Abstract
Despite their differences, these extracts from women’s life writing of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries share a common focus in their emphasis on personal relationships, communal identities, collective memories, and collaborations. Methodist Mary Tooth writes in a manuscript journal to preserve the letters of her friend Mary Fletcher alongside her own thoughts. Elizabeth Steele’s published narrative of the life of celebrated courtesan Sophia Baddeley is authorised by friendship and foregrounds biographical intimacy. Helen Maria Williams identifies her eye-witness accounts of the French Revolution as a contribution to the collective history of the age in a preface to a collection of her poems. My approach to theorising women’s life writing therefore begins with the writers’ own words. They frequently acknowledge the relational and communal aspects of self-representation, in contrast to the idea of autobiography s an individualistic practice, or an assertion of unique difference and solitary genius, most commonly associated in this period with the writing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and William Wordsworth.4 The argument of this book is that approaching life writing as an expression of personal feeling by a single author has tended to obscure its importance as an articulation of relationships and communal identities or as a contribution to the history of a family, community, or nation.
I have also been occupied when I have had leisure for it in reading letters that was addressed to my dear Mrs Fletcher many of which relate to persons & things which are no longer of any moment to the living those I need not leave behind me, but some of them are of that import that I am desirous of retaining & will as time will admit enter in this journal.1
Mary Tooth, ‘Journal’ (1841)
In order to give the reader an opinion of the authenticity of these memoirs, it may not be unnecessary to inform him, that I was acquainted with Mrs. Baddeley from her earlier days; that as children we were brought up together, and educated at the same school; that our intimacy continued through the whole of her life, and that for several years of it, she lived in my house; that as her friend and confidante she unbosomed herself to me.2
Elizabeth Steele, The Memoirs of Mrs. Sophia Baddeley (1787)
I have there been treading on the territory of History, and a trace of my footsteps will perhaps be left. My narratives make a part of that marvellous story which the eighteenth century has to record to future times, and the testimony of a witness will be heard.3
Helen Maria Williams, Poems on Various Subjects (1823)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Martin A. Danahay, A Community of One: Masculine Autobiography and Autonomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 39–66.
Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 1–6.
Philippe Lejeune, ‘The Autobiographical Contract’, in Tzvetan Todorov(ed.), French Literary Theory Today: A Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 192–223 (193).
Felicity Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 4.
Prior to Nussbaum, only Patricia Meyer Spacks had explored eighteenthcentury women’s self-writing in any detail, addressing the work of Laetitia Pilkington, Charlotte Charke, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Hester Thrale, and Fanny Burney in Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976).
James Treadwell, Autobiographical Writing and British Literature 1783–1834 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 59, 8, 107.
Rewarding studies include, Linda H. Peterson, Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999);
Valerie Sanders, The Private Lives of Victorian Women: Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century England (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989);
Mary Jean Corbett, Representing Femininity: Middle-Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women’s Autobiographies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992);
Regenia Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Janet Todd, Women’s Friendship in Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980)
Nina Auerbach, Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978).
Betty Rizzo, Companions without Vows: Relationships among Eighteenth-Century British Women (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994).
Rebecca D’Monté and Nicole Pohl (eds), ‘Introduction’, in Female Communities, 1600–1800: Literary Visions and Cultural Realities (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), 1–27 (2).
Elizabeth Eger, Bluestockings: Women of Reason from Enlightenment to Romanticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), 29.
Betty A. Schellenberg, The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 14.
Julie A. Carlson, England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 14.
Michelle Levy, Family Authorship and Romantic Print Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 2.
Bette London, Writing Double: Women’s Literary Partnerships (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 19.
Stephen C. Behrendt, British Women Poets and the Romantic Writing Community (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 13.
Max Saunders, Self-Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 5–6.
G. Thomas Couser, Memoir: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 14, 170.
Margaret J. M. Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993)
Margaret J. M. Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)
George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker (eds), Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Margaret J. M. Ezell, ‘Domestic Papers: Manuscript Culture and Early Modern Women’s Life Writing’, in Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle(eds), Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 33–48 (33).
Liz Stanley, The Auto/biographical I: the Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/ biography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 93. Couser also suggests that the memoir’s roots are in daily discourses ‘in spontaneous, unique oral narratives; in anecdotes that are not only told but retold as signature stories; in personal stories that may be passed down’. Couser, Memoir, 26.
Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678–1730 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 125.
See Amy Culley and Rebecca Styler, ‘Special Issue: Lives in Relation’, Life Writing, 8.3 (2011), 237–40.
Paul John Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 43.
Mary G. Mason, ‘The Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women Writers’, in James Olney(ed.), Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 207–35. For a summary of this critical tradition,
see Nancy K. Miller, ‘Representing Others: Gender and the Subjects of Autobiography’, Differences, 6.1 (1994), 1– (1–6).
Elizabeth Podnieks, “’Hit Sluts” and “Page Pimps”: Online Diarists and their Quest for Cyber-Union’, Life Writing, 1.2 (2007), 123–50 (125, 142).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2014 Amy Culley
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Culley, A. (2014). Introduction. In: British Women’s Life Writing, 1760–1840. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137274229_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137274229_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-44557-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-27422-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)