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- Title
Sensational Autobiography: Female Authorship, Marriage, and Melodramatic Self-Representation in 1850s England.
- Authors
Hobbs, Katherine
- Abstract
This essay argues that in mid-nineteenth-century England, a distinctive form of melodramatic autobiographical writing developed as women writers combined personal narrative, political commentary, and melodramatic devices to address marital inequalities. As autobiographer, the authoress employed her fraught status in relation to marriage to generate horrific plots and rhetoric; her dual position as writer and character allowed her to temper melodrama with self-aware metaliterary commentary. I track these techniques through three "autobiographies" of the mid-1850s: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, Julia Addison's Evelyn Lascelles, and Caroline Norton's pamphlets on marriage. In addition, I suggest that this form of autobiographical writing lent its tropes and self-conscious mode of melodramatic argument to the sensation genre of the 1860s, which maintained a critical preoccupation with marriage and its relation to female self-representation.
- Subjects
AUTOBIOGRAPHY writing; WOMEN authors; MARRIAGE in literature; AURORA Leigh (Poem : Browning); BROWNING, Elizabeth Barrett, 1806-1861; WOMEN in literature; NORTON, Caroline Sheridan, 1808-1877
- Publication
ELH, 2019, Vol 86, Issue 3, p699
- ISSN
0013-8304
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1353/elh.2019.0026