ABSTRACT

This book has identified a continuum for women’s letters as life writing extending from Charlotte Barrett’s Diary and Letters of Burney (1842–6) and Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) through Llanover’s Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Delany (1861–2) to the Winkworths’ Letters and Memorials (1883), Brabourne’s Letters of Austen (1884) and Cross’s Life of Eliot (1885). This chapter takes three approaches to reading the afterlives of these six texts. The chapter first explores the immediate evolution of letters as life writing using the ‘Lives’ of Christina Rossetti by Ellen A. Proctor (1895), Mackenzie Bell (1898) and William Michael Rossetti (1908). The discussion identifies Rossetti’s use of epistolary techniques and the diary form in Time Flies (1885). The chapter then uses information laid out in an Appendix to identify revised and modern collection projects that form the textual afterlives of the six texts, including the work of Clement Shorter, Reginald Brimley Johnson and the Burney Centre. The chapter finally introduces hidden or tangential lives including those of Barrett and Gaskell, as well as those of the Winkworth family and Gaskell’s daughters, that have emerged from letter-writing evidence in the wake of these new collections.