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Traditions of Victorian Women's Autobiography

The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing
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Arguing that women's autobiography does not represent a singular separate tradition but instead embraces multiple lineages, this work explores the poetics and politics of these diverse forms of life writing. It analyses the polemical ""Autobiography"" of Harriet Martineau and ""Personal Recollections"" of Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, the missionary memoirs that challenge Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and the romantic autobiographies of the poet and poetess that Barrett Browning reconstructs in ""Aurora Leigh"". It also covers the professional stories of Margaret Oliphant and her contemporaries, and the Brontean and Eliotian bifurcation of Mary Cholmondeley's memoirs.
Linda H. Peterson is Professor of English and Chair of the English department at Yale University. She is author of Victorian Autobiography: The Tradition of Self-Interpretation and general editor of The Norton Reader, ninth and tenth editions.
Situating her study in relation to earlier attempts to discover--or invent--a tradition of women's autobiography, Peterson challenges some of the prevailing orthodoxies by her extensive research into texts that have, until now, been largely absent from such discussions. Lucidly written, elegantly argued, and impeccably structured, Traditions of Victorian Women's Autobiography will make a major contribution to nineteenth-century women's literary history. --Mary Jean Corbett, Miami University
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