Women's life writing and historical change 1780-1970
COURSE OUTLINE AND SCHEDULE
Course outline:
Week
Date & Time
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
Week 6
Week 7
Week 8
Location
Diaries – Kathryn Gleadle
Letters – Christina de
Bellaigue
Memoir & Autobiography –
Selina Todd
Autobiography &
testimony – Senia Paseta
Individual meetings with relevant tutors to discuss
essay research
Reading week
Thematic seminar –
student presentations
Deadlines
Fri: submit
essay title
to faculty
Weds:
submit draft
to tutor
Thematic seminar –
student presentations
Individual meetings with relevant tutors to discuss
essay drafts
Week 9
Mon:
submit
7,500 word
essay to
exam
schools
Contact details:
kathryn.gleadle@history.ox.ac.uk
christina.debellaigue@history.ox.ac.uk
selina.todd@history.ox.ac.uk
senia.paseta@st-history.ox.ac.uk
Class schedule and reading
Each class will focus on one principle primary source which you must read (marked*); you
should also read one other source from the period of your choice, as well as the specified
secondary material for that week. Please email to let the relevant class tutor know which of
the additional sources you have chosen to focus on.
You should use the bibliography to read about the relevant genres and to explore those
themes and questions arising from the sources that are of particular interest to you. In
addition, you should use the suggested reference material to research the authors you are
focusing on.
You will begin developing ideas for your essays, with help from the tutors, in week 4. Your
essays may draw on material not touched on as part of the taught course; you must,
however, write on some aspect of women’s history, and engage with methodological
questions about the use of life-writing as a source.
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Class 1) Diary:
literary production, public and private identities
Primary sources
Period / place
th
Source
Late 18 C, early
19thC, England -
*Mary Moorman (Ed), Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth: the Alfoxden
Journal, 1798; the Grasmere journals, 1800-1803.
Please focus in particular on part IV [4 may 1802 – 16 January 1803]
[Note: there are plenty of college copies of this text, although we can
make a PDF version available to you if necessary].
Mid 19th, England
Diaries of Anne Lister, 1791-1840
We will focus on the year 1819: [a PDF version can be made available if
necessary]
Mid 19thC, Ireland
Diary of Rose la Touche, 1861 and January 1867 [Available via "British
and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries” database – accessed via oxlip.
Or consult in Van Akin Burd, ed, John Ruskin and Rose La Touche, Her
unpublished diaries (1979)
Mid 20thC, England
Nella Last Diary, 1939-1945 [Available via SOLO on Mass Observation
Online as diarist number 5353. Note there is also lots of other useful
material available on this website.]
Please consult the years 1943 and 1951
Secondary sources:
*[introductory] R.Hogan, "Engendered Autobiographies: The Diary as a Feminine Form."
Prose Studies: Special Issue on Autobiography and Questions of Gender 14.2 (September
1991): 95-107
Wordsworth:
*Jill Ehnnen, “Writing against, writing through: subjectivity, vocation and authorship in the
work of Dorothy Wordsworth”, South Atlantic Review, 64 (1999), PP.72-90
Patricia Comitini, "More than half a poet": vocational philanthropy and Dorothy
Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals", European Romantic Review 14 (3) (2003) PP.307-322
Susan Levin, Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism (1987)
Lucy Newlyn, "Dorothy Wordsworth's experimental style", Essays in Criticism 57 (4) (2007),
PP.325-49
Lister:
*Danielle Orr, “I tell myself to myself: homosexual agency in the journals of Anna Lister”,
Women’s Writing, 11 (2) (2004)
Or: *Jill Liddington, “Anne Lister of Shibden Hall, Halifax: her diaries and historians”, History
Workshop Journal, 35 (1993), PP.45-77
Anna Clark, “Anne Lister’s construction of lesbian identity”, Journal of the History of
Sexuality, 7 (1) (1996), PP.23-50
La Touche:
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*Jane H Hunter, ‘Inscribing the self in the heart of the family: diaries and girlhood in lateVictorian America’, American Quarterly 44 (1) 51-81.
C. Steedman, The Tidy House (1982), chapter 3
Nella Last:
*L.Stanley, “Women have servants and men never eat meat: issues in reading gender, using
the case study of mass observation’s 1937 day diaries”, Women’s History Review 4 (1)
(1995), 85-102
Dorothy Sheridan et al, Writing ourselves: mass-observation and literary practices (2000)
James Hinton, Nine wartime lives: mass observation and the making of the modern self
(2010) introduction and chapter 2
Class 2) Letters:
Girlhood, work and career, relationships & poverty
Primary sources
Period / place
th
Source
Late 18 C, England
Essex Pauper Letters, 1731-1837 (ed. Thomas Sokoll) [a selection will be
circulated to students]
Mid 19thC, England
*Letters of Octavia Hill, 1852-1853,1864-1868 [available via OXLIP on
British and Irish Women’s Letters & Diaries]
*Letters to Fellow-Workers, 1872 & 1873 in Octavia Hill’s Letters to
Fellow-Workers, 1872-1911 ed. R. Whelan (2005)
Mid 19thC, Australia Letters of Isabella Wyly, 1856-1877 in D. Fitzpatrick, Oceans of
Consolation: personal accounts of Irish migration to Australia, (Cork, 1994)
[online via OXLIP]
Early 20thC,
England
Letters of Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain, (1920-1935) (ed. V. Brittain
and G. Handley-Taylor) [a selection will be circulated to students]
Secondary sources:
*[Introductory] P.A.M. Spacks, 'Personal letters', in J. J. Richetti, (ed.), The Cambridge history
of English literature, 1660-1780 (2005)
M. Jolly, L. Stanley, ‘Letters as / not a genre’ Life Writing, 2,2, (2005)
Pauper letters:
*T. Sokoll, ‘Writing for relief: rhetoric in English pauper letters’ in Gestrich, King & Raphael
(eds.) Being poor in Modern Europe, 1800-1940 (2006), and Chs I and IV in Essex Pauper
Letters
S. King, “I fear you will think me too presumptuous in my demands but necessity has no
law”: clothing in English pauper letters, 1800-1834’ International Review of Social History, 54
(2009) 207-36.
Octavia Hill:
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*J. Lewis, Women and social action in Victorian and Edwardian England, (1991), Introduction,
Ch.1.
*Octavia Hill’s Letters to Fellow Workers 1872-1911, ed. R. Whelan (2005) ‘Editor’s
Introduction’
Stephen P. Walker. ‘Philanthropic women and accounting. Octavia Hill and the exercise of
‘quiet power and sympathy’, Accounting, Business & Financial History, 16:2, (2006) 163-194
G. Darley, Octavia Hill (1990)
H. Jones, ‘Recognizing fellow creatures: FD Maurice, Octavia Hill, Josephine Butler’ in V.
Morgan & C. Williams (ed.) Shaping belief: culture, politics and religion in 19thC writing
(2008)
Isabella Wyly:
*D. Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation: Personal accounts of Irish migration to Australia
(1994), Ch.16 ‘Correspondence: ceremonies of communication’
D. Mcraild, ‘Review article: personal narratives of emigration and adjustment’ Irish Historical
Studies, 36:141 (2008)
R. A. Harris, ‘Come you all courageously’: Irish women in America write home’ Eire-Ireland: a
journal of Irish studies, (Spring-Summer 2001)
Vera Brittain & Winifred Holtby:
D. Gorham, V. Brittain, A feminist life (1996)
M. Shaw, The clear stream: a life of Winifred Holtby (London 1999)
*C. Clay, Re-visiting the friendship of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby: a ‘trade’ in work and
desire, Women's History Review, 12:2 (2003), 309-328
C. Acton, ‘Writing and Waiting: The First World War Correspondence between Vera Brittain
and Roland Leighton’ Gender & History, 11:1 (April 1999) 54–83.
Class 3) Autobiography & Memoir:
Selfhood, class and feminism
Primary sources:
Period / place
th
Late 18 C, England
Source
Lucy Luck, A Little of My Life (1992); or see extract reprinted in J.
Burnett, Useful Toil (1975)
Early 20th C,
England
Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth, (1933)
Late 19thC/early
20thC, England
H. Mitchell, The Hard Way Up (1968/1977)
Mid 20thC, England
*Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a good woman (1986)
Secondary sources:
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*L. Stanley, ‘Movements of Writing: is there a feminist auto/biography?’, Gender and History
2:1 (1990).
R. Gagnier, ‘Social atoms: working-class autobiography, subjectivity and gender’, Victorian
Studies, 30:3 (1987)
Hannah Mitchell
J. Purvis, ‘Deeds not words. The daily lives of militant suffragettes in Edwardian England’,
Women’s Studies International Forum 18:2 (1995).
W. Webster, ‘Our life. Working class women’s autobiography in Britain’ in F. Bonner et al eds.
Imagining Women: Cultural representations and gender (1992)
Vera Brittain:
D. Gorham, Vera Brittain: A feminist life (1996)
H. Kean ‘Searching for the past in present defeat: the construction of historical and political
identity in British feminism in the 1920s and 1930s’ in Women’s History Review 3:1 (1994).
P. Berry and M. Bostridge, Vera Brittain: a life (1993)
Carolyn Steedman:
Rosner, Victoria, 'Have you seen this child? Carolyn K. Steedman and the writing of fantasy
motherhood ', Feminist Studies 26 (2000) 1, 7-32
G. Eley, The Crooked Line (2005).
*E. Setch, ‘Personal History’ (review piece), History Workshop Journal, 53:1 (2002).
Additional:
B. Caine, ‘The making of Catherine Cookson’s autobiography’, Women’s History Review, 22:1
(2013).
R. Gagnier, ‘Democratic subjects: the self and the social in nineteenth-century England’,
Victorian Studies 39:3 (1996).
E. Griffin, ‘Sex, illegitimacy and social change in industrialising Britain’, Social History, 23:2
(2013).
P. Graves, Labour Women (1994)
J. Hannah and K. Hunt, Socialist women: Britain, 1880s-1920s (2002)
*C. Langhamer, ‘Love, Selfhood and Authenticity in Postwar Britain’, Cultural and Social
History, 9:2 (2012).
H. Rogers, Women and the people: authority, authorship and the radical tradition in 19thC
England (2000)
N. Rose, Inventing ourselves (1999)
J.M. Strange, ‘Fatherhood, providing and attachment in late Victorian and Edwardian
working-class families’, Historical Journal 55:4 (2012).
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Class 4) Autobiography and testimony:
Writing Citizenship in Ireland, c. 1916-1940 – political identities, citizenship, public and
private identities
Primary Sources:
Period / place
Source
th
R. Frow & E. Frow (eds) Political women, 1800-1850 (1989) [details tbc]
th
Mid 19 C, Ireland
Anna Parnell, The tale of a great sham (ed. D Hearne) (1986) [details
tbc]
Early 20thC, Ireland
*Margaret Skinnider, Doing my Bit for Ireland, New York, (1917)
[details tbc]
Early 20thC, Ireland
-
* Helena Molony witness statement: Bureau of Military History
[available via
http://www.bureauofmilitaryhistory.ie/bmhsearch/search.jsp ]
Late 18 C, England
Secondary sources:
Cullen Owens, Rosemary, A Social History of Women in Ireland, 1870-1970, (Dublin: Gill and
Macmillan, 2005).
McCarthy, Cal, Cumann na mBan and the Irish Revolution, (Cork: Collins Press, 2007).
McCoole, Sinéad, Guns and Chiffon: Women Revolutionaries and Kilmainham Gaol, 19161923, (Dublin: Stationary Office, 1997).
McCoole, Sinéad, No Ordinary Women: Irish Female Activists in the Revolutionary Years,
1900-1923, (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 2004).
* Eve Morrison, ‘The Bureau of Military History and Female Republican Activism’ in Maryann
G Valiulis (ed.), Gender and Power in Irish History, (Dublin, 2009).
Taillon, Ruth, When History was Made: The Women of 1916, (Belfast: Beyond the Pale,
1996).
*Townshend, Charles, ‘Historiography: Telling the Irish Revolution’ in Joost Augusteijn (ed.),
The Irish Revolution, 1913-1923, (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 1-16.
Townshend, Charles, Easter 1916: the Irish Rebellion, (London: Allen Lane, 2005).
* Weihman, L, ‘Doing My Bit for Ireland: Transgressing Gender in the Easter Rising’, EireIreland, 39:3&4, (Fall/Winter, 2004), pp. 228-249.
Wills, Clair, Dublin 1916: The Siege of the GPO, (London: Profile, 2009).
Paseta, Senia. Irish Nationalist Women, 1900-1918, (Cambridge, 2013).
Memoir/biography:
Czira, Sydney, The Years Flew By: The Recollections of Madame Sydney Czira, (Dublin: Gifford
and Craven, 1974).
Gonne MacBride, Maud, A Servant of the Queen, (Dublin: Golden Eagle Books, 1950).
Gray, Betsy, ‘A Memory of Easter Week’, Capuchin Annual, 1948, pp. 281-285.
Éilis Ni Riain, ‘A Cumann na mBan Recalls Easter Week’, Capuchin Annual, 1966, pp. 271-278.
Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh (and Edward Kenny) The Splendid Years: Recollections of Maire Nic
Shiubhlaigh’s Story of the Irish National Theatre as told to Edward Kenny, (Dublin: J Duffy,
1955).
O’Brennan, Lily M, ‘The Dawning of the Day’, Capuchin Annual, 1936, pp. 157-59.
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Plunkett Dillon, Geraldine, All in the Blood: A Memoir of the Plunkett Family, the 1916 Rising
and the War of Independence (edited by Honor O Brolchain), (Dublin: A & A Farmar, 2006).
Reynolds, M, ‘Cumann mBan in the GPO’, An t-Óglach, March, 1926.
Sheehy Skeffington, Hanna, British Militarism as I Have Known It, (Tralee: Kerryman, 1946).
Sheehy Skeffington, Hanna, ‘Reminiscences of an Irish Suffragette’, in Andrée Sheehy
Skeffington and Rosemary Cullen Owens, Votes for Women, (Dublin, 1975), pp. 12-26.
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