Abstract
The promise that autobiographical writing seems to hold — to lead us beyond the fictional, providing ways of intervening in political debate with personal stories of discovery and transformation — made it a particularly important form in the 1970s and 1980s. Women’s autobiographical writing — encouraged as praxis as much as studied as texts — became allied with the idea of ‘finding a voice’, of putting an identity into words or telling a life story which challenged the ready-made stereotypes of women within a patriarchal order. The phenomenon of ‘consciousness-raising’, with which feminism is associated in this period, depended on an idea of telling one’s unique story and being able to validate the personal as an ‘authentic truth’. However, key to this use of personal stories was also the idea that the personal would provide insight into politically charged questions of gender identity, and that any story would achieve ‘interactive significance’ or collective resonance within the group.1
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Notes
See Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, trans. Paul A. Kottman (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 61.
Sheila Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), pp. 39–40.
Alison Light, ‘Writing Lives’, The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, ed. Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 754.
See Linda Anderson, Autobiography (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 26–9.
Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 105.
Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 286.
Anne Oakley, Taking It Like a Woman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1984), pp. 2–3.
Lauretta Ngcobo, ed., Let It Be Told (London: Virago, 1987), p. 96.
Nicole Ward Jouve, White Woman Speaks With Forked Tongue: Criticism as Autobiography (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 7.
Liz Stanley, The Auto/biographical I (Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 101.
Liz Heron, ed., Truth, Dare or Promise: Girls Growing Up in the Fifties (London: Virago, 1985), p. 1.
Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman (London: Virago 1986), p. 28.
Lorna Sage, Bad Blood (London: Fourth Estate, 2001), p. 21.
Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir (London: Fourth Estate, 2010), p. 4.
Julia Blackburn, The Three of Us: A Family Story (London: Vintage, 2009), p. 202.
Janice Galloway, This is Not About Me (London: Granta, 2008), p. 179.
Luce Irigaray ‘The Limits of the Transference’, The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 181.
Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. 36–7.
Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (London: Vintage, 2012), p. 6.
Jackie Kay, Red Dust Road (London: Picador, 2011), p. 47.
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© 2015 Linda Anderson
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Anderson, L. (2015). Life Lines: Auto/biography and Memoir. In: Eagleton, M., Parker, E. (eds) The History of British Women’s Writing, 1970-Present. The History of British Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-29481-4_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-29481-4_13
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