Eighteenth Century Women S Writing And The Scandalous Memoir

This book contributes to the literary history of eighteenth-century women’s life writings, particularly those labeled “scandalous memoirs.” It examines how the evolution of this subgenre was shaped partially by several innovative memoirs that have received only modest critical attention. Breashears argues that Madame de La Touche’s Apologie and her friend Lady Vane’s Memoirs contributed to the crystallization of this sub-genre at mid-century, and that Lady Vane’s collaboration with Tobias Smollett in The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle resulted in a brilliant experiment in the relationship between gender and genre. It demonstrates that the Memoirs of Catherine Jemmat incorporated influential new strategies for self-justification in response to changing kinship priorities, and that Margaret Coghlan’s Memoirs introduced revolutionary themes that created a hybrid: the political scandalous memoir. This book will therefore appeal to scholars interested in life writing, women’s history, genre theory, and eighteenth-century British literature.

British Women's Life Writing, 1760-1840 brings together for the first time a wide range of print and manuscript sources to demonstrate women's innovative approach to self-representation. It examines canonical writers, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson, and Helen Maria Williams, amongst others.

This 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.

British Women's Life Writing, 1760-1840 brings together for the first time a wide range of print and manuscript sources to demonstrate women's innovative approach to self-representation. It examines canonical writers, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson, and Helen Maria Williams, amongst others.

In bringing biography and celebrity together, the essays in Making Stars interrogate contemporary and current understandings of each. Although biography was not invented in the eighteenth century, the period saw the emergence of works that focus on individuals who are interesting as much, if not more, for their everyday, lived experience than for their status or actions. At the same time, celebrity emerged as public fascination for the private lives of publicly visible individuals. Biography and celebrity are mutually constitutive, but in complex and varied ways that this volume unpacks. Contributors to this volume present us a picture of eighteenth-century celebrity that was mediated across multiple sites, demonstrating that eighteenth-century celebrity culture in Britain was more pervasive, diverse and, in many ways, more egalitarian, than previously supposed.

Between the late seventeenth and the early nineteenth century, the possibilities for travelling within Britain became increasingly various owing to improved transport systems and the popularization of numerous tourist spots. Women Writing the Home Tour, 1682-1812 examines women's participation in that burgeoning touristic tradition, considering the ways in which the changing face of British travel and its writing can be traced through the accounts produced by the women who journeyed England, Scotland, and Wales during this important period. This book explores female-authored home tour travel narratives in print, as well as manuscript works that have hitherto been neglected in criticism. Discussing texts produced by authors including Celia Fiennes, Ann Radcliffe and Dorothy Wordsworth alongside the works of lesser-known travellers such as Mary Morgan and Dorothy Richardson, Kinsley considers the construction, and also the destabilization, of gender, class, and national identity through chapters that emphasize the diversity and complexity of this rich body of writings.

First published in 1984, this book filled an acknowledged gap in the social history of the eighteenth century. Drawing on newspapers, journals, memoirs, diaries, courtesy books, county surveys and records, it also does so on the literature of the period. It examines the role assigned to women in society and explores attitudes of the time and the real experience of women.

Forming a critical introduction to the history of women's autobiography from the mid 18th-century to the present, this book analyses the most important changes in women's autobiography, exploring their motivation, context, style, and the role of life experiences. Caine effortlessly segues across three centuries of history: from the emergence of the 'modern autobiography' in the 18th-century which laid bare the scandalous lives of 'fallen women', to the literary and suffragist autobiographies of the 19th-century to the establishment of feminist publishers in the 20th century and the taboo-shattering autobiographies they produced. The result is a much-needed history, one which provides a different way of thinking about the trajectory of genre information. Caine's compelling study fills an important gap in the genre of autobiography, by embracing a wide range of women and offering an extensive discussion of the autobiographies of women across the 19th and 20th centuries, making it ideal for classroom use.