Women's Life Writing, 1700-1850 Gender, Genre and Authorship

by Cook, Daniel; Culley, Amy

• ISBN13: 9780230343078
• ISBN10: 0230343074
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-08-07
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Daniel Cook teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. After completing a PhD at Cambridge he took up a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship at Bristol. He has published widely on eighteenth-century and Romantic-period literature and biography and has edited such publications as The Lives of Jonathan Swift (Routledge, 2011). Amy Culley is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Lincoln, UK. She has published on women's life writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is editor of volumes 1-4 of Women's Court and Society Memoirs (Pickering Chatto, 2009) and is guest editor of a special edition of the journal Life Writing (2011).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. vii
Contributors	p. viii
Introduction: Gender, Genre and Authorship	p. 1
The Air of a Romance: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Constructs Her Life	p. 9
Barrett Writing Burney: A Life among the Footnotes	p. 26
An Authoress to Be Let: Reading Laetitia Pilkington's Memoirs	p. 39
Sociability and Life Writing: Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi	p. 55
Journal Letters and Scriblerations: Frances Burney's Life Writing in Paris	p. 71
A Model for the British Fair? French Women's Life Writing in Britain, 1680-1830	p. 86
Autobiographical Time and the Spiritual 'Lives' of Early Methodist Women	p. 103
Writing Female Biography: Mary Hays and the Life Writing of Religious Dissent	p. 117
'Prying into the Recesses of History': Women Writers and the Court Memoir	p. 133
The Memoirs of Harriette Wilson: A Courtesan's Byronic Self-Fashioning	p. 150
Remembering Wollstonecraft: Feminine Friendship, Female Subjectivity and the 'Invention' of the Feminist Heroine	p. 165
Jane Austen and Charlotte Smith: Biography, Autobiography and the Writing of Women's Literary History	p. 181
Notes	p. 197
Select Bibliography	p. 239
Index	p. 244
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