Biographical Misrepresentations of British Women Writers

Reviewed by: Biographical Misrepresentations of British Women Writers: A Hall of Mirrors and the Long Nineteenth Century ed. by Brenda Ayres Meritxell Simon-Martin (bio) Biographical Misrepresentations of British Women Writers: A Hall of Mirrors and the Long Nineteenth Century Brenda Ayres, editor Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, xiv + 291 pp. ISBN 978-3319567495, $119.99 hardcover. Since its inception, the field of women's history has aimed to redress how female historical subjects have been both omitted and misrepresented in traditional history writing. In Biographical Misrepresentations of British Women Writers, Brenda Ayres assembles fourteen essays that focus on the study of how late-eighteenth- to nineteenth-century female authors have been misleadingly portrayed, not only in traditional scholarship but also by female and feminist scholars. This book puts into question the long-presumed objectivity of biographical accounts by examining the interconnections between biographer and biographee, which includes well-known authors such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot, among others. In her introduction, Ayres announces: "The goal of Biographical Misrepresentations is to expose the distortions, gaps, inconsistencies, biases, contradictions, mistakes, misconceptions, and misappropriation of information on several key women writers ... whose lives have been the subject of a myriad of biographies" (4). Her point of departure is that "biography is a hybrid of fact and fiction, more or less with facts selected to serve the author's agenda, with speculation to patch the holes when the facts aren't available, and with varying degrees of fiction to entertain the reader" (2). As she continues to explain, the lives of these authors have become "all the more controversial with [the biographical record's] propensity to sensationalize, distort, exaggerate, and/or misrepresent the facts" (4). Resorting to the mirror as a metaphor, Ayres expounds that, as a result, there "has been great disparity within the biographies on each woman," depending on "the curvature of the mirror" that these biographical accounts reflect (4–5). The contributors to Biographical Misrepresentations explore these mirror reflections with a view to understanding "not necessarily who the woman actually was but how she has come to be depicted after a historical composite of her" (5). To do so, the chapters explore how the different agents involved in producing a [End Page 869] biographical account have contributed to constructing "the hall of mirrors" of the book's title: from biographers and editors to the biographees themselves, and their own family, friends, and acquaintances. Of particular interest is the way the essays trace a history of how biographies fashion and refashion historical subjects—reflecting what they are constructed to mean at different moments in time—and tease out how these refashionings suit the biographies' "social, political and ideological agendas" (9), as well as the tastes of contemporary readerships. In their undertaking, the authors engage with key methodological issues in compelling ways, from putting into question the reliability of the primary sources, to demystifying the authority of the biographer, and bringing to the fore the historical context of the biographical act, including the evolving academic trends in biographical historiography. Hence, for example, Magdalena Nerio's "Genteel Appropriations of Lady Wortley Montagu" examines the rhetorical strategies employed by her biographers in the nineteenth century to produce an image of Lady Wortley Montagu in line with prevalent bourgeois notions of femininity, self-cultivation, and moral agency, ready "for Victorian consumption" (21). Nerio suggests that by contrasting these genteel biographical accounts with the bluestocking image Montagu articulated in her own epistolary self-presentations we can unpack not only some of the salient values, discourses, desires, and expectations of both historical periods, but also the underlying twofold agenda of Victorian biographers—to place Montagu "in a long and distinguished line of scholarly women unhindered by circumstance or naysayers" (24) and to offer a "didactic biography" (31) on feminine self-culture and self-help. Likewise, Sarah Faulkner's "Artifact or Artifice? The Epistolary Image of Mary Hays" analyzes how an early-twentieth-century collection of Hays' letters, edited by her great-great-niece, is at the source of what the author considers "a biographical injustice" (60) that has "obscure[d

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