1st Edition

Records of Girlhood An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Women’s Childhoods

Edited By Valerie Sanders Copyright 2000
    248 Pages
    by Routledge

    248 Pages
    by Routledge

    This anthology brings together for the first time a collection of autobiographical accounts of their childhood by a range of prominent nineteenth-century literary women. These are strongly individualised descriptions by women who breached the cultural prohibitions against self writing, especially in the attention given to psychologically formative incidents and memories. Several offer detailed accounts of their inadequate schooling and their keen hunger for knowledge: others give new insights into the dynamics of Victorian family life, especially relationships with parents and siblings, the games they invented, and their sense of being misunderstood. Most contributors vividly describe their fears and fantasies, together with obsessive religious practices, and the development of an inner life as a survival strategy. This collection makes vital out-of-print material available to scholars working in the field of women’s autobiography, the history of childhood, and Victorian literature. The volume will also appeal to general readers interested in biography, autobiography, the history of family life, education, and women’s writing: read alongside Victorian women’s novels it offers an intriguing commentary on some of their key themes.

    Contents: Introduction; Amelia Opie; Dorothea Herbert; Mary Martha Sherwood; Mary Somerville; Lady Caroline Lamb; ’Charlotte Elizabeth’; Anna Jameson; Mary Howitt; Sara Coleridge; Harriet Martineau; Fanny Kemble; Elizabeth Sewell; Frances Power Cobbe; Charlotte M. Yonge; Annie Besant; Index.

    Biography

    Valerie Sanders

    'As well as being a useful resource for scholars of the nineteenth century in general, and of women's autobiography in particular, Records of Girlhood is a consistently entertaining and illuminating volume which deserves to be widely read.' Journal of Victorian Culture