Abstract
These words of the prison reformer Elizabeth Fry (1780–1845) could just as easily have been written by any of the numerous nineteenth-century women who, in one form or other, engaged in life writing. Common to nearly all was a similar sense of frustrated potential: a conviction that they were capable of doing more than their personal circumstances allowed, and deserved to be recognised for their unusual abilities, originality, and inventiveness, or simply their passionate longing for a chance to distinguish themselves in the world beyond their own household. This sense of personal uniqueness commonly emerged in childhood and remained a powerful memory even if the woman herself delayed for half a century before publishing her reminiscences. In Elizabeth Fry’s case, there was no formal autobiography, but a series of diary entries, letters, and autobiographical fragments embedded in the two-volume Memoir (1847) edited by two of her daughters. Nor are all the letters and other fragments of life writing in the Memoir solely by Fry. Instead, her editors assembled a mass of documents through which Fry herself emerges as a woman whose legendary public success is privately overshadowed by a habit of self-doubt and feelings of unworthiness that she never overcame, even as her outward successes were publicly acclaimed.
I am now seventeen, and if some kind, and great circumstance does not happen to me, I shall have my talents devoured by moth and rust.1
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Notes
1. Memoir of the Life of Elizabeth Fry, with Extracts from her Journal and Letter. Edited by Two of Her Daughters [Katharine Fry and Rachel Cresswell], 2 vols. (London: Charles Gilpin and John Hatchard, 1847), vol. 1, p. 24.
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Rosemarie Bodenheimer, ‘Autobiography without Borders’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 27:1 (March 1999), p. 317.
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Linda H. Peterson, ‘Harriet Martineau: Masculine Discourse, Female Sage’, in Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse, ed. by Thais Morgan (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1990)
Linda H. Peterson, ‘Sage Writing’, in A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. by Herbert F. Tucker (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 373–87
Linda H. Peterson, Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
Amy Culley, British Women’s Life Writing 1760–1840: Friendship, Community, and Collaboration (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 5.
Linda H. Peterson, ‘Collaborative Life Writing as Ideology: The Autobiographies of Mary Howitt and Her Family’, in Women’s Life Writing and Imagined Communities, ed. by Cynthia Huff (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2005), p. 176.
Fry, Memoir (1847), I, p. 49.
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Fry, Memoir I(1847 and 1848), p. vii. Further references are to the first edition of 1847.
Fry, Memoir, vol. 2, p. 228.
Fry, Memoir, vol. 1. p. 93.
Fry, Memoir, vol. 2, p. 353.
[John Bruce], ‘Modern Quakerism’, The Edinburgh Review, 87 (April 1848), p. 531.
Alison Booth, How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. 2004), p. 150.
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Fry, Memoir, vol. 1, p. 65.
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Harriet Martineau, Autobiography, ed. by Linda H. Peterson (1877; Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview 2007), p. 44, 40.
Henry George Atkinson and Harriet Martineau, Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development (Boston: Josiah P. Mendum 1851), p. 4.
Deborah A. Logan, ‘Rhetorical Practice and Epistolary Writing’, in Harriet Martineau and the Birth of Disciplines: Nineteenth-Century Intellectual Powerhouse, ed. by Valerie Sanders and Gaby Weiner (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 216–34.
Annie Besant, An Autobiography (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1893)
Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections from Early Life to Old Age, with Selections from hr Correspondence, by her daughter, Martha Somerville (London: John Murray, 1873), p. 374
Mary Somerville, Life of Frances Power Cobbe. By Herself (London: R. Bentley & Son, 1894), vol. 2, p. 77.
Mary Somerville, Journals and Correspondence of Miss Berry from the Year 1783 to 1852, ed. by Lady Theresa Lewis, 3 vols. (London: Longmans Green, 1865), vol. 3, p. 445.
Berry, Journals and Correspondence, vol. 3, p. 446.
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Sanders, V. (2018). Life Writing. In: Hartley, L. (eds) The History of British Women’s Writing, 1830–1880. History of British Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58465-6_13
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