1st Edition

Men of Letters, Writing Lives

By Trev Lynn Broughton Copyright 1999

    Trev Lynn Broughton takes an in-depth look at the developments within Victorian auto/biography, and asks what we can learn about the conditions and limits of male literary authority. Providing a feminist analysis of the effects of this literary production on culture, Broughton looks at the increase in professions with a vested interest in the written Life; the speeding up of the Life-and-Letters industry during this period; the institutionalization of Life-writing; and the consequent spread of a network of mainly male practitioners and commentators.
    This study focuses on two case studies from the period 1880-1903: the theories and achievements of Sir Leslie Stephen and the debate surrounding James Anthony Froude's account of the marriage of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle.

    PART 1 Stephen’s Stephens Introduction: ‘Some little employment’: letters, Lives and Leslie Stephen 1 On the wire: Leslie Stephen, Life-writing and the art of Forgetting 2 Missing her: the Leslie Stephens, Anny Ritchie and the sexual politics of genre PART 2 Froude’s Carlyles: anatomies of a controversy 3 Dust-clouds and dissonances: married life as a literary Problem 4 Froude: the ‘painful appendix’ 5 ‘Revelations on ticklish topics’: impotence, biography and Froude-Carlyle

    Biography

    Trev Broughton teaches in Women's Studies and Literature at the University of York, and specialises in auto/biography. She has edited, with Linda Anderson, Women's Lives/Women's Times: New Essays on Autobiography:with Joseph Bristow, The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter;and with Ruth Symes,The Governess: An Anthology.