Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Women's Autobiography - Autobiographies By Women Of Letters

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AUTOBIOGRAPHIES BY WOMEN OF LETTERS

Sidonie Smith (essay date 1987)

SOURCE: "Harriet Martineau's Autobiography: The Repressed Desire of Life Like a Man's," in A Poetics of Women's Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation, Indiana University Press, 1987, pp. 123-49.

[In the following excerpt, Smith evaluates Harriet Martineau 's autobiography and discusses elements specific to Victorian autobiography.]

I fully expect that both you and I shall
occasionally feel as if I did not discharge a
daughter's duty, but we shall both remind
ourselves that I am now as much a citizen
of the world as any professional son of
yours could be.
—Harriet Martineau to her mother, July 8, 1833

Charlotte Charke [in her autobiography A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke written in 1755] dons the clothes and gestures of the man as she sets...

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1. Introduction
2. Representative Works
3. Overviews
4. Autobiographies Concerned With Religious And Political Issues
5. Autobiographies By Women Of Color
6. Autobiographies By Women Pioneers
7. Autobiographies By Women Of Letters
8. Further Reading
9. Copyright

1. Autobiography