Linda H. Peterson - Traditions of Victorian Womens Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing

Victorian womens 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 artists 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 womens 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 Cholmondeleys memoirs.The desire to know the details of other womens lives--and to use them for ones own purposes--underlies much Victorian womens autobiography, even as it helps to explain our continuing interest in their accounts.