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

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.Acknowledgements 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

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 literlÃ5