Abstract
This essay examines the autobiography of Hester Lynch Piozzi and contextualizes her story within eighteenth-century ideologies of gender and aging. From a narrative understanding of identity, autobiographical writing serves as one of the many stories that constitute an individual's identity. This reading of Piozzi's account finds that it functions both as an act of reminiscing and as an effort to give meaning to life that was often misunderstood. Considering Piozzi as a woman who lived most of her life outside of the social and cultural expectations for a middle class female of her era, this essay suggests the importance of listening to and retelling the stories of others as well as our own.
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Rodriguez, C.M. A Story of Her Own: Hester Lynch Piozzi's Autobiography. Journal of Aging and Identity 4, 127–138 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022807514463
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022807514463