Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice

R.G. Moyles is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.

To be more accurate, though not disparaging, this collection of essays
should be entitled Feminist Essays on Life Writing, for not only are all
the essays by feminist theorists, but nearly all (save two or three) are
directed toward an understanding of female issues.

In Parts 1 and 3, which concentrate on “Literary Women Who Write the
Self,” Alice Van Wart explores Elizabeth Smart’s early journals;
Christl Verduyn offers a feminist critique of Marian Engel’s Cahiers;
Helen Buss examines Anna Jameson’s Winter Studies and Summer Rambles
as an “epistolary dijournal”; Eleanor Ty argues that Mary
Wollstonecraft’s travelogue derives its covertness from the fact that
she is “daughter,” not “son”; and Janice Williamson reads Elly
Danica’s Don’t: A Woman’s Word as a metaphor of the “powerless
child.” Only in the last two essays (Evelyn Hinz’s “Mimesis: The
Dramatic Lineage of Auto/Biography” and Shirley Neuman’s
“Autobiography: From Different Poetics to a Poetics of Differences”)
are we offered what might be termed more objective theoretical—less
polemical—analyses of “life writing.”

This is not to devalue the importance of this collection, merely to
suggest that there is an unevenness of approach that is slightly
disturbing. The collection perhaps should have been solely feminist
(with a title to suggest such) or more accommodating of other approaches
(to truly reflect its present title). This reservation aside, the
collection is an excellent contribution to a growing area of academic
study, and in its comprehensive definition of “life writing” expands
our view of the subject.