Traditions Of Victorian Women S Autobiography

Victorian women's autobiography emerged at a historical moment when the field of life writing was particularly rich. Spiritual autobiography was developing interesting variations in the heroic memoirs of pioneering missionary women and in probing intellectual analyses of Nonconformists, Anglicans, agnostics, and other religious thinkers. The chroniques scandaleuses of the eighteenth century were giving way to the respectable artist's life of the professional Victorian woman. The domestic memoir, a Victorian variation on the family histories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, flourished in a culture that celebrated the joys of home, family, and private life. Perhaps most important, Victorian women writers were experimenting with all these forms in various combinations and permutations. Arguing that women's autobiography does not represent a singular separate tradition but instead embraces multiple lineages, Linda H. Peterson explores the poetics and politics of these diverse forms of life writing. She carefully analyzes the polemical Autobiography of Harriet Martineau and Personal Recollections of Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, the missionary memoirs that challenge Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, the Romantic autobiographies of the poet and poetess that Barrett Browning reconstructs in Aurora Leigh, the professional life stories of Margaret Oliphant and her contemporaries, and the Brontëan and Eliotian bifurcations of Mary Cholmondeley's memoirs. The desire to know the details of other women's lives--and to use them for one's own purposes--underlies much Victorian women's autobiography, even as it helps to explain our continuing interest in their accounts.

In her immensely readable and richly documented book, Christine Bayles Kortsch asks us to shift our understanding of late Victorian literary culture by examining its inextricable relationship with the material culture of dress and sewing. Even as the Education Acts of 1870, 1880, and 1891 extended the privilege of print literacy to greater numbers of the populace, stitching samplers continued to be a way of acculturating girls in both print literacy and what Kortsch terms "dress culture." Kortsch explores nineteenth-century women's education, sewing and needlework, mainstream fashion, alternative dress movements, working-class labor in the textile industry, and forms of social activism, showing how dual literacy in dress and print cultures linked women writers with their readers. Focusing on Victorian novels written between 1870 and 1900, Kortsch examines fiction by writers such as Olive Schreiner, Ella Hepworth Dixon, Margaret Oliphant, Sarah Grand, and Gertrude Dix, with attention to influential predecessors like Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot. Periodicals, with their juxtaposition of journalism, fiction, and articles on dress and sewing are particularly fertile sites for exploring the close linkages between print and dress cultures. Informed by her examinations of costume collections in British and American museums, Kortsch's book broadens our view of New Woman fiction and its relationship both to dress culture and to contemporary women's fiction.

This volume is the first to identify a significant body of life narratives by working-class women and to demonstrate their inherent literary significance. Placing each memoir within its generic, historical, and biographical context, this book traces the shifts in such writings over time, examines the circumstances which enabled working-class women authors to publish their life stories, and places these memoirs within a wider autobiographical tradition. Additionally, Memoirs of Victorian Working-Class Women enables readers to appreciate the clear-sightedness, directness, and poignancy of these works.

The late Victorian period brought a radical change in cultural attitudes toward middle-class women and work. Anxiety over the growing disproportion between women and men in the population, combined with an awakening desire among young women for personal and financial freedom, led progressive thinkers to advocate for increased employment opportunities. The major stumbling block was the persistent conviction that middle-class women - "ladies" - could not work without relinquishing their social status. Through media reports, public lectures, and fictional portrayals of working women, From Spinster to Career Woman traces advocates' efforts to alter cultural perceptions of women, work, class, and the ideals of womanhood. Focusing on the archetypal figures of the hospital nurse and the typewriter, Arlene Young analyzes the strategies used to transform a job perceived as menial into a respected profession and to represent office work as progressive employment for educated women. This book goes beyond a standard examination of historical, social, and political realities, delving into the intense human elements of a cultural shift and the hopes and fears of young women seeking independence. Providing new insights into the Victorian period, From Spinster to Career Woman captures the voices of ordinary women caught up in the frustrations and excitements of a new era.

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.

This is the first book-length study of the fictional autobiography, a subgenre that is at once widely recognizable and rarely examined as a literary form with its own history and dynamics of interpretation. Heidi L. Pennington shows that the narrative form and genre expectations associated with the fictional autobiography in the Victorian period engages readers in a sustained meditation on the fictional processes that construct selfhood both in and beyond the text. Through close readings of Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and other well-known examples of the subgenre, Pennington shows how the Victorian fictional autobiography subtly but persistently illustrates that all identities are fictions. Despite the subgenre’s radical implications regarding the nature of personal identity, fictional autobiographies were popular in their own time and continue to inspire devotion in readers. This study sheds new light on what makes this subgenre so compelling, up to and including in the present historical moment of precipitous social and technological change. As we continue to grapple with the existential question of what determines “who we really are,” this book explores the risks and rewards of embracing conscious acts of fictional self-production in an unstable world.

Ledbetter explores themes and patterns of poetry publication in a variety of women's periodicals published throughout the Victorian era using taste, style and the significance of poetry to advance our understanding of women's lives in the nineteenth century.