Reviews Author Related Links To Order		Traditions of Victorian Women's Autobiography The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing
		by Linda H. Peterson
		272 pages, 4 b&w illus., 6 x 9
		Cloth ISBN 0-8139-1883-9 • $49.50
		Paper ISBN 0-8139-2060-4 • $21.50
		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 Brontë'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 Brontëan 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.
		Reviews
		"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
		The Author
		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. Related Links
		Traditions of Victorian Women's Autobiography The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing by Linda H. Peterson 272 pages, 4 b&w illus., 6 x 9 Cloth ISBN 0-8139-1883-9 • $49.50 Paper ISBN 0-8139-2060-4 • $21.50
		http://www.upress.virginia.edu/peterson_linda.html
		Revised 8/2/05