Women’s Letters as Life Writing 1840–1885 (The Nineteenth Century Series)

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. "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"-- Provided by publisher Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: Re-reading Letters as Life Writing 1 Women’s Letters Becoming Life Writing 2 The Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay (1842–46): Women’s Life Writing and Family Considerations 3 The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857): Family Considerations and the Written Life 4 Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs Delany (1861–62): The Family Letter Collection 5 Letters and Memorials of Catherine Winkworth (1883 and 1886): A Life in Translation 6 Letters of Jane Austen (1884): The Family Record 7 George Eliot’s Life (1885): Letters as Life Writing and the Response to Biography 8 Women’s Letters as Life Writing: Hidden Lives and Afterlives Index Letters are collaborative texts and can be used for writing lives together. This book revisits the material conditions for letter-writing and addresses issues of survival and choice when an archive passes into family hands, examining how women’s lives came to be written and rewritten in letters in the nineteenth century.