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Poet, painter, and biographer Matilda Betham (1776-1852) is known chiefly for her friendships with and portraits of such famous men as S. T. Coleridge and Robert Southey. Yet her most scholarly publication, A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804), reflects her deep interest in women authors. Though Katharine Antony praised the Dictionary`s encyclopedic scope and bold subject matter as early as 1948, the work has yet to receive the scrutiny needed to assess its contribution to feminist studies. While its subject matter indeed appears to be a striking example of early feminism, Betham`s scholarship was not unique: several comparable biographical works, many of which served a politically conservative agenda, had been published during the eighteenth century. What distinguishes Betham`s Dictionary is its inclusion of several contemporary writers, some of whom were widely regarded as unconventional or politically radical. Any discussion of Betham`s work must be contextualized in these generic and historical terms, since comparisons between her Dictionary and the works of her immediate predecessors reveal the extent to which Behtam both revised and reiterated existing narratives of women`s role in active affairs.

Betham acknowledged two strains of inquiry--empirical biography and independent analysis--that allowed her to assure readers of her reliability as a historian by repeating the judgment of her predecessors while also asserting her own views by writing about women who had not previously found inclusion in biographical anthologies. Although Betham certainly relied principally on authorative sources, the instances when she does offer her own criticism suggest a receptiveness to various interpretations of what constitutes a "celebrated" woman. This dualism in Betham`s research has elicited contradictory responses. Victorian novelists Matilda Betham-Edwards (Betham`s niece and first biographer) believed the work to be unprecedented, praising its "pioneering", and several early-twentieth-century critics agreed in admiring its uniqueness. However, recent commentators have instead emphasized its antecedents in earlier encyclopedia projects. Both responses have merit, for while Betham repeated conservative opinions about women`s role in the public sphere, she also sometimes advanced her own more liberal point of view. In part, these contradictory assessments of Betham`s project rehearse a larger shift in feminist thinking over the course of the twentieth century, from celebration of early feminist writers as revolutionaries who defied patriarchal authority, evident in such landmark anthologies as Gilbert and Gubar`s Shakespeare`s Sisters, to a more cautious, historically informed evaluation of women intellectuals and the cultural complexities surrounding them. The other reason for the contradictory assessment of Betham`s Dictionary lies in its research methodology. Betham both conformed to and subverted mainstream notions of history and definitions of womanhood, apparently adhering to a conservative position on historiography while including a surprisingly eclectic range of secondary sources.

The author of the passage suggests which of the following about Shakespeare`s Sisters?

AIt is representative of a kind of feminist scholarship that was less nuanced than feminists work that came after it
BIt was revolutionary in introducing an approach to the study of early women writers upon which all subsequent feminist criticism is based
CIt was one of the first twentieth-century books to examine Betham in light of the cultural complexities of her times
DIt challenged earlier critics` view of Betham by pointing out the revolutionary implications of her work
EIt discusses the contradictory assessments of Betham`s Dictionary by earlier scholars and places those assessments in a historical context

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