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- Title
NARCYZA ŻMICHOWSKA'S NOVEL FROM LIFE.
- Authors
PHILLIPS, URSULA
- Abstract
The article discusses Narcyza Żmichowska's final novel. Like most of her other fiction, it is incomplete, although the extant part consists o f over 250 published pages. Żmichowska left a general outline o f how she envisaged the text would develop, as well as another document and letters that all shed light on her original conception of the project as a collaborative effort with her former pupil Wanda Grabowska. The novel was conceived as the "writing of a womans life" and raises crucial issues surrounding distinctions between the genres of autobiography, biography, and fiction. It also highlights Żmichowska's concerns about authorship and authenticity, as well as more specifically about the problems affecting female authorship in the nineteenth century. The part of the text she managed to complete portrays the protagonist's childhood in the 1820s and also the stories of several female members of her maternal family stretching back to the beginning of the eighteenth century, which provide an interesting critique of the social, psychological, and emotional lives of Polish women in the pre-partition and early nineteenth-century noble manor.
- Subjects
ZMICHOWSKA, Narcyza, 1819-1876; CZY to powiesc? (Book); 20TH century Polish literature; POLISH literature -- History &; criticism; UNFINISHED books; ZELENSKA, Wanda, 1841-1904; WOMEN in literature; HISTORICAL fiction writing; POLISH fiction; HISTORICAL fiction
- Publication
Polish Review, 2014, Vol 59, Issue 1, p17
- ISSN
0032-2970
- Publication type
Literary Criticism
- DOI
10.5406/polishreview.59.1.0017