Autobiographies of American women writers to 1914

The autobiographies of women writers are of interest both to students of autobiography and to students of women's literature. The present study examines all autobiographies by American women writers published up to 1914. For a comprehensive group, the total is quite small, comprising only twenty-three writers, and only nine of the autobiographies were published before 1900. The women do represent a cross-section of people, including novelists, poets, and journalists, hailing from all regions of the United States (as well as immigrants), and ranging in age from two born in the late eighteenth-century to two born in 188l. Chapters surveying this varied group are divided according to the major focus of the autobiographies.

Eight are autobiographies of youth and childhood. Catharine Sedgwick and Caroline Dall are primarily concerned with the value of their childhood memories as part of the social history of America. Frances Hodgson Burnett and Lucy Larcom create a much more individual persona, although these autobiographies, as well as those of Laura E. Richards and Grace Greenwood, are aimed at a youthful audience. All convey a traditional, conventional view of childhood, in sharp contrast to the autobiographies of Mary Antin, a Russian immigrant, and Mary MacLane, a nineteen-year-old autobiographer whose autobiography brought her a scandalous celebrity because of its frank portrayal of her "inner self." Nine autobiographies focus either wholly or in large part on the writer's career; three of these are essentially apologies for a career. Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Elizabeth Banks, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps focus their autobiographies exclusively on the story of their literary careers. Margaret Sangster, Amelia E. Barr, and Emma Bullet give significant attention to their careers but so sharply distinguish between their career and non-career roles that they create two separate personae. Instead of telling the story of a career, Caroline Churchill, Jane Swisshelm, and Lydia Sigourney create in their autobiographies the defense of a career.

Of the adult autobiographers, six are less concerned with portraying "how I was" than with recapturing "how it was." This outward focus is evident, in varying degrees, in the autobiographies of Ednah Dow Cheney, Rebecca Harding Davis, Marion Harland, Constance Cary Harrison, Adele Sarpy Morrison, and Mary Elizabeth Sherwood. Each gives little attention to her own career, focusing instead on the times and the people she knew.

The survey of different kinds of autobiography is followed by chapters on two subjects of particular interest to students of women's literature. A chapter on autobiography and the writing life traces a composite portrait of the life led by nineteenth-century literary women, from remarks on their literary apprenticeship through advice to would-be writers and comments on the sources of their literary creativity. In contrast to frequent remarks on the hard work involved in professional writing, several refer to pcems or even novels that "came unbidden." The implication that one's career was a response to a vocation rather than a conscious choice leads to an examination of these writers' attitudes to domesticity and the nineteenth-century "cult of true womanhood." Although a few were outspoken feminists, most present no explicit challenge to traditional attitudes toward women, despite the fact that a professional writing career is itself an implicit challenge to tradition. Most give at least lip service to stereotypical ideals of "true womanhood": the more successful the writer, the more likely she is to celebrate the sacred duties of womanhood.

A brief epilogue places these twenty-three writers in the context of other women writers through reference to an unpublished study of autobiographies of twenty American and British women writers. Taken together, the two studies survey forty-two women writer-autobiographers. All tend to take a defensive autobiographical stance and about half prefer discontinuous structural patterns to straight chronological narrative. The major difference between the autobiographers in the two studies is that the British and American group, all but one born after 1850, emphasize their singularity and the implications of their sex far more than do the autobiographers in the present study, all but five of whom were born before 1850.