Rewriting lives: reading, sociability, and authority in women’s literary biography, 1780-1820

Stanbridge, Emma

Abstract

This dissertation assesses the contributions of three biographers – Hester Lynch Piozzi (1741-1821), Anna Seward (1742-1809), and Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849) – to the development of British life-writing in the period 1780-1820. This examination of their life-writings highlights how these authors contributed to the redefinition of literary biography by demonstrating that intellectual authority can emerge from intimate and gendered modes of writing a Life. By emphasising femininity and drawing on a domestic perspective, they aligned their life-writings with a cultural shift that privileged private, emotional, and moral insights over public accomplishments. This dissertation also explores how these writers increasingly leveraged their reputations as published authors in other genres to substantiate their status as literary biographers. In doing so, they positioned the biographer as an arbiter of literary-biographical knowledge, blending personal insight with intellectual rigour. Each biographer examined here had a complex relationship with her biographical subject, who was also her mentor. This dissertation establishes not how women were mentored but how they became biographers by negotiating, and at times disavowing, their mentors’ influence. The textual influences of Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (1779–1781) and James Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791) were also significant in shaping their biographical methods. Additionally, this dissertation situates their work within the broader literary culture of the period, with particular attention to how intellectual and literary networks, especially those associated with Lichfield, shaped their life-writing. Through explorations of their reading practices, critical engagements with literature, and narrative innovations, this study contends that Piozzi, Seward, and Edgeworth were crucial in reshaping biographical conventions. Bridging feminist recovery projects with an integrationist approach, this dissertation offers new insights into the interplay of gender, genre, and literary authority in the late Georgian period. It seeks to reposition the life-writings of Piozzi, Seward, and Edgeworth as central to the development of literary biography.

Citation

Stanbridge, E. Rewriting lives: reading, sociability, and authority in women’s literary biography, 1780-1820. (Thesis). Keele University. https://keele-repository.worktribe.com/output/1109729

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Mar 21, 2025
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 21, 2025
• Public URL: https://keele-repository.worktribe.com/output/1109729
• Award Date: 2025-03