Definition
From the late 1980s, the Victorian period proved particularly fertile ground on account of the proliferation of women’s written lives, the product of increasing literacy and access to the literary marketplace. By the late 1990s, scholars were casting their nets ever wider to catch the diversity of Victorian women’s autobiographical acts. Intersections between life-writing, fiction, and poetry revealed the radical potential of texts produced at the margins of a dominant form. While the range of texts was formally diverse, the canon emerging by the close of the twentieth century was overwhelmingly white, straight, and middle-class. These narrow limits are the product of archival lacunae, research priorities, and publisher profit margins, but where different voices can be heard, the rich potential of the broader field is glimpsed. A familiar roster of names and texts continues to dominate, though their celebrity is limited to small (and decreasing) circles, for Victorian...
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Regis, A.K. (2019). Autobiography. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_116-1
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