Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni

Corinne Bigot

Valérie Baisnée-Keay

Stephanie Genty

Nathalie Saudo-Welby

This collection explores how women writers in the English-speaking world transform personal intimacy into political engagement, challenging cultural oppression across genres—life writing, novels, poetry, and theatre—from the 19th century to today. Guided by the feminist slogan “the personal is political,” it bridges feminist, decolonial, ethnic, and queer studies, revealing how gender-based domination intersects with other forms of oppression. The authors highlight how these writers, across various forms of expression, imagine new modes of resistance and carve out space for social change.

Not So Private Conversations

Women Writing Intimacy and Resistance

Claire Bazin

This book examines the relationship between words and images in various life-writing works produced by nineteenth to twenty-first century American and British women. It addresses the politics of images in women’s life writing, contending that the presence or absence of images is often strategic. Including a range of different forms of life writing, chapters draw on traditional (auto)biographies, travel narratives, memoirs, diaries, autofiction, cancer narratives, graphic memoirs, artistic installations, quilts and online performances, as life writing moves from page to screen and other media. The book explores a wide range of women who have crossed the boundary between text and image: painters who have become writers, novelists who have become painters, writers who hesitate between images and words, models who seize the camera, and artists who use the frame as a page.

Picturing the Female Self

Text and Image in Women's Life Writing

Valerie Baisnee-Keay

This collection of essays offers a stimulating insight into the practice of reading and the relationship between reading and writing in women's life writing texts such as memoirs, autobiographies, diaries, travel logs, and graphic memoirs. It covers a great variety of writers from literary classics such as Virginia Woolf to the authors of slave narratives. Some essays focus on how literary texts help frame a narrative of the self, acting as models and counter models; others insist on the role of literature in resisting imposed gendered and ethnic identities. The essays also show that female writers use reading to deepen their relationship to the rest of the world. While reading is often represented as central to life and aesthetic experience, the collection stresses that there is no single or universal approach to reading in women's life writing. Taking into account debates about life writing, the collection opens new fields of investigation and fully participates in current scholarly conversations in the field.

Corinne Bigot

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