ABSTRACT
The Introduction discusses the letter as a vehicle for life writing and briefly explores how letters were employed within the nineteenth-century letter collections of six women: Frances Burney, Charlotte Brontë, Mary Delany, Catherine Winkworth, Jane Austen and George Eliot. This will also include an introduction to the types of collaborations to be covered by the rest of the book. The model emerging from this analysis will later demonstrate that elements of (un)sociability, resistance and community played a role in the response to writerly identity portrayed in letters, and that the letter has a significant role in recovering relational aspects of exemplar women. Life-writing publications driven by letters responded also to reviews of women as authors in the marketplace. Women’s Letters as Life Writing finally discusses how the spectrum of writing within the core texts becomes a kind of collective biography.
