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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0813520924
• ISBN13: 9780813520926
• Release Date: June 1994
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Length: 226 Pages
• Weight: 0.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.3" 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.