Biographical Misrepresentations of British Women Writers

This book is an investigation of the biases, contradictions, errors, ambiguities, gaps, and historical contexts in biographies of controversial British women who published during the long nineteenth century, many of them left unchecked and perpetuated from publication to publication. Fourteen scholars analyze the agenda, problems, and strengths of biographical material, highlighting the flaws, deficiencies, and influences that have distorted the portraits of women such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Sydney Owenson, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Felicia Hemans, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Caroline Norton, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, Lady Florence Dixie, George Eliot, and Edith Simcox. Through exposing distortions, this fascinating study demonstrates that biographies are often more about the biographer than they are about the biographee and that they are products of the time in which they are written.

“Biographical Misrepresentations of British Women Writers explores how biographies are the products of the time in which they are written. In doing so, it unpacks the biases, contradictions, errors, ambiguities, distortions, and gaps that biographical accounts hide, and which have remained unchecked and are perpetuated from publication to publication.”  (Meritxell Simon-Martin, Biography, Vol. 42 (4), 2019)

Brenda Ayres teaches at Liberty University and to date has published 27 books in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English literature. Her most recent publications are on Mary Wollstonecraft and include: Betwixt and Between the Biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft, Wollstonecraft’s War with Womanhood, and An “Accountable Being”: Mary Wollstonecraft and Religion.