Telling Women's Lives: The New Biography

By Linda Wagner-Martin

Book Overview

Placing herself in the avid reader's chair, Linda Wagner-Martin writes about women's biography from George Eliot and Virginia Woolf to Eleanor Roosevelt and Margaret Mead, and even to Cher and Elizabeth Taylor. Along the way, she looks at dozens of other life stories, probing at the differences between biographies of men and women, prevailing stereotypes about women's lives and roles, questions about what is public and private, and the hazy margins between autobiography, biography, and other genres. In quick paced and wide-ranging discussions, she looks at issues of authorial stance (who controls the narrative? who chooses which story to tell?), voice (is this story told in the traditional objective tone? and if it is, what effect does that telling have on our reading?), and the politics of publishing (why aren't more books about women's lives published? and when they are, what happens to their advertising budgets?). She discusses the problems of writing biography of achieving women who were also wives (how does the biographer balance the two?), of daughters who attempt to write about their mothers, and of husbands trying to portray their wives.

Telling Women's Lives is the first overview of the writing and the history of biographies about women. It is a significant contribution to the reassessment of the work of the hundreds of women writers who have made a difference in our conception of what women's stories--and women's lives--have been, and are becoming. The book is a must read for anyone who loves reading biographies, particularly biographies of women.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0813523753
• ISBN13: 9780813523750
• Release Date: June 1996
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Length: 226 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.9" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Welcome Views on Women

Review of: Telling Women's Lives: The New Biography. Linda Wagner-Martin. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1994. 169 p. Those of you who loved Carolyn Heilbrun's Writing a Woman's Life, will find that Linda Wagner-Martin's Telling Women's Lives picks up where Heilbrun left off. Wagner-Martin describes how male writers of women's lives tend to limit their discussion to stereotypic roles like motherhood or homemaking. They neglect developmental events that women see as crucial and show their subject only in relation to the men in their lives, as though their associations with women were not vital. James Joyce's wife, Nora, was castigated by male critics as low class, uneducated, a poor cook (!), and a rampant sensualist. She was in reality educated, of equal class with her common-law husband, competant, and an independant spirit who inspired a lasting devotion in Joyce. Wagner-Martin also describes successful stories of women by women and points the way toward new trends in woman's biography, including several recommendations to direct one's reading. A valuable book for writers and readers of women's lives.