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Lady Anne Clifford was Countess of Pembroke, Dorset and Montgomery by marriage, and by birth Baroness Clifford. Anne began her life with the expectation that she would live the typical and prescribed life of a seventeenth-century aristocratic woman - marrying into an important family. With the death of her brother Robert in 1591, the one-year-old Anne became sole heir of the vast Clifford hereditary estates in Westmorland and north-west Yorkshire. However, her status as heir was soon compromised by her father, who began legal manoeuvres to place his own brother Francis as heir. This and George Clifford's infidelities led to great strains in his marriage to Margaret Russell, which Anne describes in detail in the 1603 Memoir. George Clifford died in 1605 and by his will left some hereditary estates to his brother Francis Clifford. The will stipulated that, should his brother leave no direct male heirs, his daughter Anne would inherit these estates. Margaret Russell refused to accept the will and this ignited an inheritance dispute that would last for decades, with repercussions that rumbled on for over a century. Anne's mother led the battle to regain her daughter's inheritance in the early years of the lawsuit. Anne Clifford lived during the reigns of four monarchs and two heads of state in her long life of eighty-six years. She experienced exile and isolation as well as great political power. Anne Clifford's surviving autobiographical writing reveals her deep commitment to maintaining a record or account of her life.
Christianisation of Northumbria and its neighbouring kingdoms up to the year 731. 1 He concluded the work with a brief autobiographical statement, following which he drew together the diverse elements of his output in the form of an itemised list to show the harmony in his approach, before ending with a prayer to Jesus for salvation. 2 Because the Ecclesiastical history circulated so widely in the
2 Autobiographical acts of reading and the work of Gloria Anzaldúa and Dorothy Allison In a 2007 interview for the Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Dorothy Allison shares her experiences of being a feminist activist and organiser in the 1960s and 1970s while at college in Florida. She reveals how, attending one women’s meeting, she realised why she did not belong there: When I went to the women’s meeting … these people can afford to talk about this stuff, but I could lose my scholarship and be on the street. So I walked out, then didn’t go back. And that
In this article I demonstrate the significance of a flexible approach to examining the autobiographical in early eighteenth-century womens writing. Using ‘old stories’, existing and developing narrative and literary forms, womens autobiographical writing can be discovered in places other than the more recognizable forms such as diaries and memoirs. Jane Barker and Delarivier Manley‘s works are important examples of the dynamic and creative use of cross-genre autobiographical writing. The integration of themselves in their fictional and poetic works demonstrates the potential of generic fluidity for innovative ways to express and explore the self in textual forms.
This article examines the paradoxes inherent in filmic time, with particular reference to the autobiographical work of the British director Terence Davies. Analysing ways in which film, itself constructed from still images, can create, reverse or freeze temporal flux, confuse and blend multiple and conflicting temporalities, and create the spatial dimensions of an ‘imaginary’ time, it argues that the relationship between film and music may well provide a fundamental key to the understanding of filmic time.
This essay presents the idea of James Baldwin as a freedom writer, the organizing idea of my biography in progress. As a freedom writer, Baldwin was a revolutionary intellectual, an essayist and novelist committed unfailingly to the realization of racial justice, interracial political equality, and economic democracy. While the book is still in process, this short essay narrates autobiographically how I came to meet and know Baldwin’s work, explains in critical fashion my work in relation to existing biographies, and reflects interpretively my thoughts-in- progress on this fascinating and captivating figure of immense historical and social consequence.
This article engages with the discourse of food and eating especially as related to the representation of the abject eating-disordered body. I will be particularly interested in the gothic representation of the anorexic and bulimic body in samples of medical advice literature and NHS websites and how they reinforce popular myths about anorexia by imagining the eating disordered body as a fixed object of abjection. Focusing on the use of gothic devices, tropes and narrative structure, these imaginations will be read against alternative representations of anorexic/bulimic bodies in autobiographical illness narratives, fictional accounts and a psychoanalytical case history in order to explore how gothic discourses can help opening up new understandings and conceptions of illness, healing and corporeality in the dialogue between medical staff and patients.
James Baldwin writes within and against the testimonial tradition emerging from the Black Church, challenging the institution’s refusal to acknowledge the voices and experiences of black queer men. Baldwin’s autobiographical novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, creates a space for Baldwin’s testimony to be expressed, and also lays the foundation for a tradition of black queer artists to follow. In the contemporary moment, poet Danez Smith inhabits Baldwin’s legacy, offering continuing critiques of the rigidity of conservative Christian ideologies, while publishing and performing poetry that gives voice to their own experiences, and those of the black queer community at large. These testimonies ultimately function as a means of rhetorical resistance, which not only articulates black queer lives and identities, but affirms them.
This article offers a survey of the recently discovered scrapbooks collated over a number of decades by the Yorkshirewoman Dorothy Richardson (1748–1819). The large set of thirty-five volumes presents an important collection of press cuttings relating to the history and consequences of the French Revolution, and also contains ‘historical and miscellaneous’ material of a more eclectic nature. I argue that the texts significantly improve our understanding of Dorothy Richardson’s position as a reader, writer and researcher working in the North of England at the turn of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, her set of albums raises important questions about the relationship between commonplacing and scrapbooking practices, and the capacity of such textual curatorship to function as a form of both political engagement and autobiographical expression.