Examining letter collections published in the second half of the nineteenth century, Catherine Delafield rereads the life-writing of Frances Burney, Charlotte Brontë, Mary Delany, Catherine Winkworth, Jane Austen and George Eliot, situating these women in their epistolary culture and in relation to one another as exemplary women of the period. She traces the role of their editors in the publishing process and considers how a model of representation in letters emerged from the publication of Burney’s Diary and Letters and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Brontë. Delafield contends that new correspondences emerge between editors/biographers and their biographical subjects, and that the original epistolary pact was remade in collaboration with family memorials in private and with reviewers in public. Women’s Letters as Life Writing addresses issues of survival and choice when an archive passes into family hands, tracing the means by which women’s lives came to be written and rewritten in letters in the nineteenth century.

Letters are collaborative texts and can be used for writing lives together. This book revisits the material conditions for letter-writing and addresses issues of survival and choice when an archive passes into family hands, examining how women's lives came to be written and rewritten in letters in the nineteenth century.

This inspiring and fascinating book is the first truly comprehensive study of women's letters ever published. Organised by subject matter, and covering a wide range of topics from politics, work and war, to childhood, love and sexual passion, ' 800 Years of Women's Letters' reveals the depth, breadth and diversity of women's lives through the ages. Here Heloise writes to Abelard of her undying devotion, Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf correspond about life and writing, and Queen Victoria complains to Robert Peel about the neglect of Buckingham Palace. Many more women write letters that reveal the compassion, humour, love and tenacity with which they confront the often difficult circumstances of everyday life. This is an intriguing insight, and a rare opportunity to read the real words of real women, in their own intimate language.

A fresh approach to building the life of Jane Austen through her letters, demonstrating that a well-known life can be reframed by being grounded in evidence of that life The Life of the Author: Jane Austen takes readers on a literary-biographical journey through Austen's life in letters. Using a unique non-linear approach, author Catherine Delafield explores three frames for Austen's literary life—family, correspondents, and fiction—to suggest new pathways for the interpretation of life writing about one of the most popular and influential English novelists of all time. Delafield addresses multiple aspects of Austen's epistolary practice and the ways in which her letters, juvenile writings, and unpublished novels have been overlaid on both biography and fiction. Throughout the text, special attention is paid to the changing view of women’s correspondence as personal record and to Cassandra Austen's role as editor of her sister’s surviving letters. The book opens with selected readings from Austen's letters and a review of the family treatment of the life. Subsequent chapters discuss the female circle of correspondents in both extant and missing letters, the letter content and structure of Austen's novels, the use of letters as representations of places and spaces based on Austen's own lived experience of epistolary communication, and more. Discusses how the letters, correspondents, and novels supplement Jane Austen’s fiction and substantiate her life Highlights Austen's use of the letter as a conversation on paper, rather than as an autobiographical tool Explores the letters within Austen's fictional writing as well as recipes, accounts, and needlework with links to the letters Features a select chronology using letters as landmarks, tables representing surviving letters by correspondent, and family trees tracing names and relationships The Life of the Author: Jane Austen is an excellent text for undergraduate and graduate courses on the novel, women's writing, British writing, and life writing, as well as for general readers with interest in gaining new perspectives on Austen's chronological life and literary output.

Jane Austen was a keen consumer of the arts throughout her lifetime. The Edinburgh Companion to Jane Austen and the Arts considers how Austen represents the arts in her writing, from her juvenilia to her mature novels. The thirty-three original chapters in this Companion cover the full range of Austen's engagement with the arts, including the silhouette and the caricature, crafts, theatre, fashion, music and dance, together with the artistic potential of both interior and exterior spaces. This volume also explores her artistic afterlives in creative re-imaginings across different media, including adaptations and transpositions in film, television, theatre, digital platforms and games.

Until now, the missionary plot in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre has been seen as marginal and anomalous. Despite women missionaries being ubiquitous in the nineteenth century, they appeared to be absent from nineteenth-century literature. As this book demonstrates, though, the female missionary character and narrative was, in fact, present in a range of writings from missionary newsletters and life writing, to canonical Victorian literature, New Woman fiction and women’s college writing. Nineteenth-century women writers wove the tropes of the female missionary figure and plot into their domestic fiction, and the female missionary themes of religious self-sacrifice and heroism formed the subjectivity of these writers and their characters. Offering an alternative narrative for the development of women writers and early feminism, as well as a new reading of Jane Eyre, this book adds to the debate about whether religious women in the nineteenth century could actually be radical and feminist.