ABSTRACT
According to Simone de Beauvoir, 'women more than men cling to childhood memories'. In the nineteenth century, women were doubly transgressive in writing about themselves, and claiming a place in the history of their times. Women writers have always been concerned with the hidden emotions of very specific and individual children. A consistent theme in Romantic women's autobiographical writing is relationship with the community. Following in the tradition of the Romantics, Victorian women explored the hidden terrors of the inner life in a way that many Victorian men tended to avoid, as they focused more on their intellectual and spiritual development. For women, the inner life was paramount, frequently displacing any chronological account of external events. School episodes, which figure so largely in male autobiography, are more haphazard in nineteenth-century women's writing. As Victorian women began to publish and read each other's autobiographies, they noticed how similar their childhood experiences had been, especially their imaginative lives.
