Women's Autobiography

Peasants and Partisans, Stranger Selves: Stuart Hood’s Memoir Project and Second World War Life Writing

“…For example, it resonates with Victoria Stewart's discussion of the 'infinitely expandable nature of [Vera] Brittain's autobiography', motivated by a different kind of war trauma, in which 'repetition occurs principally in the re-writing of events in different formats and contexts, in an attempt to gain mastery of them'. 52 As Linda Anderson argues, this ongoing return, from new perspectives, to the same events, or to similar scenarios in Brittain's fiction, produces 'an "otherness" in terms of her self'. 53 Hood arrives at a perception of himself as a stranger through an analogous process.…”

Living with the past at home: The afterlife of inherited domestic objects

“…Exploring the material inheritance of home in relation to definitions of heimlich and unheimlich helps locate the variety of responses to the past, of feelings of belonging and homeliness or of anxiety, superstition and uncertainty; often both. The home becomes an uncanny place because it holds secrets or hiding places (see Fletcher, 2000, andStewart, 2003). The 'hidden' objects in this study become metaphors for a meeting of the heimlich and un/heimlich, with the 'combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar' within the home rendering it uncanny (Gelder and Jacobs, 1998: 23) -akin to the experience of the spectres of the 'archaeological imagination', which are 'at once horrifying and comforting' (Buchli and Lucas, 2001: 11-12; see also Vidler, 1999).…”

Writing and Reading Diaries in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain

“…I have written elsewhere about Anne Frank's diary: it is clear that although the idea that her diary might eventually be of historical value spurred Frank on to write and indeed revise her diary, it would be wrong to suggest that her diary ceased to have a more personal function for her once it took on, in her own mind, this historical purpose, nor was this purpose necessarily to the forefront in every entry. 30 Pratt's existing diary and her M-O diary are not a binary pair of private and public texts, then. While some information about her private life was excluded from the M-O diary, which remained anonymous until Garfield obtained permission from Pratt's surviving family to publish A Notable Woman, she evidently still considered the possibility that her regular diary, quite aside from her M-O contributions, might eventually find a readership.…”