British Women's Life Writing, 1760-1840 (PDF)

Amy Culley is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Lincoln, UK. She has published essays on women's life writing in the eighteenth century and Romantic period. She is the editor of volumes 1-4 of Women's Court and Society Memoirs (2009) and co-editor of Women's Life Writing, 1700-1850: Gender, Genre and Authorship (2012).

“In her study ofwomen’s life writing in manuscript and in print, Amy Culley persuasively arguesfor a rethinking of the theory and practice of self- representation in the lateeighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. … Engaging throughout with existingscholarship, this is an innovative and incisive study which significantlyadvances our understanding of women’s life writing.” (Anna M. Fitzer, SharpNews, Vol. 24 (4), 2015)

"This book productively deploys the more capacious conceptual model of life-writing to take account of the diverse ways in which women narrated their lives, through print and manuscript, emphasising themes of community, textual sociability and generational interaction. There is no book that applies the methodology of 'life- writing studies' to 18th and 19th century women in this way. The book has a number of interdisciplinary strengths, appealing to scholars in history, gender studies, literary studies, French Revolution studies, celebrity studies and life writing studies." Elizabeth Eger, Kings College London, UK

"Life writing has fresh theory, which Culley uses thoughtfully and imaginatively in tandem with scholarship on 18th-century lives, letters, journals and travel writing... With all its case studies, the book makes a convincing case for seeing women's life writing as outward-looking, even if its insistence on relationality raises an unfashionable question: did none of these women ever shut the door and breathe a sigh of relief that on paper they could be or invent themselves? The egalitarianism of life writing has been very beneficial to literary studies, and Culley's sympathetic readings show how. I wonder, though, whether the updating of models of relationships from circles to social networks projects our own remodelling of relationships in social media: this is the LinkedIn version of self. No wonder it's persuasive." Clare Brant, Times Higher Education

"A carefully constructed and warm-hearted study... Culley