The Laws of God and Men

This article explores Eliza Davies' 1881 autobiography The Story of an Earnest Life through the lens of nineteenth-century spiritual autobiographic genres. It analyses Davies' use of the spiritual autobiography to create a subjectivity beyond the culturally-sanctioned role of wife and mother, a sense of self that is closely linked to her legal identity. In South Australia in the early 1840s, Davies found herself trapped in a position of legal non-subject through her marriage to a violent, alcoholic husband. Her autobiography charts not only her spiritual journey as Christ's missionary, but also he recreation as a legal subject through the divorce proceedings she brought against her husband in the 1860s. Through her interrogation of legal identity, Davies registers a dissenting voice in contemporary religious and imperial discourses regarding women's social and legal position

Aesthetics · Art · Biography · Identity (music · Life writing · Political science · Sociology · Subject (documents · Subjectivity · Wife · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Gender Studies · History · Law · Multicultural Socio-Legal Studies · Philosophy · Religion, Gender, and Enlightenment · Religious studies · Religious Studies

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  Julia Watson, Sidonie Smith•Reading autobiography•2001

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  Open Access•Patricia Grimshaw, Deborah Oxley•Labour History•1997

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