Amy Culley

Editorial: Lives in Relation

In what ways does life writing explore relational selfhood? How do auto/ biographies, diaries, letters, and portraits represent inter-personal as well as personal experience? In shaping the account of a life, what role is played by the relationships between the subject and his/her family, peers, religious and political movements, or intellectual discourses? How does the text give form to the relationship between biographer, subject, and imagined reader? What records of collective life do we have and what critical methods can we adopt to challenge the individualistic tendency that has prevailed in traditional approaches to auto/ biography? The papers in this volume emerged from a conference called ‘Lives in Relation’ which was held at the University of Lincoln, UK, in 2009, and which sought to address the issues above, by bringing together contributions from the humanities disciplines on life writing in its various forms. The theme of relationality was chosen with the sense that there has been a shift within life writing (both its practice and criticism) away from the traditional emphasis on the autonomous individual who stands out of his or her milieu in favour of considerations of the relationality inherent in individual lives. The concept of the autonomous, unified self, the source of its own meaning and action as a selfdetermined agent, has been challenged by poststructuralist and psychoanalytic approaches to selfhood and language. In addition, feminist critics have demonstrated the inadequacy of individualism for understanding traditions of women’s life writing, both in terms of their textual forms and conceptions of personal identity. These critical approaches have contributed to new ways of writing and interpreting life narratives. In terms of scholarship on life writing, we have now moved beyond a gendered reading of relationality as a distinctly feminine category or female practice, to recognise the relational structures underpinning all life writing texts*a claim borne out by two essays in this volume: Holly Furneaux’s discussion of John Forster’s biography of Charles Dickens as a testament to male friendship, and Arlene Leis’ consideration of the artist Jean-François Rigaud’s group portraits as emblems of professional association. As a consequence of this critical shift, life writing in forms with obviously relational structures, such as the letter and family memoir, have gained in status in relation Life Writing VOLUME 8 NUMBER 3 (SEPTEMBER 2011)

‘Prying into the Recesses of History’: Women Writers and the Court Memoir

The court memoir combines autobiographical reflections, royal biography and political history and has an uneasy association with the secret history and roman a clef. The genre has rarely been discussed within studies of women’s life writing, despite fascinating accounts of the Georgian and Regency courts by women writers and important reassessments of women’s contributions to historical writing in recent years.1 This chapter explores the omission of the court memoir within women’s literary history and examines the possibilities for women writers of this hybrid form.2 My focus is on two intersecting memoirs of the Regency court: Lady Charlotte Bury’s Diary Illustrative of the Times of George IV (1838) and (Ellis) Cornelia Knight’s Autobiography of Miss Cornelia Knight, Lady Companion to the Princess Charlotte of Wales (1861). Both women rose to prominence as ladies-in-waiting and published personal accounts of the turbulent marriage of George IV and Queen Caroline, a royal scandal that captured the public imagination throughout the 1810s. Their narratives establish their intimacy with the court, blending portraits of celebrated figures with conversations and correspondence and providing readers with voyeuristic pleasures in the insights into fashions, decor and bons mots. Their life writing reveals the complex negotiations undertaken by the court memoirist, who is implicated in royal intrigue and capitalizes on the publication of scandal.

The Sentimental Satire of Sophia Baddeley

The article explores the literary significance of Elizabeth Steele’s The Memoirs of Mrs. Sophia Baddeley (1787) and considers the relationship between satire and sentiment in the self-representations of late-eighteenth-century courtesans. The Memoirs establishes the courtesan Baddeley as a sentimental heroine and translates her experience of domestic violence and sexual double standards into a satire of fashionable society. Steele’s narrative therefore anticipates the sentimental self-portraits of nineteenthcentury women writers and looks back to an earlier tradition of the referential scandal chronicle. In addition, it reveals the impact of the commercial exchanges of the literary marketplace on female self-representations.

Introduction: Gender, Genre and Authorship

Literary scholars now recognize, as Clare Brant expresses it, that ‘many women writers in eighteenth-century Britain were not novelists, poets, or dramatists. They were writers of letters, diaries, memoirs, essays — genres of sometimes uncertain status then and certainly liminal status now’.1 This collection of new essays argues for the importance of women’s life writing, both within women’s literary history and as an integral part of the culture and practice of eighteenth-century and Romantic auto/biography. As these essays show, research in this area has broader implications for our understanding of literary genres, constructions of gender, the relationship between manuscript and print culture, the mechanisms of publicity and celebrity, and models of authorship in the period.

A Life in Opposition

Written over twenty years after the deaths of Sophia Baddeley and Mary Robinson, The Memoirs of Harriette Wilson, Written by Herself (1825) has only recently come to scholarly attention, despite Harriette Wilson’s status as a celebrated Regency courtesan and her innovative approach to life writing. Wilson’s interactions with the literary culture of the Regency have been the focus of critical studies by Sharon Setzer and Lisa O’Connell.1 Building on these much-needed re-assessments of Wilson, I consider the Memoirs’ depiction of female relationships and its place within traditions of the scandalous memoir, the fashionable silver-fork novel, and aristocratic female authorship. In contrast to the narratives of social exile associated with the ‘fallen’ woman, Wilson presents the collective history of a coterie of demireps and, like Robinson, engages in cross-class identifications with female aristocrats. Wilson exploits the sociability of the memoir form in order to depict female networks, conversation, and correspondence, yet it is never a shared life story comparable to the Memoirs of Elizabeth Steele and Sophia Baddeley. Rather, Wilson constructs her identity in opposition to a range of female figures, presents rivalries and betrayals, and above all ensures that she remains the heroine of her own narrative. These rivalries are at their most explosive in the Confessions of Julia Johnstone (1825), putatively written in answer to Wilson’s Memoirs by her friend and fellow demirep.

Mary Fletcher and the Family of Methodism

The manuscript autobiography of Mary Fletcher, written in 1785, is structured into four parts, each addressing a different personal relationship that shapes her identity. It opens with a description of her turbulent childhood and her conversion to Methodism, continues with an account of her life within the female community at Leytonstone, and in the third part deals with the aftermath of Sarah Ryan’s death and the society’s relocation to Yorkshire. Her writing was interrupted by her husband’s death in August 1785, and from this point her continuous history is replaced by disconnected extracts from her diary and an appendix. Fletcher left instructions for Mary Tooth to pass her manuscripts to John Wesley’s biographer Henry Moore for publication after her death. Moore spliced together Fletcher’s autobiography with entries from her spiritual diary, included Her Thoughts on Communion with Happy Spirits, and ended the work with Tooth’s account of Fletcher’s final days and his own review of Fletcher’s character.1 The text was published as The Life of Mrs. Mary Fletcher, Consort and Relict of the Rev. John Fletcher in 1817. Moore provided an insight into his own editorial practices in his introduction: In compiling her life, I have left out much valuable matter, which was either contained, in substance, in other parts of these Memoirs, or were not of sufficient interest to appear in the Publication. I have also compressed what I thought was redundant, that the work might not be needlessly swelled. I have also thought it right to press her sentences into more conciseness.2

The Life Writing of Early Methodist Women

The life writing of the women preachers of early Methodism provides rare insights into friendships, communal identities, conceptions of authorship, and textual sociability within a network of women writing in both youth and age. Mary Fletcher (nee Bosanquet) (1739–1815), Sarah Ryan (1724–1768), Sarah Lawrence (1756–1800), and Mary Tooth (1778–1843) (collectively referred to as the Fletcher circle)1 played a central role in Methodism from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, maintaining close relationships with John Wesley and with one another across two generations. There is an extensive manuscript archive of their personal writings still extant, including spiritual journals and diaries, autobiographies, transcribed oral testimonies, letters, sermons, and pocketbooks. The collection is discussed in recent histories of Methodism, but its significance for studies of women’s life writing has not previously been recognised. Eighteenth-century spiritual autobiography is traditionally associated with the rise of individualism and it is understood as a genre that developed out of the Puritan conversion narrative in its emphasis on rigorous self-examination, individual religious experience, and personal testimony. However, relationships are central to these women’s self-representations, as they present family histories that are spiritual rather than biological in origin, demonstrate the interdependence of narratives of self and other, and write a shared history.

Testimony and Transcription in the Life of Sarah Ryan

The life of Sarah Ryan included a family break-up, a period of domestic service, abusive ‘marriages’ to three husbands (two simultaneously), a Methodist conversion, and finally her self-reinvention as a preacher and co-founder of the Leytonstone orphanage in 1763. Her story has been marginalised within Methodist historiography, but it is preserved in the archive as a consequence of Mary Fletcher’s commitment to recording the life of her companion. Ryan seems to have dictated her personal history to Fletcher around 1767, and ‘Account of Sarah Ryan’ (allegedly ‘taken from her own mouth’) provides a narrative of her experiences from childhood up until her Methodist conversion. Fletcher includes an authorial note clarifying her relationship to Ryan and the nature of the text, and transcribes extracts from Ryan’s diary and correspondence. The patchwork of texts also includes ‘Some Further Account of Mrs Ryan’ as well as several autobiographical fragments. Aspects of this collection have found their way into print, but the full story of Ryan’s life could not be assimilated into the Methodist canon. Instead, her experiences appear in excerpts published in the Arminian Magazine, including a fifteen-page spiritual narrative in 1779, a selection of correspondence between Ryan and John Wesley serialised in 1782, and diary extracts that appeared in 1806.1 Ryan’s experiences were therefore valued as a series of isolated instants that illustrated stages on the path to salvation, but publication was premised on making the material details of her unconventional life invisible.

Female Friendship in the Auto/biography of Sophia Baddeley and Elizabeth Steele

The Memoirs of Mrs. Sophia Baddeley (1787) presents the history of an intimate friendship between the actress and courtesan Sophia Baddeley and her companion and biographer Elizabeth Steele. The interaction of the biographer and her subject demonstrates the ways in which identity is created through relationships and suggests the permeable boundaries between autobiography and biography. A fluid model of gender and sexuality is also articulated in a narrative that is punctuated by cross-dressing, bed swapping, and duels. Steele translates the women’s experience of domestic violence, financial exploitation, and sexual double standards into a feminist polemic and establishes Baddeley as an object of sympathy around which a female audience is convened. However, this female collaboration is complicated by the shadowy presence of the ghost-writer, who is glimpsed in the history of the publication and reception of the Memoirs. Baddeley and Steele have barely been discussed within accounts of the scandalous memoir, but they have been included in studies of female companionship, Gothic fiction, and in a history of eighteenth-century biography.1 The Memoirs’ most recent editors observe that ‘the story of Sophia’s life is also the story of Steele’s life’ and this depiction of a shared history provides rare insights into biographical intimacies and the complexities of female collaboration.2

Reading the Past

Recent scholarship has shown the ways in which biographical history could be used by eighteenth-century women writers in order to challenge women’s marginalisation within narratives of the past and contribute to contemporary debates regarding femininity and historiography.1 Lady Rachel Russell (1636–1723), wife of the Whig martyr Lord William Russell who was executed in 1683 for his suspected role in the Rye House Plot to assassinate Charles II and James, Duke of York, provides an ideal case study through which to consider questions of gender and genre. She was frequently discussed by women writers from the 1770s to the 1840s in political histories, poetry, biographies, editions of letters and collective biographies. The posthumous publication of her letters in 1773 provided a more intimate and complex portrait of a woman traditionally celebrated for her symbolic political value as a model of wifely devotion, piety and maternal duty. Subsequent narratives by Mary Scott, Catharine Macaulay, Mary Hays, Matilda Betham, Mary Pilkington, Lucy Aikin and Mary Berry among others retained some of these elements, but at the same time recognised the ways in which Lady Russell complicated ideas of domestic virtue, female heroism and women’s public participation.2 Her life also prompted reflections on sympathy, identification and exemplarity, and the interactions between history, biography and fiction, which were central to debates regarding historical discourse in this period.3