Women’s Letters as Life Writing 1840–1885 by Catherine Delafield (review)

Reviewed by: Women's Letters as Life Writing 1840–1885 by Catherine Delafield Oindrila Ghosh (bio) Women's Letters as Life Writing 1840–1885 by Catherine Delafield; pp. 202. Routledge, 2021. $11.36 paper. 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...

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