In May 1930, a little more than a year after Charlotte's death, Frederic Boas read a paper before the Royal Society of Literature (RSL) in recognition of her passing. The paper was informed by personal details supplied by her daughter and concluded with short speeches from several of her RSL friends and colleagues. Boas mentioned her participation in the women's movement, her contribution to the history of the London theatre and her part in various Shakespearian controversies. While admitting that she had broken new ground in the field of Shakespeare studies and scored points against established scholars, he brought his account to a close by referring to his subject as ‘the servant rather than the mistress’ of her ‘minute researches’, consigning her memory to the gendered realm of the personal. Boas, like Aylmer Maude, drew naively from Marie's subjective impression of her mother, shaped by her experiences as a child. It was a piece of work that put Charlotte in her place, as the fading voice of late Victorian amateurism.

Boas was neither the first nor the last twentieth-century male academic to refer to Charlotte in these terms. Four decades later, Samuel Schoebaum asserted his view of her historicism as the dull legacy of a Victorian matron of minutiae. To these scholars, her foundational contribution to the history of women and citizenship hardly registered.

Boas wrote what came within his ken, while Schoenbaum's only interest was in accounting for her various Shakespearian excursions. Charlotte had brought new aspects of Shakespearian history to light and helped to broaden knowledge and understanding of the Bard and his contemporaries. Her interest in the English Renaissance theatre, however, was not her most significant contribution to history. It was her advocacy of political and intellectual emancipation for women that encapsulated her lasting achievement.