Történeti nőalak születik : Acsády Ignác Széchy Mária-életrajzáról = A historical female figure is born : Acsády Ignác and his biography of Széchy Mária

Pálfy, Eszter (2024) Történeti nőalak születik : Acsády Ignác Széchy Mária-életrajzáról = A historical female figure is born : Acsády Ignác and his biography of Széchy Mária. IRODALOMTÖRTÉNETI KÖZLEMÉNYEK, 128 (3). pp. 353-369. ISSN 0021-1486

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Abstract

The 17th-century Hungarian noblewoman Széchy Mária played a significant role in the literary memory of the 19th century. The romantic story of her marriage to the Hungarian countpalatine Wesselényi Ferenc was adapted into literary or stage form by many authors, including Kisfaludy Károly, Petőfi Sándor, Arany János and Jókai Mór. Her literary popularity was also reflected by her first biographer, Acsády Ignác, who sought to create a historical picture of the literary figure, presenting the life of his heroine on the basis of contemporary 17th-century sources. Acsády Ignác’s biography, Széchy Mária was published in 1885, in the Hungarian Historical Biographies series. The paper first examines the contemporary context of Acsády’s biography and the characteristics of how Széchy Mária is portrayed. To this end, it draws a parallel between the historiography that became professionalised in the last decades of the 19th century and a genre of popular literature of the period, in which female historical figures were presented as role models for female readers. The paper then discusses the Kisfaludy Society’s competitions for historical female figures in 1882 and 1883, and reveals that Acsády Ignác’s historical biography was originally written for the Kisfaludy Society’s competition, as were two other works in the Hungarian Historical Biographies series, Márki Sándor’s work on Queen Mária Anjou and Deák Farkas’s on Forgách Zsuzsanna.

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