Abstract
Although the importance of the contributions made by women poets, novelists, and critics to fin-de-siècle literary culture is becoming increasingly difficult to contest, the achievements of female biographers remain obscure. This neglect is largely due to the scepticism with which Victorian biography as a whole continues to be regarded. In Eminent Victorians (1918) Lytton Strachey was rather too effective in dismissing those ‘two fat volumes, with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead’ (vii), and the notion that the genre was predominantly concerned with whitewashing Great Men persists. The scant attention given to female biographers is exacerbated by the shadow cast by contemporary autobiographers such as Margaret Oliphant and Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, who seem to offer more poignant and (self-)revealing representations of female authorship.
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Atkinson, J. (2012). Fin-de-Siècle Female Biographers and the Reconsideration of Popular Women Writers. In: Gavin, A.E., de la L. Oulton, C.W. (eds) Writing Women of the Fin de Siècle. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230354265_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230354265_9
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