“I write after the impression has been partly wiped away”: gender and the politics of memory in selected excepts from Lady Anne Barnard's Cape writings

Abstract

This article offers a feminist analysis of selected excerpts from various collections of Lady Anne Barnard's Cape diaries and letters in order to explore the gendered experiences of a woman who is mostly remembered for the writings that survived her. A close reading through the theoretical rubric of feminism reveals how Lady Anne's textual legacy is fundamentally shaped by both the dynamics and the politics of memory. Letters and diaries form part of the larger genre of life- writing and the article will demonstrate that all life-writing texts are determined by the vicissitudes of memory while simultaneously exposing the fundamentally gendered nature of memory. This centrality of memory shapes the engagement with Lady Anne's texts at different levels. When reading these texts, it emerges that Lady Anne was both dependent on memory and that she was carefully negotiating the politics of gender and memory at the time of writing.