Overview
- Tears down common biographical understandings of British women writers, offering these writers in a new light
- Covers an impressive range of writers including Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Barrett Browning, the Brontes, and George Eliot
- Connects the problem of biography to larger issues with the role of women in the nineteenth century
- Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Life Writing (PSLW)
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Table of contents (15 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book is an investigation of the biases, contradictions, errors, ambiguities, gaps, and historical contexts in biographies of controversial British women who published during the long nineteenth century, many of them left unchecked and perpetuated from publication to publication. Fourteen scholars analyze the agenda, problems, and strengths of biographical material, highlighting the flaws, deficiencies, and influences that have distorted the portraits of women such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Sydney Owenson, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Felicia Hemans, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Caroline Norton, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, Lady Florence Dixie, George Eliot, and Edith Simcox. Through exposing distortions, this fascinating study demonstrates that biographies are often more about the biographer than they are about the biographee and that they are products of the time in which they are written.
Reviews
“Biographical Misrepresentations of British Women Writers explores how biographies are the products of the time in which they are written. In doing so, it unpacks the biases, contradictions, errors, ambiguities, distortions, and gaps that biographical accounts hide, and which have remained unchecked and are perpetuated from publication to publication.” (Meritxell Simon-Martin, Biography, Vol. 42 (4), 2019)
Editors and Affiliations
About the editor
Brenda Ayres teaches at Liberty University and to date has published 27 books in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English literature. Her most recent publications are on Mary Wollstonecraft and include: Betwixt and Between the Biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft, Wollstonecraft’s War with Womanhood, and An “Accountable Being”: Mary Wollstonecraft and Religion.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Biographical Misrepresentations of British Women Writers
Book Subtitle: A Hall of Mirrors and the Long Nineteenth Century
Editors: Brenda Ayres
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Life Writing
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56750-1
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-56749-5Published: 17 November 2017
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-85991-0Published: 23 August 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-56750-1Published: 08 November 2017
Series ISSN: 2730-9185
Series E-ISSN: 2730-9193
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIV, 291
Topics: Nineteenth-Century Literature, British and Irish Literature, Literary History, Culture and Gender