Victorian Review

Women’s Letters as Life Writing 1840–1885 attempts a much-debated and much-disputed proposition that women’s letters may find an integral and important place in shaping women’s life writing. The author argues, with the help of six celebrated women, that life writing in fact emerged from the letter writing, collection, curation, and recuperation of these women letter writers. The author rightly points to the fact that letter-writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was widely dictated by handbooks or “taught experience of letter writing,” and yet for women, letters provided a less transgressive “vehicle” of self-record (19). The letters of Frances Burney, Charlotte Brontë, Mary Granville, Catherine Winkworth, Jane Austen, and George Eliot become the basis of the author’s deftly handled medium of arguing, justifying with substantiation, and finally establishing the point that it is possible for women’s letters to transmute themselves to life writing. The book is a momentous compendium that persuasively argues for and establishes the vital link between a matrix of editors, biographers, family, and reviewers of the original letter writers to establish a representation in letters. Chapter 1 introduces Delafield’s methodology and outlines the roles played by these figures in transforming letters to veritable life writing, with the remaining chapters devoted to these six women letter writers and the processes through which their letters became lives.

Chapter 2 brings us to the world of Frances Burney, Madame D’Arblay, whose Diary and Letters became the basis for the creation and perpetuation of the model for women’s lives told through letters (35). In situating the [End Page 176] Burney letters as an important influence moulding the paraphernalia of life writing, Delafield brings out the duality that letters represented—on one hand, giving the potential for self-narration and dramatization (36) and on the other, the probability of reordering and fictionalizing right at the point of composition, with future publicity and publication in mind. With well-documented research on the Burney collection, Delafield reveals the pitfalls of being the author of Evelina, in which fictional epistolary correspondence succeeded while at the same time raising suspicions about the truthfulness of her letters (49).

Chapter 3 contrasts The Life of Charlotte Brontë, by Elizabeth Gaskell, which Delafield claims was the model for women’s letters as life writing, with the style followed by Charlotte Barrett in Diary and Letters. Delafield primarily labels Gaskell’s task as that of recovery and fictionalization, a task and a duty of contextualizing a nineteenth-century woman author through her letters. Much criticism of Gaskell has pointed out her “sentimental” style, rendering the work as a “story” but not “history” (53). Delafield, like her predecessor Linda Peterson, attributes to Gaskell the reiteration and salvaging of what she dubs the “duty” narrative around Charlotte Brontë’s life and professionalism. This, she points out, had to be undertaken to rescue Brontë from accusations of unwomanliness and coarseness (55). The chequered history of this process of salvage and rescue by Gaskell was justified by her premise that she was being faithful in presenting Charlotte’s own words, her letters. However, Gaskell’s adoption of the personae of the biographer and champion of the “duty” narrative still made her appear to be a writer subordinating the letters “to serve her intention” (68). Yet, whatever may be the criticism of or reservations about Gaskell’s methods or intentions, the fact is that “[r]ecovery, duty and identity are thus elements of the life-writing model” (69), which Gaskell’s Life achieved. In the process of establishing a model or methodology for using letters for life writing, the life of the biographer is revalued. Along with Burney’s biographer-editor Barrett, Gaskell’s biography, too, became a popular model that shaped the writing of others in this genre, which this book elaborates upon in its following chapters.

Chapter 4 is a riposte to Burney and examines the Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs. Delaney. Lady Llanover becomes the central, intervening force as editor in this work, which attempts to rectify the erasure and misrepresentation that Delaney’s family members suffered in Diary and Letters. This politics of erasure and reinstation is marvellously probed by Delafield in this chapter, a comparative, persuasive, and detailed account of the role, motives, and methods Llanover uses to reinstate Delaney in her role as a court memoirist. Delafield critically exposes the pitfalls of such methods, in which an eighteenth-century figure such as Delaney becomes a different projection of “a controlled antiquarian image” for a nineteenth-century readership (90). Llanover’s methods in Autobiography severely distorted and effaced Delaney’s personality and role in self-writing at the cost [End Page 177] of neutralizing Burney’s pivotal role in the image-making of Delaney. Once again, the book lays out the role of editors, the handlers of letters, in making or unmaking life writings, before a modern reader.

Chapter 5 is devoted to the Letters and Memorials of Catherine Winkworth, edited by her sister, and contemporary, Susanna. Delafield mentions that the methodology it uses is borrowed from the style of Burney’s Diaries and that of Gaskell’s Life. The chapter situates the history and role of the Winkworth family and especially the translator sisters before it probes the significance of the family in shaping the life writing in Winkworth’s collected letters. As in all previous chapters, the quaintly arranged sections on the life of the characters and the journey of the letters read almost like enjoyable short fiction. Delafield also rightly notes the problematics that engulfed a published volume of letters in the nineteenth century and points out that because Letters and Memorials was not meant for wide circulation, it was saved from the censorship of levities that was characteristic of the Winkworth family in the hands of Susanna. These letters gave Susanna and Catherine a new voice within that work and an opportunity to re-examine the editor Susanna’s role in the context of a nineteenth-century model of letter writing.

Chapter 6 tackles the history of the correspondence of the most famous and popular of early nineteenth-century novelists, Jane Austen, to show how Letters of Jane Austen, in two volumes, was primarily an attempt by the family to reshape, preserve, and domesticate the life of the novelist. Delafield explores the role of Austen’s grandnephew, Lord Brabourne, who attempted to reshape Austen’s image for consumption, showing how “the survival pattern of correspondence inflects future life writing” (115). A personal favourite, this chapter deftly brings out the problems of letters being manipulated by collectors and editors, in this case Brabourne, for self-aggrandisement or for feeding personal agendas, oftentimes to the detriment or marginalization of the biographical subject (126). Brabourne thus does two things that go on to show the precarious fate of life writing recreated through letters: firstly, of juxtaposing the life of Burney with that of Austen; and secondly, by using Austen’s letters as aids to rewrite the family history imaginatively, with Brabourne at its centre. Delafield’s final conclusion is that despite attempted usurpation by the frame narrative or the editor, the biographical subject in Austen’s letters is never “engulfed” but rather demonstrates a “multivocal” challenge for women’s life writing (134).

Chapter 7 focuses chiefly on George Eliot’s Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals, by John Cross, her second husband, and the practical and intellectual hurdles he faced because he lacked knowledge of the market for biography. Cross faced severe criticism for supposedly suppressing and reducing Eliot’s personality, even though he claimed to have let her speak for herself while he would only work toward the “selection and arrangement” (7) of the letters. Of all the women letter writers, George Eliot as a literary figure loomed large by virtue of her craft as well as her intellectual position in the Victorian [End Page 178] literary world, which expressed emphatic views on life writing, placing autobiography on a pedestal, in her lifetime. This, according to Delafield, was the prime impetus for Cross to let Eliot write her autobiography posthumously through her letters. Posited against his autobiographical memorial was Eliot’s biography by Mathilde Blind, which Delafield probingly points out was a hurdle for Cross because he had to “reclaim both Eliot and her circle of correspondents” from this biography, which preceded his Life (148). Cross’s failure lay in his inability to use the letters to mould or represent Eliot, and the backsliding into a domestic narrative came into direct conflict with earlier narratives that positioned her in the “sage and sibyl model” (156).

The conclusion takes up the case of Christina Rossetti and her life writing through letters and goes on to make a larger comment on letter writing, hidden lives, and the afterlives of biographical subjects in the period from 1840 to 1885. As in all previous chapters, Delafield uses another significant woman writer and the handling of her extant letters by posterity to reiterate the importance of “family memory, collection, and academic recovery” (174). Overall, Delafield’s research is convincing as she meticulously unravels the complex tapestry through which the mid-nineteenth century woman’s letters “were narrated and fixed but also questioned and concealed” (174).

The book is well researched, dense in detail, and hence a valuable resource for scholars of nineteenth-century women’s life writing. The chapters have an identical pattern of subsections, which detail the lives of the editors, biographers, and their subjects as well as the lives and afterlives of the collections of letters. These are interesting and anecdotal often, despite the academic seriousness palpable in them. The work, I believe, achieves more than it set out to do, and does so with deep academic rigour and well-knit research findings, an exhaustive bibliography, and a sound theoretical base delineated in the introduction and throughout the remaining chapters. It stands as an indispensable resource for scholars and researchers of women’s life writing in the mid-nineteenth century. [End Page 179]