Women's Life Writing in the Long 18th Century: A Critical Survey

Abstract

This essay provides an overview of developments in studies of British women's life writing in the long 18th century over the last 25 years and explores possible future directions at an exciting moment for the field. It addresses the expansion of the canon under the influence of feminist criticism and the shift in emphasis from autobiography to life writing as a hybrid and indeterminate form which works across disciplinary boundaries. It takes account of scholarly work on traditional categories of women's life writing, such as the scandalous memoir and spiritual autobiography, and considers more recent interests in biography, collective biography, afterlives and the letter. The article concludes with some reflections on potential avenues for future research, including a more rigorous approach to genre, the interrelations of manuscript and print and collaboration and collective authorship, as well as highlighting some of the challenges (and rewards) of working with life writing texts.

Bluestocking Studies 2011–2017: The Transnational Turn

“…French Women's Life Writing in Britain, 1680–1830,” shows a shift from the favorable British reception of Madame de Maintenon's memoirs to the vilification of Madame de Genlis's memoirs in the 1820s, which led to a “rejection of French women's life writing more generally” in the post‐Napoleonic period (93). Amy Culley's monograph British Women's Life Writing, 1760–1840: Friendship, Community, and Collaboration includes analysis of British women's memoirs of France in the revolutionary period, which show “highly innovative … generic experiments” and become self‐conscious contributions “to the politics and collective memories of the age” (Culley , 145; see also Culley , 3) so that autobiography, focused on the individual, nonetheless affects bluestockings across time and space to have an impact on the larger narrative of international interest and conflict. Indeed, Gillian Dow focuses on the pan‐European manifestations of life writing as she evaluates bio‐bibliographical accounts from Giovanni Boccaccio (1361–1375) to Mary Hays (1803) and Stéphanie‐Félicité de Genlis (1811) and concludes that “we ignore the prior writing of women's lives – literary history before the term was invented – at our peril” (Batchelor and Dow 210).…”