SOURCE: Jelinek, Estelle C. “The Nineteenth Century: New Voices.” In The Tradition of Women's Autobiography: From Antiquity to the Present, pp. 41-53. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986.

[In the following excerpt, Jelinek surveys autobiographical writings by English women of the nineteenth century, concluding with a summary of their contributions to the genre.]

The subjective autobiographies of the eighteenth century had little if any influence on the autobiographies by women or men during the nineteenth century. The confessionals of Pilkington, Phillips, and Vane may have contributed to the development of the novel, but they had little effect on later autobiography. (Such was also the case with that rare subjective autobiography by a man, Rousseau's Confessions, 1782.) Even before Victorianism took hold, the impulse to intimate revelation was silent. Women continued to treat personal matters, but at a distance. To protect their vulnerable private lives, they wrote objectively about themselves and others. It was not until the second half of the twentieth century that women began to come out of their emotional closets to write subjective life studies once again.

The century, however, ushered in a plethora of autobiographies, the result of the revolution in printing, increased economic stability, and, especially for women, advancements in education. There was a booming book industry, with many works from the previous centuries published for the first time, a proliferation of reprints, and hundreds of new autobiographies eagerly consumed by an increasingly literate populace. The public was eager to read about everyone—not just the famous. “Self-portraiture ceased to be considered an extraordinary activity … and came to be accepted as conventional.”¹

Two rare subjective autobiographies during the nineteenth century were by women whose fame gave them the courage to brave society's censure, for they wrote about romantic hardships similar to those of Pilkington, Phillips, and Vane. The first, like these eighteenth-century women's apologies, was Mary “Perdita” Darby Robinson's (1758-1800) Memoirs (1801).² Like them Robinson pleads her case as a devoted daughter and mother and a loyal wife despite an irresponsible and wayward husband; she also shared their reputations as accomplished women—she was a published poet and a renowned Shakespearean actress on the London stage. But Robinson only hints at the events that resulted in the loss of her reputation; a biographical sketch appended to her memoirs tells the reader of her seduction, brief affair, and betrayal by the prince of Wales (later George IV), all of which precipitated the loss of her reputation, prompting her to write a self-portrait to justify her moral character.

Thus, the Memoirs takes us through only a small portion of Robinson's life, ending abruptly when she is in her early twenties. It is a real loss to autobiography that she did not write her own account of the affair and her later life, for her work shares many of the characteristics of Halkett's life study. It is an eminently readable chronological narrative that is as gripping as a psychological novel³ and includes considerable realistic dialogue. In occasional digressions she perceptively sketches the influences on her personality as a precocious, beautiful, and sophisticated child and adolescent, her own motives as a talented young adult, and the character traits of others. She creates suspense by teasing readers with hints of her impending seduction by the persistent prince and her final decision to capitulate—where the memoir ends.

Robinson struggles self-consciously to vindicate herself and pleads for readers' acceptance of her moral rectitude. She also takes pains to describe subjects of exclusively female interest. For the first time in autobiography, we find descriptions of the discomforts of pregnancy (though not of childbirth), the pleasure and inconvenience of breastfeeding, and the joy of a child's first words. She also details her efforts to reconcile her passive duties as a wife with her desire for a theatrical career—much encouraged by David Garrick. Even she felt that acting was not respectable work for a woman and chose it only out of economic necessity; as an established actress, she still had to ward off would-be seducers. Financial independence, she realizes, is her only hope for true freedom: “The consciousness of independence is the only true felicity in this world of humiliations.”

Robinson also wrote a tract entitled “Thoughts on the Condition of Women and the Injustices of Mental Subordination,” in addition to poems that were admired by Coleridge and Southey, and several novels, including The Widow and Angelina. Few actresses were as talented and sensitive as Robinson, and after her, few dared to brave Victorian censure by writing about their lives. It was not until late in the century that the actress Frances (Fanny) Anne Kemble (1809-93) published her trilogy Record of a Girlhood (1878), Records of Later Life (1882), and Further Records (1890). (Earlier Kemble had written about her unhappy experiences in America in Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839; see chapter 6.)

The second subjective autobiography was by Elizabeth Medora Leigh (1815-49), the alleged daughter of Lord Byron and his half sister Augusta. Her brief Autobiography (1869)⁴ elicited considerable attention when it was published twenty years after her untimely death, for it has all the “scandalous” elements that could easily qualify it as a vie scandaleuse. It begins with her rape at fifteen by her brother-in-law, Henry Trevanion, and then her forced life with him until she was able to escape ten years later after three pregnancies and only one surviving daughter. Alone, sick, and unable to obtain financial support from her family, including the alternately caring and vindictive Lady Byron, Leigh wrote the autobiography as a plea to her readers for understanding of her unhappy life and for financial aid from friends and relatives. Obviously, her pleas went unanswered, for her work was not published during her lifetime.

The absence of subjective autobiographies as a dominant mode during the nineteenth century appears all the more surprising because the period was so rich in other forms of subjective literary expression. The very people we would expect to write such autobiographies—women and men of poetic sensibility—and to continue the tradition initiated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not do so. Perhaps one explanation is that poets and novelists pour all their emotional energies into creative works, leaving little time for nonfictional renderings.

True, some of the Romantics lived short lives, but many others did not. Among the male literary giants of the Romantic and Victorian periods who did not write autobiographies are Shelley, Keats, Byron, Landor, Tennyson, Dickens, Robert Browning, Thackeray, D. G. Rossetti, Pater, Arnold, Swinburne, Morris, and Meredith. The exceptions are primarily by essayists: De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822) and Autobiographic Sketches (1853), Hazlitt's Liber Amoris (1823), and Hunt's Autobiography (1850). Coleridge includes only fragmentary personal notes in Biographia Literaria (1817), and Wordsworth's Prelude (written in 1804-5, revised in 1839, and published after his death in 1850) has autobiographical elements, but it is not a prose work, which is our sense of an autobiography.

The picture is similar for the female literary giants of the century. Virginia Woolf called the nineteenth century the “epic age of women's writing” in fiction, but though their letters have often been collected, none of these novelists wrote autobiographies: Jane Austen, the three Brontë sisters—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—Elizabeth Gaskell, Frances Trollope, Caroline Bowles, and George Eliot, as well as the poet Christina Rossetti. Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61) left only two brief and youthful essays: “My Own Character,” composed when she was twelve, and “Glimpses into My Own Life and Literary Character,” written when she was fourteen (the latter was published posthumously in Hitherto Unpublished Poems in 1914).⁵ In girlish self-absorbed prose, Browning describes a happy and secure childhood, her devotion to poetry and the classics, her adoration of her brother, and her efforts to overcome her vanity. But these pieces do not qualify as complete or mature life studies.

It may surprise readers that most autobiographies are not written by literary people and that most male autobiographies that are considered classics were not written by novelists or poets. During the nineteenth century, the “full and luxuriant flowering” of autobiography that Shumaker posits⁶ applies only to male autobiographies published in the last decades of the century, and they were, for the most part, written by men who were not creative writers; for example, Cardinal John Newman's Apologia (1864), philosopher John Stuart Mill's Autobiography (1873), novelist Anthony Trollope's Autobiography (written 1876; published 1883), art and social critic John Ruskin's Praeterita (1886-89), novelist George Moore's Confessions of a Young Man (1888), naturalist Charles Darwin's autobiography (1896), and the edited Reminiscences (1881) of essayist Thomas Carlyle.

Among female autobiographers, we do find a number by literary women, but they are totally unknown today—both for their life studies and their other works. Because more women were educated during the nineteenth century, more were able to earn a living by writing, whatever the subject matter or genre. However, a significant number of these women's autobiographical works center not on themselves but on others, often taking the view of Elizabeth Browning, who began “Glimpses” with that now famous line: “To be one's own chronicler is a task generally dictated by extreme vanity”; though written by a child, it is an accurate reflection of the attitude of most nineteenth-century female autobiographers. Accomplished women, even those who were successful if not famous, were usually apologetic or self-deprecating about their personal lives and careers. Many women whose lives crossed paths with famous male writers chose to concentrate on them rather than on themselves, believing, as Fanshawe and Rich did in the seventeenth century, that the public was more interested in the lives of these men than in their own.

Samuel Johnson was a particularly popular focus of such attentions. Just as Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi (1741-1821) is known more for her Anecdotes (1786) about Johnson and her Letters (1788) to and from him than for her own Autobiography, Letters, and Literary Remains (1861), so too are Laetitia Matilda Hawkins for her Anecdotes (1822) and Memoirs (1824) and Fanny Burney (1752-1840) for her Diary and Letters (1842-46)—all descriptions of their social life in Johnson's circle.

Especially popular objects of curiosity were the poets and writers of the Romantic era. Lady Marguerite Blessington (1789-1849), an accomplished novelist, penned a graphic journal, Conversations with Lord Byron (1834); Anne Richman Lefroy (b. 1808) described her literary friends the Burneys, the Lambs, and Hazlitt, among others, in Good Company in Old Westminster and the Temple (first published in 1925); and the novelist Elisabeth Lynn Linton (1822-98) portrayed her friendships with Landor, Dickens, Thackeray, and Eliot in My Literary Life (1899).

Dorothy Wordsworth's (1771-1855) Alfoxden Journal (1798) and Grasmere Journals (1800-1803)⁷ contain personal reminiscences about people she and William encountered on their walks, as well as poetic descriptions of nature—notes her brother used in writing some of his famous poems. But strikingly absent from Wordsworth's journals are any of her own feelings, especially about her close relationship with William. The Journals of Mary Shelley (1797-1851) do reveal many of her intimate feelings, but most relate to her profound dependence on her husband.⁸ The letters, diaries, and journals of other wives of famous authors are less personally revealing, though they did make the job of future biographers of their husbands easier.⁹

The focus of these autobiographies—whether by well-known or obscure women—on famous male writers indicates the low esteem in which these women—and society—held their own literary efforts. Lady Sydney Owenson Morgan (1783?-1859) wrote two life studies—Passages from My Autobiography (1859) and Memoirs (1862); though a successful novelist and historian, Lady Morgan, like many of her female contemporaries, is apologetic about her choice of a literary career over a strictly “feminine” life as a wife.

Mary Russell Mitford (1787-1855) was also a successful writer—a playwright (Rienzi, 1828), author of sketches (Our Village, 1824-32), and a novelist (Belford Regis, 1835, among others)—yet in her Recollections of a Literary Life (1852)¹⁰ she writes very little about her career and even that is self-deprecating. Though this work is cataloged as an “autobiography,” it is actually an anthology of selections of Mitford's favorite poets and prose writers. What we do learn about her writing and her personal life is scattered nonchronologically and fragmentedly in prefatory remarks and biographical sketches introducing the selections. In her preface Mitford honestly and accurately evaluates her Recollections:

Perhaps it would be difficult to find a short phrase that would accurately describe a work so desultory and so wayward—a work where there is far too much of personal gossip and of local scene-painting for the grave pretension of critical essays, and far too much criticism and extract for anything approaching in the slightest degree to autobiography.¹¹

The low self-esteem that writers such as Morgan and Mitford display by dismissing or downplaying their personal lives and careers is matched by their Victorian reticence. Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna (1790-1846) reveals a passionate nature in her novelistic social exposés of the sufferings of women factory workers in The Wrongs of Woman (1843-44) and of child labor in Helen Fleetwood (1839-40). Yet despite Tonna's concern for social and personal issues relevant to women, her Personal Recollections (1841)¹² omits any reference to subjects she considered indiscreet, such as her first unhappy marriage, all her living friends, even her writing career. Instead, 90 percent of this autobiography is devoted to moralizing about God and correct behavior—Tonna was a virulent anti-Catholic. Like Mitford, she gives only occasional glimpses of her personal feelings.

In addition to autobiographies by women connected to the literary world, there were the perennial religious narratives, especially by Quaker women. They were intended for moral instruction and to show the course of their spiritual progress. None of even passing interest survives. Upper-class women continued to write autobiographies about their happy marriages in the tradition established in previous centuries. For example, Lady Isabel Burton (1831-96) left a fragment on her happy marriage and travels, which was incorporated into her biography by W. H. Wilkins (Romance, 1897). Even Queen Victoria (1819-1901) contributed to this mode with two autobiographies, one in 1862, Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, and twenty years later, More Leaves (1883).

But new on the scene were autobiographies by women in occupations other than literature; these women were more independent in their activities and less apologetic in their life studies. A number of these autobiographies were by women in working-class occupations other than acting, such as Nelly Weeton Stock's (1776-1850) Miss Weeton: Journal of a Governess (first published 1936-39); missionary Sarah Nash Bland's The Field and the Garner (1854); domestic servant Elizabeth Cadwaladyr Davis's picaresque travels in the West Indies, Brazil, Australia, and South Africa as a nurse and housekeeper (Autobiography, 1857); Mary Ann Ashford's Life of a Licensed Victualler's Daughter (1844); and professional pickpocket Ellen O'Neill's Extraordinary Confessions (1850).

While some of these women wrote about travels to foreign lands from their vantage point as workers, there were other more routine travel autobiographies by wives accompanying their husbands to the colonies. Especially during the 1850s and 1860s, India was the place most of these women wrote about, and an amazing number of them seem to have been present at the siege of Lucknow. Women also wrote about their impressions of the American and French revolutions, of the war in the Crimea, and of visits to Russia and Africa.

New among travel autobiographies were those by women with the means to travel at their leisure, sometimes accompanied but often alone. They did not feel obliged to prove their marital contentment nor to focus on a popular event to appeal to their readers. Many of these works had real literary merit and, unlike writings by male counterparts, emphasized feelings over events.

One remarkable narrative about a three-month trip to America was A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879)¹³ by Isabella Lucy Bird (later Bishop) (1831-1904). Written in the form of seventeen letters, the work nonetheless maintains its continuity by the poetic sensibility that informs it. Like an early-day Annie Dillard, Bird describes her 1873 trip alone and on horseback, depicting in beautiful strokes the flora and fauna of the region, the rough terrain, the breathtaking beauty of the mountains, as well as the many primitive people she encountered in wilderness hovels. Though Bird tells us little about herself directly, her personality—independent, spunky, generous, and not at all snobbish—is conveyed, along with her self-confidence and sensitivity to people and nature alike.

Other examples of such travel autobiographies are Lady Lucie Duff-Gordon's (1821-69) Letters from Egypt (1865) and Last Letters from Egypt (1875), Baroness Annie Allnutt Brassey's (1839-87) A Voyage in the Sunbeam (1878), and Lady Anne Blunt's (1837-1917) A Pilgrimage to Nejd, the Cradle of the Arab Race (1881); Blunt's is an especially intense and personal narrative of her travels on horseback with her husband in Arabia. A charming journal by Victoria Wortley (1837-1912) written when she was fifteen—before she became the famous semanticist Lady Welby-Gregory¹⁴—is generously sprinkled with youthful slang as the sensitive and curious young woman reveals her fascination with the people and customs of America.

During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, a new element entered autobiographical writing, an interest in the development of the individual as both an intellectual and a psychological being. We saw the beginnings of this interest in the writings of Cavendish and Halkett; now we see it shaped by Darwinian notions of development and evolution as autobiographers write voluminously of the influences that affected their personalities and of their accomplishments. Some of the women who wrote such “developmental” autobiographies earned their living by writing—literary and otherwise—and they took their professional work and lives seriously, not apologizing for their lack of “femininity” in pursuing careers or for their “vanity” in writing a self-centered work. They are self-conscious about the practices of writing autobiography and tend to imitate the orderly progressive style of male “developmental” life studies while retaining the basic characteristics of the female tradition: emphasis on the personal and disjunctive narratives.

Harriet Martineau (1802-76) is probably the best known of these late nineteenth-century autobiographers. A prodigious writer on progressive politics for a quarter of a century, she was the author of Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-34), Society in America (1837), Eastern Life (1848), and Household Education (1849), among many others (her famous novel is Deerbrook, 1839). Like a nineteenth-century Upton Sinclair, Martineau transformed complex political and philosophical ideas into didactic fiction that was palatable to a mass audience eager for the new ideas of a century bursting with change. Her Autobiography (1877)¹⁵ is in the spirit of her age and her temperament, both consumed by a scientific obsession with facts. It is a workhorse of a book, a long, meticulously detailed account of the career of a woman of phenomenal self-discipline, impeccable honesty, avant-garde egalitarianism, and, of course, Victorian discretion.

Martineau's Autobiography was written in 1855 at breakneck speed in three months when physicians told her that her death from heart disease was imminent. She had it printed, illustrated, and bound in 1855, but she lived another twenty years.¹⁶ We cannot help but wonder why she never undertook a sequel to document those later years. At any rate, the haste with which she undertook her life study may help to explain its straightforward “scientific” objectivity, which was also the mode of her professional writings. Like them it is methodically organized, here around four basic subjects, with the most concentrated treatment given to her career. The first subject is her unhappy childhood and her early adult struggles to publish her writings. The second describes her twenty-some years of success as a working author asked to write on numerous subjects, which she researched thoroughly. The third emphasizes the many famous people she met and befriended—including Malthus, Macaulay, Wordsworth, Dickens, Thackeray, Carlyle, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft in England; and Margaret Fuller, Catharine Sedgwick, Fanny Kemble, Emerson, and Channing, among many others, in America, which she visited in 1834-36 and whose slavery she bravely spoke out against in her book. Finally, she describes her “declining” years of just a little less work, some travel, and stoic preparations for her death.

Though the autobiography is chronological within the four main subject divisions, it is often nonchronological from one to the next. The sketches of famous people, letters, articles, and stories—some by others as well as her own—often interrupt the narrative, as does her documentation of the sources of all her articles and books. This sometimes makes for tedious reading, but scattered throughout are hints of the private feelings of this very public person.

In the section on her childhood, a safe subject for revealing personal feelings, she describes herself as a bright, shy, but painfully sensitive child who was almost totally deaf and who suffered deeply from her mother's callousness (“I was more trouble than I was worth” was the sentiment her mother often conveyed to her). Martineau emphasizes how selfishly her mother behaved toward her self-deprecating daughter.

In the second section Martineau hints cautiously, indirectly, of her mother's jealousy and disapproval of her social position. Intensely afraid of her mother, she was unable to stand up to her domination, which resulted in a five-year illness, supposedly a tumor caused by “mental stress.” Martineau was cured by mesmerism, which turned her to atheism, but her mother refused to see her again because atheism threatened her religious convictions. In the last chapters Martineau reveals some of her fears of impending death.

Martineau did not have the leisure to contemplate and reflect on her personal struggles when she wrote the Autobiography in 1855. Perhaps she did not write that sequel because she felt she had accomplished her objective, which was to demonstrate the overriding motive of her life: that with hard work and self-mastery anyone can accomplish anything. She is intolerant of individual weakness, including passion, and believes that with the proper education and self-discipline, women can accomplish anything that men can. Though she was very conscious of and sympathetic to women's oppression (“I want to be doing something with the pen,” she writes, “since no other means of action in politics are in a woman's power”) and though she supported many women's issues such as suffrage, she considered feminism itself as the cause of women with a gripe. Though she cared about people, it was her intellectual pursuits that drove her; and though she does not write in the psychological language familiar to twentieth-century readers, she is aware of how her mother influenced her need to prove her self-worth, to authenticate herself through her writing.¹⁷ She is glad she never married; she says: “That life is not for those whose self-respect had been early broken, or had never grown. … I have ever been thankful to be alone. … I am probably the happiest single woman in England.”

Less well known today than Martineau but equally prolific and famous during her lifetime was Annie Wood Besant (1847-1933), whose An Autobiography (1893)¹⁸ divides itself naturally into two “lives.” The first one, a third of the work, documents early developmental influences—her happy and secure childhood, her shock at the restrictions of married life, and then—abandoning her intense Christian upbringing—her divorce and turn to atheism. The second “life” leaves her personal struggles behind and focuses on her political and philosophical efforts in the public arena—her life as a frequently published writer and charismatic speaker on the causes first of atheism, then of socialism, and finally of the occult. The “two lives” are distinguished by different styles—the first introspective and subjective, the second discursive and polemical, less a narrative than a compendium of letters, articles, and speeches on various causes.

Of course, the first part of An Autobiography holds more interest to students of autobiography, exhibiting more of the personal, introspective reflections of Besant's inner feelings. The second part becomes a pedestrian, progressive history, a proselytizing tract by a woman caught up in public advocacy midway through life—when the autobiography was written.

Another woman well known during her time for her dedication to social reform was Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904), a philanthropist, antivivisectionist, feminist, and religious writer—much criticized for her last views by the freethinker Besant. Cobbe wrote thirty books, including her Life (1894).¹⁹ This autobiography has even less developmental history than Besant's and is weighed down intellectually by her thoughts on the many subjects that absorbed her social conscience. Crowded with selections from her writings on personal travels, social history, and feminist issues (especially divorce), Cobbe's Life lacks even the minimal personal reflection of Martineau's and Besant's autobiographies.

These three professional writers belonged to a growing class of women who earned their living by writing. Without husbands or children, they devoted their lives to their work. As a result their autobiographies focus on their professional lives and, therefore, like many men's, they are unidimensional, progressive, and less personal than autobiographies by earlier women, especially those who wrote about romantic complications in their personal lives. Thus, it is not surprising that a working writer who was also a destitute and widowed mother of three children produced a rare subjective autobiography at the end of the century.

Margaret Oliphant's (1828-97) work was as central to her life as it was to the more intellectually oriented Martineau, Besant, and Cobbe. In a period of fifty years she wrote one to four books a year, totaling over one hundred novels (her most famous is Miss Marjoribanks, 1866) and nearly thirty-five other books on history and biography. She also published over three hundred short stories and articles, primarily in Blackwood's Magazine. Yet her Autobiography (1899) concentrates almost entirely on her feelings, without being scandalous and with the usual Victorian discretion.

Oliphant merely mentions the dates when she completed her works, preferring to write about real people than about the “creatures of her [sic] imagination.” After describing her happy childhood and marriage, she details without pity the loss of her beloved husband and then each child in succession. Too preoccupied with her family and her work to socialize with her literary peers, she writes self-consciously of her loneliness, her considerable financial difficulties, and also her “obstinate elasticity” in brief happy times. The life story ends on a mordant sense of futility at the death of her last child.

The autobiography was written in three installments, the first in 1860, the second in 1864, and the third twenty years later from 1885 to 1892. However, the installments shift back and forth in nonchronological order,²⁰ leaving huge gaps in her history. There are also many digressive but vivid character sketches of the friends and neighbors who helped her through her trials and of the very few who understood and encouraged her literary efforts. Thus, the work lacks the continuity of a progressive narrative, but it has a continuity of feeling and sensibility. It is an engaging portrait of a sensitive, shy, and reclusive woman whose greatest concern was her children and her friends. This fragmented autobiography is a moving and absorbing document of a struggling working writer who never lost touch with matters of the heart.

Oliphant's autobiography is atypical of women's life studies during the late nineteenth century, which are self-conscious about their careers and the new role of women. Increasingly, we find women speaking out against the oppression of women as a social class, but not until the first decades of the twentieth century do we find autobiographies by suffragists, such as Emmeline Goulden Pankhurst's (1858-1928) My Own Story (1914). Their works are similar to Martineau's in their reticence to speak about personal matters, but there are forays into subjectivity and intimacy similar to Oliphant's in the autobiographies written by women during the second half of the twentieth century, especially in America after the great leap forward of the second women's movement.

.....

Most of these women are self-conscious about their gender, aware that readers will accuse them of vanity for their autobiographical efforts. They are often apologetic and self-deprecating at the same time that they take pride in their accomplishments and assert their honesty and integrity. … Seventeenth-century autobiographers proved their authenticity by asserting that they were contented wives. In the eighteenth century women pleaded their innocence while pursuing independent lives. And in the nineteenth century they fought self-consciously as professionals for respect in a man's world.

Their struggles were not in vain but contributed much to autobiography and to women's history. Women added a major development to the genre: the analysis of self through subjective, personal treatment rather than abstract or philosophical analysis. It was women who dealt with the issues of heart and hearth, while men were touting their exploits in historical chronicles or res gestae.

In style, women's autobiographies follow a fairly consistent pattern. Unlike most men's progressive, unidirectional forms, most women's life studies tend to be disjunctive or discontinuous narratives—often interrupting the chronological order with flashbacks, anecdotes, and character sketches. …

Other women digress from strict chronology by inserting anecdotes, poems, letters, articles, and the like. … In the nineteenth century, besides anecdotal and fragmentary travel autobiographies and a profusion of journals, diaries, and letters, even the more career-oriented, unidirectional, basically chronological autobiographies by Martineau and Besant still rely on anecdote, flashback, and sketches. Theirs is an organization more unconscious than conscious, more “closely akin to free association,”²¹ to the integral play of their personalities with forms suitable to their lives and their feelings.

Notes

1. [Wayne] Shumaker, English Autobiography[: Its Emergence, Materials, and Form Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954], 28.

2. Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson, Written by Herself (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1930), 1-131.

3. Shumaker errs once again, this time in describing Robinson's work as reading like a gothic novel. Only the first few paragraphs—describing her birth as told to her by her mother—have gothic elements (English Autobiography, 93).

4. Medora Leigh: A History and an Autobiography, with an Introduction and a Commentary on the Charges Brought Against Lord Byron by Mrs. Beecher Stowe, ed. Charles Mackay (London: Richard Bentley, 1869), 122-54.

5. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Hitherto Unpublished Poems and Stories, with an Inedited Autobiography, 2 vols. (Boston: Bibliophile Society, 1914). 1:3-28. Both works were published as “Two Autobiographical Essays by Elizabeth Barrett,” in Browning Institute Studies, ed. William S. Peterson, no. 2 (New York, 1974), 119-34.

6. Shumaker, English Autobiography, 28.

7. See The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Mary Moorman (London: Oxford University Press, 1971).

8. See also The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980-).

9. See Sara Coleridge's (1802-52) Memoirs and Letters (1873); and Jane Welsh Carlyle's (1801-66) Letters and Memorials (1883) and New Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, ed. Alexander Carlyle (London: John Lane, 1903); Duke University Press is preparing a complete edition of the Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Carlyle.

10. Mary Russell Mitford, Recollections of a Literary Life and Selections from My Favorite Poets and Prose Writers (London: Richard Bentley, 1883). Her Letters were edited in 2 vols. by A. G. K. L'Etrange (1870).

11. Mitford, Recollections, vii. See Elizabeth Winston, “The Autobiographer and Her Readers: From Apology to Affirmation,” in Jelinek, ed., Women's Autobiography [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980], 93-111.

12. Charlotte Elizabeth, Personal Recollections (New York: Charles Scribner, 1858). The name Tonna does not appear anywhere in the book, not even on the title page.

13. First published serially as “Letters from the Rocky Mountains” in the genteel English weekly Leisure Hour in 1878; it was published in 1879 under its present title by John Murray in London and by G. P. Putnam Sons in New York. A modern edition was published in 1982 by Virago Press in London, with an introduction by Pat Barr.

14. Victoria Alexandrina Maria Louisa Stuart Wortley, who became the Honorable Lady Welby-Gregory, was important in the history of semiotics, wrote Links and Clues and What Is Meaning? and was an influential correspondent of Charles Sanders Peirce between 1903 and 1911.

15. Harriet Martineau, Harriet Martineau's Autobiography, ed. Maria Weston Chapman, 2 vols. (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1877).

16. See Mitzi Meyers, “Harriet Martineau's Autobiography: The Making of a Female Philosopher,” in Jelinek, ed., Women's Autobiography, 53-70.

17. Shumaker argues that at the point where she describes acquiring a literary reputation, Martineau's narrative breaks down, revealing a “new self-confidence and even vindictiveness of character” (English Autobiography, 90; Shumaker does not explain his statement, frequently the case when he disparages female autobiographers). Ellen Moers interprets Martineau's self-confidence as a stoicism in reaction to the romanticism she saw in the works of Mary Wollstonecraft (Literary Women [New York: Doubleday, 1975], 20).

18. Annie Besant, An Autobiography (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1908).

19. Frances Power Cobbe, The Life of …, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894), 1:1-330, 2:331-648.

20. The Autobiography and Letters of Mrs. M. O. W. Oliphant, arranged and edited by Mrs. Harry Coghill (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1899), 3-150. Unfortunately, the editor arranged the installments in the chronological order of the events rather than in the order of their writing, presumably for the sake of historical clarity rather than autobiographical authenticity.

21. [Patricia Meyer] Spacks, Imagining a Self[: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth Century England, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976], 78.