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Reading history through autobiography: politically active women of late nineteenth-century Britain and their personal narratives

Abstract In line with a substantial body of feminist scholarship interrogating the representational agency of women's personal narratives, this article examines the autobiographical writings of politically active British women in the late nineteenth century and their particular relationship to issues of politics and genre. It begins by outlining the attitudes and approaches taken by a number of female activists of the period towards the interrelation of autobiography with history and politics, and it then focuses this issue in a discussion of Edith Simcox's Autobiography of a Shirt Maker. The argument positions these women's writings alongside the multitude of contemporary class-related and gender-specific constraints which aimed to ‘outlaw’ female behaviour in order to examine how their desire to ‘write to history’ provided a significant motivation for their life-writings, at the same time as their writings reveal a representation of selfhood that is both ontologically and epistemologically complex.