Women<U+0080>́<U+0099>s Life Writing, 1700<U+0080>́<U+0093>1850 Gender, Genre and Authorship

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. Front Matter....Pages i-x Introduction: Gender, Genre and Authorship....Pages 1-8 The Air of a Romance: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Constructs Her Life....Pages 9-25 Barrett Writing Burney: A Life among the Footnotes....Pages 26-38 An Authoress to Be Let: Reading Laetitia Pilkington’s Memoirs....Pages 39-54 Sociability and Life Writing: Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi....Pages 55-70 Journal Letters and Scriblerations: Frances Burney’s Life Writing in Paris....Pages 71-85 A Model for the British Fair? French Women’s Life Writing in Britain, 1680–1830....Pages 86-102 Autobiographical Time and the Spiritual ‘Lives’ of Early Methodist Women....Pages 103-116 Writing Female Biography: Mary Hays and the Life Writing of Religious Dissent....Pages 117-132 ‘Prying into the Recesses of History’: Women Writers and the Court Memoir....Pages 133-149 The Memoirs of Harriette Wilson: A Courtesan’s Byronic Self-Fashioning....Pages 150-164 Remembering Wollstonecraft: Feminine Friendship, Female Subjectivity and the ‘Invention’ of the Feminist Heroine....Pages 165-180 Jane Austen and Charlotte Smith: Biography, Autobiography and the Writing of Women’s Literary History....Pages 181-196 Back Matter....Pages 197-253 This collection of new essays by international scholars discusses British and Irish life writings by women in the period 1700-1850. It argues for the importance of women's life writing, both within women's literary history and as an integral part of the culture and practice of eighteenth-century and Romantic auto/biography. The essays presented here reveal women's innovative and diverse experiments with life writing and highlight the complex relationships between conceptions of femininity, auto/biographical forms, and models of authorship in the period. They advance our understanding of canonical women writers while also recovering neglected authors, genres, and traditions to suggest the various ways in which female lives might be narrated in this period