Women and autobiography in the twentieth century

Drawing on contemporary feminist, psychoanalytic and post-structuralist theory, this original and revealing work explores the autobiographical writings of six modern female authors: Alice James, Virginia Woolf, Vera Brittain, Sylvia Plath, Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich. The book focuses on the variety of forms twentieth-century autobiographical writing by women has taken and looks closely at the different theoretical issues and critical interpretations they have generated. The author argues that the problem posed by a feminist criticism of autobiography is how to avoid speaking for or about the very discourses through which women themselves are attempting to speak. How can theory resist appropriating the female subject at the very point of her emergence? How can criticism recognise a potential gap between what is written and what has yet to be understood? Through careful analysis of specific texts, Linda Anderson enters into debate with critical work on autobiography and, at the same time, allows those texts to open up new questions about how we read and know them.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.