Writing the lives of Restoration and eighteenth-century women writers: Towards a new feminist biography

While feminist literary biography has as its immediate goal the rediscovery and restoration of forgotten or neglected women writers, its larger aim is to challenge the bias and inadequacy of existing methods of historiography and to rewrite literary history to reflect more accurately women's participation in and contribution to literary culture. Feminist literary biography works, first, to document and record women's lives and works, rediscovering and recovering those works for literary critics as well as the general reading public. Feminist literary biographers next attempt to challenge and revise the literary canon by asserting that a particular writer achieved excellence or even greatness in these newly-recovered and newly-appreciated works. But though feminist literary biography predicates itself upon disrupting received ideas, it rarely disrupts the received forms that have conventionally been used to express those ideas. This dissertation argues that this policy of intervention is in fact essential to the practice of feminist biography and should be applied to more than just literary history. Biography itself as a genre is in need of precisely the kinds of intervention which feminist theories and practices are ideally suited to stage. While feminist scholars of women's autobiography have defined the project of women's life-writing against the practices of conventional life-writing, feminist biographers and scholars of biography too often define their project in the same terms as conventional or traditional practices of biography. The result, as this dissertation shows, is literary biography that succeeds in changing the subject and adding women to literary history but falls short of interrogating the systems and structures that made it possible for women to be written out of history in the first place. There are four main areas where feminist intervention would revitalize the current practice of literary biography, making it theoretically viable as a twenty-first century genre: in biography's claims of objectivity and neutrality; in its mania for archival documentation and fact; in its tendency to conflate life and work; and in its practice of emplotting life history as narrative.