Description
Book SynopsisIf questions of subjectivity and identification are at stake in all biographical writing, they are particularly trenchant for contemporary women biographers of women. Often, their efforts to exhume buried lives in hope of finding spiritual foremothers...
Trade ReviewBeizer investigates the history of womankind and, in particular, women authors through time. It is a celebration of women's identities as perceived through the roles of foremothers, mothers, daughters, and writers.... Her book is a pleasure to read for anyone interested in maternal representation s in literature and illustrates the connectedness that exists between daughters and mothers, which is often forgotten.
-- Nicole S. Dobianer * Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature *
The reader is richly rewarded by the unfolding of an extensive multi-layered discussion of motherhood and writing.... In her complex interpersonal study Beizer ambitiously claims to seek an alternative to what she terms women's salvation-biography or resurrection biography.... Beizer's concern seems to be attentive to intertwining anthropological reading of text whilst not forgetting the author but questions the possibility of ever recovering lost mothers. Instead she probes limitations and tensions between intentions, declared and undeclared, of authors and their interpreters, thereby taking generations of writers and their readers as her field of inquiry.
-- Maire F. Cross * Modern and Contemporary France *
