Templates for Authorship

Reviewed by: Templates for Authorship: American Women's Literary Autobiography of the 1930s by Windy Counsell Petrie Pamela L. Caughie (bio) Templates for Authorship: American Women's Literary Autobiography of the 1930s Windy Counsell Petrie University of Massachusetts Press, 2021, 240 pp. ISBN 9781625345516, $90.00 hardcover; ISBN 9781625345523, $28.95 paperback. Nearly a decade ago as I was embarking on a new project, a comparative scholarly edition of Lili Elbe's life narrative (published in its 1933 English translation as Man into Woman), a colleague recommended I read Gertrude Atherton's 1923 novel Black Oxen, reissued by Broadview Press in 2012. That novel, which engages with sexology and rejuvenation therapy, was a bestseller in 1923 and was adapted into a popular film in 1924. As a modernist and gender scholar, I was embarrassed to admit I had never heard of Atherton. My ignorance, however, only confirms Windy Counsell Petrie's point in Templates for Authorship: the life writings by women authors included in this volume, many of whom were "generally disincluded" from American universities in the 1930s, reveal "the importance of the academy as a legitimating agency" (25). Petrie compares twelve literary autobiographies by American women writers (including Atherton) published in the 1930s, an era that yielded a "bumper crop" of life writings by women authors (1). Petrie analyzes the market forces and cultural conditions that produced this unprecedented interest in [End Page 117] literary memoirs by women, including the academic consolidation of modernism that contributed to the loss of so many of these authors from literary histories. Focused on the motivation of publishers and authors for producing such autobiographical writings, and on their reception by popular and academic readers, Templates for Authorship reveals "the tension between the demand for and discomfort within these women's autobiographies" (37), as the authors adopt, adapt, and create various templates for women writing about their literary lives. These authors struggled with how to present themselves to an audience already familiar with their work and yet primed to see women writers in terms of certain passé notions of women in the public sphere. Do they present themselves as artists dedicated to their craft, or as professional writers devoted to the lucrative business of publishing? Do they play on their celebrity status, cultivating an individualist persona, or on their reputations as activists, effacing their individuality for the sake of a common cause? Do they write for a popular readership on whom their financial success depends, or for an academic audience on whom their critical reception depends (36–38)? These are the dilemmas Petrie deftly navigates by structuring her analyses around various templates—the artist, the activist, the celebrity, the visionary, the professional—and pairing autobiographies under these prototypes to better explain their shared challenges, frustrations, and innovations. Pairing authors by templates allows patterns to emerge that might otherwise be missed, as Petrie explicitly notes in Chapter 6, which compares Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) with Carolyn Wells's The Rest of My Life (1937). Both works defy readers' expectations by refusing linear chronology, engaging in long digressions, deferring promised information, and withholding biographical details. By attending in each chapter to the paired writers' overlapping motivations and shared rhetorical strategies, and to the marketing and reception of their works, Templates for Authorship tells us as much, or more, about how literary lives and histories are made as it does about the individual women authors. The first chapter, for example, delineates the rhetorical devices that Edith Wharton, perhaps the most established author covered here, and Grace King, the "grande dame" (45) of southern letters, deployed to present themselves as serious artists against their social identities as members of the privileged class. In A Backward Glance (1933) and Memories of a Southern Woman of Letters (1932), respectively, Wharton and King suppress their private lives and emotions, renounce "ornamental femininity" (46, 53), downplay their mothers' roles in their lives, and evade difficult family relationships, such as Wharton's divorce and King's brother's alcoholism. Such strategies foreground their literary significance at the expense of their social positions. "Under similar pressures to highlight and preserve their serious reputations," Petrie writes, "King and Wharton

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