Victorian women's autobiography emerged at a historical moment                  when the field of life writing was particularly rich. Spiritual autobiography was                  developing interesting variations in the heroic memoirs of pioneering missionary                  women and in probing intellectual analyses of Nonconformists, Anglicans, agnostics,                  and other religious thinkers. The chroniques scandaleuses of the eighteenth century                  were giving way to the respectable artist's life of the professional Victorian                  woman. The domestic memoir, a Victorian variation on the family histories of the                  seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, flourished in a culture that celebrated the                  joys of home, family, and private life. Perhaps most important, Victorian women                  writers were experimenting with all these forms in various combinations and                  permutations.Arguing that women's autobiography                  does not represent a singular separate tradition but instead embraces multiple                  lineages, Linda H. Peterson explores the poetics and politics of these diverse forms                  of life writing. She carefully analyzes the polemical Autobiography of Harriet                  Martineau and Personal Recollections of Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, the missionary                  memoirs that challenge Charlotte Bront?'s Jane Eyre, the Romantic autobiographies of                  the poet and poetess that Barrett Browning reconstructs in Aurora Leigh, the                  professional life stories of Margaret Oliphant and her contemporaries, and the                  Bront?an and Eliotian bifurcations of Mary Cholmondeley's                  memoirs.The desire to know the details of other                  women's lives--and to use them for one's own purposes--underlies much Victorian                  women's autobiography, even as it helps to explain our continuing interest in their                  accounts.

Traditions of Victorian Women's Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing PDF

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