Life Writing

Abstract

These words of the prison reformer Elizabeth Fry (1780–1845) could just as easily have been written by any of the numerous nineteenth-century women who, in one form or other, engaged in life writing. Common to nearly all was a similar sense of frustrated potential: a conviction that they were capable of doing more than their personal circumstances allowed, and deserved to be recognised for their unusual abilities, originality, and inventiveness, or simply their passionate longing for a chance to distinguish themselves in the world beyond their own household. This sense of personal uniqueness commonly emerged in childhood and remained a powerful memory even if the woman herself delayed for half a century before publishing her reminiscences. In Elizabeth Fry’s case, there was no formal autobiography, but a series of diary entries, letters, and autobiographical fragments embedded in the two-volume Memoir (1847) edited by two of her daughters. Nor are all the letters and other fragments of life writing in the Memoir solely by Fry. Instead, her editors assembled a mass of documents through which Fry herself emerges as a woman whose legendary public success is privately overshadowed by a habit of self-doubt and feelings of unworthiness that she never overcame, even as her outward successes were publicly acclaimed.

I am now seventeen, and if some kind, and great circumstance does not happen to me, I shall have my talents devoured by moth and rust.¹