Abstract
The chapter provides a much-needed history of the central role that women’s autobiography has played in the development of modern feminism. Lidström Brock demonstrates how modern feminist critics in the 1970s developed a suspicion of the autobiographical genre and eventually turned to biography in their search for exemplary life stories. The chapter traces this biographical turn through a short account of the history of realist biography and an examination of the genre’s author and subject constructions. Lidström Brock further points to aspects of the genre that feminists continue to find problematic and provides an answer to the question why feminist historians are still attracted to the realist biographical form.
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Notes
- 1.
In her biography of Mary Wollstonecraft, Lyndall Gordon states that “already [on the day Wollstonecraft died], a struggle for possession had begun, starting with the question: what version of this woman’s life will be transmitted to posterity?” Lyndall Gordon, Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Virago, 2006), 364.
- 2.
To Liz Stanley, biography seems “stuck in a time-warp, protected from and resistant to the winds of change.” Stanley, The Auto/biographical I, 126.
- 3.
Carolyn Steedman, “La Theorie qui n’en est pas une, or, Why Clio Doesn’t Care,” History and Theory 31, no. 4, Supplement 31: History and Feminist Theory (December, 1992): 34.
- 4.
See, for example, Richard W. Bulliet, ed., The Columbia History of the 20th Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA: New Ed. (New York: Penguin, 2001); Howard Zinn, The Twentieth Century: A People’s History (New York: Harper Perennial, 2003); and J. M. Roberts, The Penguin History of the Twentieth Century: The History of the World, 1901 to the Present (New York: Penguin, 2004).
- 5.
Quotation taken from a letter by Abigail Adams to John Adams, March 31, 1776. “Abigail Adams (1776),” in The Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir, ed. Alice S. Rossi (Toronto: Bantam, 1974), 10.
- 6.
Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America (New York: Penguin, 2000), xi.
- 7.
Ibid.
- 8.
Ibid., xv. It is debatable, however, whether the modern women’s movement was ever a “revolution.” As Marcia Cohen points out, “no one was ever shot at. No one was ever murdered in the fray or beaten in jail cells or left to rot as a political prisoner.” Cohen, The Sisterhood, 373.
- 9.
Sara Alpern et al., eds., The Challenge of Feminist Biography: Writing the Lives of Modern American Women (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 3.
- 10.
In November 1967, Shulamith Firestone, Anne Koedt, Kathie Sarachild and Carol Hanisch held their first meeting in Koedt’s apartment. Sarachild’s program was presented at the First National Convention of the Women’s Liberation Movement that took place in Chicago in November 1968. Over the next few years, small-group feminist consciousness-raising spread to cities and suburbs throughout the United States. Castro, Feminism, 21–25.
- 11.
Kate Sarachild, “A Program for ‘Feminist Consciousness-Raising,’” in Public Women, Public Words: A Documentary History of American Feminism 2, ed. Dawn Keetley and John Pettegrew (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 167.
- 12.
Castro, Feminism, 24–25.
- 13.
Women in consciousness-raising groups exchanged “stories” of their experiences. They did not exchange actual experiences, or opportunities for (new) experiences. Written down, these stories took numerous forms, including biography, autobiography and life stories of other kinds, such as diaries, journals and letters. See The Personal Narratives Group, eds., Interpreting Women’s Lives: Feminist Theories and Personal Narratives (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), 4.
- 14.
Ibid.
- 15.
Catherine N. Parke, Biography: Writing Lives (New York: Twayne, 1996), 108.
- 16.
See, for example, Susan Kopperman Cornillon, Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Press, 1972).
- 17.
Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, 83. Felski’s examples of “confessional” texts span from 1973 to 1984 (ibid., 85).
- 18.
Ibid., 27. The modern feminist tendency to read women’s writing as in some sense always “autobiographical” resembles that of biographer and biography critic Georg Misch, who, according to Laura Marcus, viewed autobiography as the reflection of a self-knowing subject and “‘discover[ed]’ autobiographical works everywhere he look[ed].” Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 149. See also Georg Misch, A History of Autobiography in Antiquity, trans. E. W. Dickes, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1951).
- 19.
Estelle Jelinek, The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography: From Antiquity to the Present (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1986), 1. For an early example of feminist autobiography criticism, see Anna Robeson Burr, Autobiography: A Critical and Comparative Study (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1909).
- 20.
Larsson, Sanning och konsekvens, 77.
- 21.
Jelinek, The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography, 1–2.
- 22.
Ibid., 2.
- 23.
Ibid.
- 24.
Jelinek refers to critics, such as Wayne Shumaker, Barrett John Mandel, Georges Gusdorf and Robert Sayre, who defined autobiography as a literary genre, distinct from biography. Jelinek, The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography, 2. Later critics, who express similar views, include Philippe Lejeune, who introduces the term “autobiographical pact” in Le Pacte Autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975).
- 25.
Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 3.
- 26.
According to Pascal, “proper” autobiography communicates “universal values” by providing readers with “the intuitive knowledge of some unique experience” (ibid., 186). Pascal quotes from Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (New York: Scribner, 1953).
- 27.
Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography, 185.
- 28.
Ibid., 10.
- 29.
Ibid., 182.
- 30.
Ibid., 185.
- 31.
Stanley, The Auto/biographical I, 89.
- 32.
Jelinek, The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography, 4.
- 33.
See, for instance, Avrom Fleishman, Figures of Autobiography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983) and Paul John Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), mentioned in Jelinek, The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography, 4.
- 34.
Larsson, Sanning och konsekvens, 99.
- 35.
James Olney, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 19.
- 36.
Ibid., 22.
- 37.
Ibid.,13.
- 38.
Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (1975; repr. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977).
- 39.
Larsson observes that Barthes is “compulsively preoccupied with the empty and dead I.” Larsson, Sanning och konsekvens, 104. The above and subsequent translations of Larsson’s text are mine.
- 40.
Barthes, Roland Barthes, 56.
- 41.
Stanley, The Auto/biographical I, 17.
- 42.
The only woman’s autobiography that really passes muster with Pascal is Saint Teresa’s The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila by Herself. See Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography, 168.
- 43.
See Pascal on The Book of Margery Kempe. According to Pascal, Kempe’s autobiography displays an “almost consistent fortuitousness of relationship…between her actions, the incidents in her outward life, and her inward convictions and urge.” To Pascal, “Margery’s [autobiography] moves in a haphazard world without which itself then makes the personality seem haphazard and wayward.” Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography, 186. Pascal insists, however, that his examples “have not been chosen to suggest that women are incapable of writing great autobiography.” Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography, 65.
- 44.
About Beatrice Webb’s My Apprenticeship, Pascal notes that Webb’s diary entries are often “unaccompanied by comment…From the autobiography, however, we expect a coherent shaping of the past; and if diary entries or letters are quoted, we need the explanatory, interpretative commentary of the author,” a requirement that causes him to dismiss Webb’s published diary. Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography, 5.
- 45.
Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, 83.
- 46.
For one of the earliest feminist theoretical approaches to autobiography, see Cynthia Stodola Pomerleau’s study Resigning the Needle for the Pen: A Study of Autobiographical Writings of British Women before 1800 (Ph.D. thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1974), http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=miscellaneous_papers.
- 47.
Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses, 151.
- 48.
Ibid.
- 49.
Estelle Jelinek, Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1980).
- 50.
Ibid., 19.
- 51.
Ibid., 17.
- 52.
Jelinek, The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography, 5.
- 53.
See also Trev Lynn Broughton, who finds that ideals, such as “autonomy, transcendence, authenticity, subjecthood, authority, literary heroism, expertise, self-possession and so on,” which are commonly used to define canonical auto/biographical narratives have largely gone unquestioned. As a consequence, critics have ignored that auto/biographical canonical male texts are “not as straightforward, their influence as irresistible, nor their relationship to male power as direct as is commonly supposed.” Trev Lynn Broughton, Men of Letters, Writing Lives: Masculinity and Literary Auto/Biography in the Late Victorian Period (London: Routledge, 1999), 9–10.
- 54.
Jelinek, Women’s Autobiography, 13.
- 55.
Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, 83.
- 56.
“It all needs to be invented, or discovered, or resaid.” Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life, 19.
- 57.
Larsson, Sanning och konsekvens, 106–107.
- 58.
Ibid., 105.
- 59.
Ibid., 106–107.
- 60.
Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and Fictions of Self-Representation (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), 40.
- 61.
Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, 86. Christopher Lasch’s critique of confessional tendencies in contemporary culture does not include a gender perspective. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979; repr. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 17.
- 62.
Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, 17.
- 63.
Tess Cosslett, Celia Lury and Penny Summerfield, “Introduction,” in Feminism and Autobiography: Texts, Theories, Methods, ed. Tess Cosslett, Celia Lury and Penny Summerfield (London: Routledge, 2000), 7.
- 64.
Carolyn Steedman, “Enforced Narratives: Stories of Another Self,” in Feminism and Autobiography: Texts, Theories, Methods, ed. Tess Cosslett, Celia Lury and Penny Summerfield (London: Routledge, 2000), 30–31.
- 65.
Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 179, also discussed in Larsson, Sanning och konsekvens, 116–117.
- 66.
Larsson, Sanning och konsekvens, 126.
- 67.
For example, see Susan Groag Bell and Marilyn Yalom, eds., Revealing Lives: Autobiography, Biography and Gender (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990) and Susan Magarey, ed., Writing Lives: Feminist Biography and Autobiography (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990). See also Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses.
- 68.
According to Stanley, “biography offers a considerably tougher challenge [than autobiography], for its present-day form and content derive from positivist and foundationalist origins and assumptions.” Stanley, The Auto/biographical I, 154.
- 69.
Ibid., 3.
- 70.
Samuel Johnson, [“Autobiography”] The Idler, no. 84 [85] (Saturday, November 24, 1759), in Samuel Johnson: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Donald Green (London: Oxford University Press, 1984), 298–300. For an example of a later critic, who sought to separate the two genres, see Wilhelm Dilthey, Der Aufbau der geschichlichen Welt in der Geisteswissenschaften (Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner Verlagsgesellschaft, 1958), discussed in Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses, 142.
- 71.
Other critics view the “self” in autobiography as a “character” in its own right. For example, see Linda R. Anderson, Autobiography: New Critical Idiom (New York: Routledge, 2001), 3. Because narrator and protagonist are not identical, these critics argue, the difference between a first-person and a third-person autobiography has less to do with “facts” and “truth” than with genre conventions. See Jean Quigley, The Grammar of Autobiography: A Developmental Account (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000), 107.
- 72.
Of course, many autobiographers reflect on, or imagine, their own, future death. For example, see Axel Munthe, The Story of San Michele (1929; repr. London: John Murray, 2004).
- 73.
For example, see Stanley, The Auto/biographical I.
- 74.
The autobiographer’s “anxiety,” Schlaeger argues, comes from seeking to be “true” to oneself and, at the same time, “true” to the image one “would like to present to the public or to posterity.” In contrast, the “truth-criterion” in biography is founded on “the consistency of the narrative and the explanatory power of the arguments.” Jürgen Schlaeger, “Biography: Cult as Culture,” in The Art of Literary Biography, ed. John Batchelor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 59.
- 75.
According to Marcus, critics after the 1950s typically viewed “subjectivity” in autobiography as a form of “self-knowing.” Biography was more often defined as an account of the “exemplary” man (or woman) by a detached and “objective” biographer, who remained largely absent from the text. The result, Marcus continues, was “a total separation between autobiography and biography.” Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses, 183, 143. See also Stanley, The Auto/biographical I, 125.
- 76.
Schlaeger “Biography: Cult as Culture,” 59.
- 77.
In this book, the term “realist biography” corresponds roughly with Stanley’s definition of “modern biography.” Stanley, The Auto/biographical I, 11. Stanley also makes a distinction between alternative biographical approaches, such as “meta-biography,” “sociological biography” and “psycho-biography.” Stanley, The Auto/biographical I, 126. The two latter approaches resemble socio-historical biography and psychobiography, respectively, but should not be understood as identical.
- 78.
Epstein argues that (realist) biography is not “a neutral vessel waiting to be filled.” Instead, he views the genre as part of “systems that are self-representative of a ‘masculine subject.’” He also refers to biography as “a generic abduction” which (metaphorically speaking), is “most frequently enacted…between two men over the body of a woman, an excluded other.” Epstein, “Introduction,” 221, 230, 219. See also Stanley, The Auto/biographical I, 249–250.
- 79.
In 1992, Stanley observes that then-contemporary (British) biographers tended to state (rather than argue) classic modernist ideas about biography. Indeed, she continues, they were inclined to see “ideas associated with postmodernism” as a “‘subtle…(and) not so subtle denigration of biography.’” See Eric Homburger and John Charmley, The Troubled Face of Biography (London: Macmillan, 1988), 6, quoted in Stanley, The Auto/biographical I, ix.
- 80.
Stanley, The Auto/biographical I, ix.
- 81.
Steve Weinberg, Telling the Untold Story: How Investigative Biographers Are Changing the Craft of Biography (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1992), 21.
- 82.
Ibid., 20.
- 83.
Ibid., 25.
- 84.
Ibid., 30.
- 85.
Ibid., 33.
- 86.
Ibid., 17.
- 87.
Ibid., 19.
- 88.
Leon Edel, Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 15. Weinberg’s focus on popular and investigative biography and Edel’s exclusive preoccupation with literary biography contribute to their respective definitions of the genre. Weinberg, especially, defends the type of biography he idealizes. He observes that since 1975, specialist academics no longer dominate the field of biography. Biography, he writes, has become a journalistic as much as a literary or historical genre. Despite its reputation as sensationalist and exploitative, Weinberg continues, most biography by investigative journalists is, in his words, “responsible” and “objective.” Weinberg, Telling the Untold Story, 2.
- 89.
Edel, Writing Lives, 25.
- 90.
Ibid., 64.
- 91.
Ibid., 164.
- 92.
Ibid., 173.
- 93.
According to Edel, the biographer must seek to identify with the subject to discover the effects of “casual connections, unconscious psychological determinism and…conflicts” that characterize the subject. All the same, he also stresses what he sees as the constant threat to “objectivity” of such involvement. In identifying with, that is, in “becoming,” this subject, “the biographer risks everything.” Edel, Writing Lives, 63–64.
- 94.
Edel’s views on the biographer’s “omnipotence” come forth most clearly in the following quotation: “All biography is, in effect, a reprojection into words, into a literary or a kind of semiscientific and historical form, of the inert materials, reassembled, so to speak, through the mind of the historian or the biographer. His becomes the informing mind. He can only lay bare the facts as he has understood them.” Edel, Literary Biography (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1959), 13.
- 95.
The two traditions outlined in the following sections should not be understood as an exhaustive account of biography’s development since the 1700s. Rather, the aim is to provide the historical background to Edel’s and Weinberg’s respective notions of their “ideal” biography, and to feminist historians’ use of the genre.
- 96.
Scott E. Casper stresses the specifically republican character of American biography. Nineteenth-century critics called for American biography “to assert the nation’s place beside European monarchies.” They wanted “American biographies that would glorify the nation and its early heroes.” Scott E. Casper, Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, NC and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 35–36.
- 97.
Casper, Constructing American Lives, 2; and Ira Bruce Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form (London: Macmillan, 1984), 15.
- 98.
Casper, Constructing American Lives, 207–208. See also James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791; repr. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics of World Literature, 1999).
- 99.
Larsson identifies Boswell’s frequent use of quotations and dramatization as examples of typical intimacy tropes. Larsson, Sanning och konsekvens, 242–244.
- 100.
Ibid., 244.
- 101.
Samuel Johnson, [“Biography”] The Rambler, no. 60 (Saturday, October 13, 1750), in Samuel Johnson: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Donald Green (London: Oxford University Press, 1984), 203.
- 102.
Casper, Constructing American Lives, 33.
- 103.
Ibid., 6.
- 104.
- 105.
Ibid., 113.
- 106.
Elizabeth Jay, “Introduction” to Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857; repr. London: Penguin, 1997), xiii.
- 107.
See, for example, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979; repr. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1984).
- 108.
Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 6–8. The effects of the philosophies and sciences influencing the nineteenth-century novel are also discernible in realist biography. Larsson draws particular attention to the influence of Hippolyte Taine, who stressed the impact of race, the age and the environment on the individual. Larsson, Sanning och konsekvens, 253. Analogies were made between biological concepts (such as “natural selection” and “inheritance”) and human society, while new social theories argued an “objective logic” of social progress. See Paul Wood, “The Avant-Garde and the Paris Commune,” in The Challenge of the Avant-Garde, ed. Paul Wood (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 116. The influence of Taine’s positivist materialism and rigid systematization limited the biographical subject’s agency to an effect of his social circumstances, Larsson points out. Furthermore, Taine’s preference for abstraction led him to look for the one influence that, more than all others, determined a particular individual’s thoughts and actions. Yet to better understand nineteenth-century realist biography, Larsson continues, one must also take into account the influence of the literary critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve. Sainte-Beuve’s approach to literature included knowledge of the author’s life. His psychological and Romantic approach to biography aimed to reveal the author’s “unique” personality. As such, it resonated strongly with Johnson’s intimate biography. Larsson, Sanning och konsekvens, 253–254. Richard D. Altick, too, stresses the similarities between Boswell’s intimate biography and the nineteenth-century realist novel. See Richard D. Altick, Lives and Letters: A History of Literary Biography in England and America (New York: Knopf, 1965), 62, also mentioned in Larsson, Sanning och konsekvens, 244. For biography’s influence on the novel, see Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740 (London: Century Hutchinson, 1988), 90–128.
- 109.
Casper, Constructing American Lives, 110–111.
- 110.
Ibid., 7.
- 111.
Ibid., 32.
- 112.
Ibid., 17.
- 113.
Nadel, Biography, 13.
- 114.
It is perhaps Thomas Carlyle who best summed up the “life and times” biographical subject and his relationship to world events. “The History of the World,” Carlyle proclaimed in 1840, is the “Biography of Great Men.” Thomas Carlyle, “Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History” (Tuesday, May 5, 1840), repr. in Thomas Carlyle, Heroes and Hero Worship (London: Collins Pocket Classics no. 61, n.d.), 23.
- 115.
Casper, Constructing American Lives, 39–40. Biography’s status as historical record came to depend on the degree of documentary “truth” upon which it was based. The reliance on “verifiable documents of the past, distinct from oral lore and fuzzy sentiment” increased throughout the century, in an attempt to raise the genre’s “scientific” and professional status. Casper, Constructing American Lives, 8–9. The influence of the materialistic study of history, and the new study of literature, resulted in what Larsson refers to as a collision between “idealistic” (official) life writing and the new search for the “truth” about the individual. Larsson, Sanning och konsekvens, 257. The controversy surrounding James A. Froude’s biography of Thomas Carlyle, which offered a portrait of the “great man,” yet also revealed intimate and scandalous details about the Carlyles’ marriage, exemplifies this clash. See James A. Froude, A History of the First Forty Years of Carlyle’s Life, 2 vols. (London: Longman, 1882) and James A. Froude, A History of Carlyle’s Life in London, 2 vols. (London: Longman, 1884).
- 116.
Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (1918; repr. London: Penguin, 1986).
- 117.
Edel, Writing Lives, 143.
- 118.
Ibid., 33–37.
- 119.
Weinberg’s investigative method resembles Boswell’s scrupulous recording of the many details in Johnson’s life. At one point, Weinberg refers in positive terms to the “quarter million pages of records and documents” that Howard Hughes’ biographers compiled in the course of their research. Weinberg, Telling the Untold Story, 103. Stanley points out that Boswell can be seen as both “a scrupulously objective recorder of the details of Samuel Johnson’s life” and “an arch selector and interpreter: not representing but reconstructing, according to his own authorial views and understandings, the ‘inner truth’ of his subject.” Liz Stanley, The Auto/biographical I, 11.
- 120.
Patrick K. O’Brien, “Political Biography: A Polemical Review of the Genre,” Biography 2, no. 1 (Winter, 1999): 51.
- 121.
Ibid., 56, 55.
- 122.
Reed Whittemore, Pure Lives: The Early Biographers (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 3, mentioned in Carina Nynäs, Jag ser klart?: synen på den heliga Birgitta i svenska 1900-talsbiografier (Åbo: Åbo University Press, 2006), 30.
- 123.
Nynäs, Jag ser klart?, 320.
- 124.
Ibid., 60.
- 125.
Brian Harrison and James McMillan, “Some Feminist Betrayals of Women’s History,” The Historical Journal 26, no. 3 (June, 1983), 376.
- 126.
Martin J. Burke, “U.S. Social History,” Science Encyclopedia: History of Ideas Vol. 2, http://science.jrank.org/pages/8087/Social-History-U-S.html.
- 127.
According to Burke, an important agenda for “the ‘new’ social history that emerged in the United States in the 1960s…was the project of rewriting history from the ‘bottom up,’ and providing a ‘usable past’ for contemporary movements for social change.” Burke, “U.S. Social History.”
- 128.
Richard Holmes, “The Proper Study?,” in Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography, ed. Peter France and William St. Clair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 7.
- 129.
Jill Roe, “The Appeal of Biography,” in Writing Lives: Feminist Biography and Autobiography, ed. Susan Margarey (Adelaide: Australian Feminist Studies, 1992), 3–10. See also Nynäs, Jag ser klart?, 85–86.
- 130.
The question of biography’s scientific status has been asked throughout the history of biography. Indeed, as Nynäs observes, even the first known biographer, Xenophon (400 bc), expresses conflicting views on the subject. Nynäs, Jag ser klart?, 29.
- 131.
Liedman, I skuggan av framtiden, 58.
- 132.
Steedman, “La Theorie qui n’en est pas une,” 34, 41–42.
- 133.
Nynäs, Jag ser klart?, 95.
- 134.
Feminism’s influence on historiography can be traced back to early twentieth-century historical studies inspired by Olive Schreiner’s and Ray Strachey’s feminist writing. Barbara Caine, “Feminist Biography and Feminist History,” Women’s History Review 3, no. 2 (1994): 248.
- 135.
According to Leila J. Rupp, “women’s historians have come to use the term ‘the history of women worthies’…to describe and criticize writings that focus on exceptional women without gleaning much about the lives of other women.” Leila J. Rupp, “Women Worthies and Women’s History,” Review of American History 12, no. 3 (September, 1984): 409.
- 136.
All the same, not all historians who strive to complement official history by retrieving women from the past define themselves as feminists. See, for example, Harrison and McMillan, “Some Feminist Betrayals of Women’s History,” 375–376.
- 137.
For example, see Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
- 138.
Stanley, The Auto/biographical I, 4.
- 139.
Caine, “Feminist Biography and Feminist History,” 249.
- 140.
Stanley, The Auto/biographical I, 125.
- 141.
Stedman, “La Theorie qui n’en est pas une,” 33.
- 142.
Ibid., 34.
- 143.
See also Robert Blake, who argues that biographies are “works of reference and unless they are accurate, get the person’s date of birth right, mention his principal achievements, say who the subject married and tell us when he or she died, they are of no use.” Robert Blake, “The Art of Biography,” in The Troubled Face of Biography, ed. Eric Homberger and John Charmley (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 76–77. Despite her misgivings about formal experimentation in biography, Steedman is also the author of a now classic, genre-defying (auto/biographical and sociological) study of working-class women. See Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (London: Virago, 1986).
- 144.
Christina Ericsson, “Inledning,” in Genus i historisk forskning, ed. Christina Ericsson (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 1993), 7. On the classification of feminisms, see also “Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-epistemology/.
- 145.
Ericsson, “Inledning,” 7.
- 146.
This use of biography is not limited to feminist historiography. See, for example, Samuel Johnson’s belief in the moral lesson learned from the biographical study of an individual’s faults and mistakes. Johnson, “Biography,” 205. See also Casper on criminal biography and its social and political uses. Casper, Constructing American Lives, 86.
Bibliography
Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Writing a Woman’s Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988.
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Lidström Brock, M. (2016). A Question of Authority. In: Writing Feminist Lives. Breaking Feminist Waves. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47178-5_2
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