Manchester University Press Romantic Women's Life Writing: Reputation and Afterlife

This book explores how the publication of women’s life writing influenced the reputation of its writers and of the genre itself during the long nineteenth century. It provides case studies of Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson and Mary Hays; four writers who authored and/or inspired works of life writing and whose names were caught up in the debates surrounding the moral and literary respectability of publishing the ‘private’ through diaries, letters, memoirs and (auto)biography. Focusing on gender, genre, and authorship, the book examines key works, such as Frances Burney’s Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay (1842–6), Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), William Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), Mary Robinson’s Memoirs (1801), and Mary Hays’s Female Biography (1803), as well as responses to these texts in essays, reviews, fiction, poetry and other life writing. It also considers print runs, circulation figures, pricing and reprinting patterns. Using both qualitative and quantitative data, the book argues for the importance of life writing – a crucial site of affective and imaginative identification – in shaping authorial reputation and afterlife. This volume also reveals the innovative contributions of these women to the genre of life writing. Ultimately, it constructs a fuller, more varied picture of the literary field in the long nineteenth century, and the role of both women writers and their life writing within it.