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  • Three Good Books on Autobiography
  • Linda Wagner-Martin (bio)
Composing Selves: Southern Women and Autobiography. By Peggy Whitman Prenshaw. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2011. 344344 pp. $45.00 cloth; $15.95 e-book.
Radical Spiritual Motherhood: Autobiography and Empowerment in Nineteenth-Century African American Women. By Rosetta R. Haynes. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2011. 236236 pp. $39.95 cloth.
Writing the South Through the Self: Explorations in Southern Autobiography. By John C. Inscoe. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2011. 246246 pp. $59.95 cloth; $19.95 paper.

Thirty years ago, critical work in autobiography was rare, aiming at something of a niche market. Now that distinctions among genre classifications have blurred, so that much so-called fiction has blended narrative with several qualities of autobiography (or life writing), the niche market threatens to overwhelm the large division of prose. When Sidonie Smith in 1987 published her A Poetics of Women's Autobiography, she was already predicting the range and complexity of these books under our consideration this year. Her study is, first of all, a reading of autobiography as gendered, in which women writers finally may speak in [End Page 134] their own distinctive voices, and tell their own stories truthfully. But she also points out,

if the autobiographer is a woman of color or a working-class woman, she faces even more complex imbroglios of male-female figures: Here ideologies of race and class, sometimes even of nationality, intersect and confound those of gender. As a result, she is doubly or triply the subject of other people's representations. In every case, moreover, she remains marginalized in that she finds herself resident on the margins of discourse, always removed from the center of power within the culture she inhabits.

To consider Peggy Whitman Prenshaw's achievement in Composing Selves: Southern Women and Autobiography, one must add "region" to Smith's list of disenfranchisements. Studying women's autobiography written in the South brings home a sense of almost-nostalgia: those soft-voiced women writers do not remind readers of radicalism or aggression, nor do they evoke the sense of truth-telling. Yet all these reactions are prompted by the range of texts Prenshaw considers.

With her usual good sense and wide knowledge, Professor Prenshaw focuses on some texts that are often not considered "autobiography." Her book provides not only the coverage to be expected in its discussion of Belle Kearney, Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and the later (and more famous) group of southern novelists—Ellen Glasgow, Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Spencer, and Ellen Douglas. But Prenshaw's aim here is also to stretch the already elastic genre's perimeters. For this reason, she includes Helen Keller and Anne Walter Fearn, women she describes as "distanced" from the South, as well as representatives of what Prenshaw calls "wifehood narratives," Mary Hamilton and Agnes Grinstead Anderson. In another two-chapter grouping, she assesses the writing of four southern women well known politically, among them Mary Craig Kimbrough Sinclair and Virginia Foster Durr.

By carefully reading the books written by these southern women, Prenshaw can conclude authoritatively that the writers were psychologically uncomfortable as they described their private emotional worlds, crossing thresholds into communities—both religious and secular—that did not welcome women's opinions. Difficulties in expression increased when these Southern observers were writers of color (as in the section on Zora Neale Hurston). [End Page 135]

By limiting her study to what she terms "the late Southern Victorian period," Prenshaw is able to skirt commenting on such earlier autobiographies as those by Mary Chesnutt and on the myriad of later ones by many contemporary writers. She gives her readers a glimpse of the variety of women's writing published in this central period that is thorough, interesting, and revealing.

Prenshaw has provided an omnibus, if selective, discussion. In contrast, Rosette R. Haynes has severely limited both her choice of texts and the focus of her interest. Radical Spiritual Motherhood, Autobiography and Empowerment in Nineteenth-Century African American Women fulfills a useful, and a comparatively new, role. Professor Haynes discusses Amanda Berry Smith, Julia Foote, Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, and Rebecca Cox Jackson, placing their life...

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