ABSTRACT
The Winkworth sisters, Susanna and Catherine, were biographers through their work as translators of letters and hymns. Chapter 5 demonstrates how Susanna’s Letters and Memorials used the framework of Catherine’s life to present a family record in letters and linked narrative. The text bears many of the hallmarks of the life-writing model of the late nineteenth century including the trading and withholding of letters together with the circulation of conduct information and discussion of the rationale for women’s lives. Susanna’s choices also reveal themselves in the silenced voices and narratives that can now be correlated from other accounts including the letters of Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte Brontë. This chapter introduces the Winkworth family, and then considers the model of letters in translation and the impact of contemporaneous family recording. The organisation of the private but published record re-sited family relationships and caused omissions and ellipses within the text. The chapter reviews the public place of Letters and Memorials arising from the mirroring of other lives within letters, specifically those of Gaskell and Brontë but also the other letter editors, Dora Hensler, Alice Winkworth and Margaret Shaen.
