British Women's Life Writing, 1760-1840 Friendship, Community, and Collaboration

British Women's Life Writing, 1760-1840 brings together for the first time a wide range of print and manuscript sources in order to explore the innovative ways in which women wrote the stories of their lives and the lives of others. It argues for the importance of personal relationships, communal affiliations, and creative collaborations in these texts, in order to challenge the traditional conception of autobiography as an individualistic practice and offer new insights into female relationships and networks in this period. By focusing on the spiritual writing of Methodist preachers, the memoirs and journals of courtesans, and British travellers' accounts of the French Revolution, this book provides a critical assessment of the complex and often indeterminate genre of life writing and its place within women's literary history. This is combined with detailed case studies which illuminate the self-representational strategies, personal and communal relationships, and collaborations of canonical writers, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson, and Helen Maria Williams, while also introducing new figures into the history of women's self-narration.

Amy Culley is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Lincoln, UK. She has published essays on women's life writing in the eighteenth century and Romantic period. She is the editor of volumes 1-4 of Women's Court and Society Memoirs (2009) and co-editor of Women's Life Writing, 1700-1850: Gender, Genre and Authorship (2012).

Acknowledgements
Introduction
PART I: 'THEIR LIVES SPOKE MORE THAN VOLUMES' THE LIFE WRITING OF EARLY METHODIST WOMEN
1. The Life Writing of Early Methodist Women
2. 'All the Family in Heaven and Earth are Married': Mary Fletcher and the Family of Methodism
3.'With Magdalene at the Masters Feet': Testimony and Transcription in the Life of Sarah Ryan
4.'The Staff of My Old Age': Memorialising Sarah Lawrence
5.'They Live Yea They Live Forever': Mary Tooth's Methodist History
PART II: 'SIGNED WITH HER OWN HAND' THE LIFE WRITING OF LATE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY AND REGENCY COURTESANS
6. The Life Writing of Late Eighteenth-Century and Regency Courtesans
7. Female Friendship in the Auto/biography of Sophia Baddeley and Elizabeth Steele
8. The Literary Family and the 'Aristocracy of Genius' in the Memoirs of Mary Robinson
9.'Such is the Sad Trials Left for the Surviver': the Journal of Elizabeth Fox
10. A Life in Opposition: the Memoirs of Harriette Wilson
PART III: 'HEARD IN THE SIGHS OF GENERAL MOURNING' THE LIFE WRITING OF BRITISH WOMEN AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
11. The Life Writing of British Women and the French Revolution
12. 'The Good Will Remain Written in Brass': Helen Maria Williams' Collective Memories
13. 'The Little Hero of Each Tale': Mary Wollstonecraft's Travelogue and Revolutionary Auto/biography
14. A Vindication of Self and Other: the Journal of Grace Dalrymple Elliott
15. To 'Rally Round the Throne': Saving the Nation in Charlotte West's Residence
Bibliography
Index