Women’s Life Writing and the Labour of Textual Stewardship

Abstract

Abstract Life-writing studies has impacted on our understanding of early modern Englishwomen’s writing, just as critical work on early modern women’s life writing has revised our understanding of several life-writing forms, especially ‘autobiography’. We now understand that, writing in a period before the ‘autobiography’ had solidified into a strict genre, early modern women often combined aspects of multiple life-writing forms. This chapter examines common characteristics of early modern women’s life writing, incorporating a range of women writers. The chapter demonstrates how life writing is a form of textual labour in which women enact stewardship of lives, whether their own or family members. As life-writing forms proliferated during these centuries, women played a role not only in developing various genres but also in putting specific life-writing genres to work for their own purposes. Life writing offered a practical means of agency and a more personal or intellectual means of understanding identity.