Description
Book SynopsisThis collection discusses British and Irish life writings by women in the period 1700-1850. It argues for the importance of women's life writing as part of the culture and practice of eighteenth-century and Romantic auto/biography, exploring the complex relationships between constructions of femininity, life writing forms and models of authorship.
Trade Review"This is an ambitious and very attractive volume on a topic very much at the cutting edge of research in the 18th and 19th century, which will be widely reviewed and, I am sure, added to the list of essential reading for women's writing courses and life writing courses." Cora Kaplan, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Southampton, UK
"These analyses of life writings - secular and spiritual, conservative and rebellious - will be valuable to literary scholars interested in genre creation and historians using autobiographical material." Recommended by Choice
"Space precludes mentioning all twelve essays, but they are all fine pieces of scholarship. It is to the credit of the editors, Cook
and Culley, and all the contributors that the chapters so consistently and productively speak to each other. Women's Life Writing
will undoubtedly become an important model and guide for future scholarship in the field." Melanie Bigold, SHARP News
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction: Gender, Genre, and Authorship; D.Cook & A.Culley The Air of a Romance: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Constructs her Life; I.Grundy Barrett Writing Burney: A Life Among the Footnotes; C.Delafield An Authoress to be Let: Reading Laetitia Pilkington's Memoirs; D.Cook Sociability and Life-Writing: Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi; F.A.Nussbaum Journal Letters and Scriblerations: Frances Burney's Life Writing in Paris; P.Sabor A Model for the British Fair? French Women's Life-Writing in Britain, 1680-1830; G.Dow Autobiographical Time and the Spiritual 'Lives' of Early Methodist Women; L.Davies Writing Female Biography: Mary Hays and the Life-Writing of Religious Dissent; F.James 'Prying into the Recesses of History': Women Writers and the Court Memoir; A.Culley The Memoirs of Harriette Wilson: A Courtesan's Byronic Self-Fashioning; S.M.Setzer Remembering Wollstonecraft: Feminine Friendship, Female Subjectivity and the 'Invention' of the Feminist Heroine; M.L.Spongberg Jane Austen and Charlotte Smith: Biography, Autobiography and the Writing of Women's Literary History; J.Batchelor Select Bibliography Index
