Abstract

British Women’s Life Writing, 1760-1840 brings together for the first time a wide range of print and manuscript sources in order to explore the innovative ways in which women wrote the stories of their lives and the lives of others. It argues for the importance of personal relationships, communal affiliations, and creative collaborations in these texts, in order to challenge the traditional conception of autobiography as an individualistic practice and offer new insights into female relationships and networks in this period. By focusing on the spiritual writing of Methodist preachers, the memoirs and journals of courtesans, and British travellers’ accounts of the French Revolution, this book provides a critical assessment of the complex and often indeterminate genre of life writing and its place within women’s literary history. This is combined with detailed case studies which illuminate the self-representational strategies of canonical writers, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson, and Helen Maria Williams, while also introducing new figures into the history of women’s self-narration.