The Liminal Case of British-Jewish Women’s Autobiographical Writings

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article explores three works by British-Jewish women writers—Louise Kehoe’s In This Dark House, Lisa Appignanesi’s Losing the Dead and Linda Grant’s The People on the Street—in order to contextualise their writings within the “memoir boom” that occurred in the field of the humanities at the turn of the millennium. By applying a narratological and rhetorical reading and drawing on the theories recently formulated in the fields of trauma, memory and Holocaust studies, I will demonstrate that these texts exemplify the contemporary trend of hybrid life-writing narratives created by British-Jewish women writers, finally showing that this group of authors has greatly contributed to the development of new liminal autobiographical practices. Even though these three works represent diverse events related to migration and trauma, they present some recurrent narrative patterns which are paradigmatic of the way contemporary British-Jewish women are attempting to reconstruct their own and their family memories in their literary and autobiographical creations.