Womens life writing 1700 1850 : gender genre and authorship This collection of new essays by international scholars discusses British and Irish life writings by women in the period 1700 1850. It argues for the importance of womens life writing both within womens literary history and as an integral part of the culture and practice of eighteenth century and Romantic auto biography. The essays presented here reveal womens innovative and diverse experiments with life writing and highlight the complex relationships between conceptions of femininity auto biographical forms and models of authorship in the period. They advance our understanding of canonical women writers while also recovering neglected authors genres and traditions to suggest the various ways in which female lives might be narrated in this period