russia, the sisters, particularly Martha, encouraged Dashkova to document her life in writing, and both served as amanuenses by replicating the manuscript through several fair copies. Written in French, the diplomatic language of the eighteenth-century Russian court, the sisters also attempted to create English translations with a view to the work’s publication, which required them to also improve their own French language skill through serious study. Martha and Dashkova formed a close bond during this period, leading the elder woman to implore the younger to consider her as her ‘Russian Mother’. Dashkova gifted her life narrative to Martha to publish after her death, essentially granting her full authority as a literary executor.

Martha’s editorial work over several decades was recognised on the title page of Memoirs by her married name, ‘Mrs. Bradford’, as well as being reiterated throughout the book in a series of editorial prefaces that highlight her relationship with the late author. Katherine’s earlier editorial work on Dashkova’s papers is noted within the pages of the Memoirs, such as in her selection and preparation of letters sent to the noblewoman by Catherine II. In addition to this, both sisters’ travel writing can be found as lengthy ‘supplements’ that fill the final two hundred and twenty-eight pages of the second volume, or twenty-eight percent of the overall page count of the publication – a weighty proportion of the total work. The Wilmot sisters’ travel narratives in Memoirs offer not only information on Dashkova’s later years and personality, but insight into the experience of women travel writers who ventured beyond the bounds of the Grand Tour at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and often with implications for transnational ideas of nationhood. Katherine’s supplement, which was posthumously assembled for publication by Martha from a series of Russian travel letters, details her attempts at early ethnography and antiquarian folk song collecting as well as culture observation of Russian peasants, alongside witty and often pointed observations of Russian culture. Martha’s own supplement traces her time in Russia as Dashkova’s intimate friend, as well as her experience of a shipwreck as she attempted to return to Ireland during the height of the Anglo-Russian War (1807-12), a conflict of the wider Napoleonic Wars, an account which highlights her affinity with Britain’s allies.

While the Wilmot sisters’ extensive labour on the production of Dashkova’s Memoirs and their original contributions are noteworthy in themselves, there also survives a large corpus of archival material that sheds further light on their noteworthy lives, travels and literary achievements. Spread between several countries, manuscript material created by the sisters and held within both public institutions and private collections reveals the extent to which women writers of the period participated in professional literary endeavours from which they were typically excluded, such as editing, translating and authorship, along with networked manuscript practices including antiquarianism and early ethnography.

My forthcoming book, Transnational Women Writers in the Wilmot Coterie, 1798-1840: Beyond Borders and Boundaries (Boydell & Brewer, 2024) examines the largely-overlooked Wilmot sisters through both their publications and manuscripts. The completion of the project has been funded by a Women’s History Network Early Career Researcher Fellowship for 2024. The book suggests new ways for reading both published and unpublished women’s writing of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries through friendship and networks, as well as across the complex boundaries of class and nationhood.

Alexis Wolf is a scholar of women’s literary history of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She specialises in the study of transnational writing and manuscript studies. Her first book, Transnational Women Writers in the Wilmot Coterie, 1798-1840: Beyond Borders and Boundaries, will be published in late 2024.

Image credit for top image: Title page from the Memoirs of Princess Daschkaw (1840), author’s own image.