Women S Life Writing And Imagined Communities

Recognising the great legacy of women's life writings, this book draws on a wealth of sources to critically examine the impact of these writings on our communities.

This collection of fifteen essays with a critical introduction explores how women's life-writing reflects and shapes a community's values - whether that community is global, national, or local. The authors examine women's autobiographical texts from a variety of perspectives, including feminism, cultural studies, postmodernism, and New Historicism. The material analysed includes novels, memoirs, autobiographies, web pages, online zines, letters, religious records, anthologies, and deportation narratives. This volume was previously published as a special issue of the journal Prose Studies. Deborah Lee Ames, Palm Beach Atlantic University, USA Lynn Z. Bloom, University of Connecticut, USA Gay Breyley, University of Wollongong, Australia Marta Yuzcaya Echano

The essays in this collection offer readers vivid and varied evidence of the female response to recurring attempts by culture to artificially limit identity along the gendered lines of private and public experience. Calling on voices both familiar and little-known, British and American, black and white, young and old, poor and rich, heterosexual and lesbian, the essayists explore how women within unique personal and historical conditions used life-writing as a means of both self-understanding and connection to a community of sympathetic others, real or imagined. The life-writings within this anthology span the modern history of the genre itself, with writers drawn from as early as the seventeenth century and as late as the 1990s.

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.

Examining letter collections published in the second half of the nineteenth century, Catherine Delafield rereads the life-writing of Frances Burney, Charlotte Brontë, Mary Delany, Catherine Winkworth, Jane Austen and George Eliot, situating these women in their epistolary culture and in relation to one another as exemplary women of the period. She traces the role of their editors in the publishing process and considers how a model of representation in letters emerged from the publication of Burney’s Diary and Letters and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Brontë. Delafield contends that new correspondences emerge between editors/biographers and their biographical subjects, and that the original epistolary pact was remade in collaboration with family memorials in private and with reviewers in public. Women’s Letters as Life Writing addresses issues of survival and choice when an archive passes into family hands, tracing the means by which women’s lives came to be written and rewritten in letters in the nineteenth century.

By investigating women lifewriters' complex quest to distinguish themselves both within and from institutions and communities, this volume uses Kant's concept of unsociable sociability to formulate a divided sense of self at the heart of women's lifewriting, offering a provocative response to the notion of the relational female subject.

The Spiritual Lives and Manuscript Cultures of Eighteenth-Century English Women explores the vital and unexplored ways in which women's life writings acted to undergird, guide, and indeed shape religious communities. Through an exploration of various significant but understudied personal relationships- including mentorship by older women, spiritual friendship, and care for nonbiological children-the book demonstrates the multiple ways in which women were active in writing religious communities. The women discussed here belonged to communities that habitually communicated through personal writing. At the same time, their acts of writing were creative acts, powerful to build and shape religious communities: these women wrote religious community. The book consists of a series of interweaving case studies and focuses on Catherine Talbot (1721-70), Anne Steele (1717-78), and Ann Bolton (1743-1822), and on their literary interactions with friends and family. Considered together, these subjects and sources allow comparison across denomination, for Talbot was Anglican, Steele a Baptist, and Bolton a Methodist. Further, it considers women's life writings as spiritual legacy, as manuscripts were preserved by female friends and family members and continued to function in religious communities after the death of their authors. Various strands of enquiry weave through the book: questions of gender and religion, themselves inflected by denomination; themes related to life writings and manuscript cultures; and the interplay between the writer as individual and her relationships and communal affiliations. The result is a variegated and highly textured account of eighteenth-century women's spiritual and writing lives.