In Composing Selves, award-winning author Peggy Whitman Prenshaw
provides the most comprehensive treatment of autobiographies by
women in the American South. This long-anticipated addition to
Prenshaw's study of southern literature spans the twentieth century
as she provides an in-depth look at the life-writing of eighteen
women authors.
Composing Selves travels the wide terrain of female life in the
South, analyzing various issues that range from racial
consciousness to the deflection of personal achievement. All of the
authors presented came of age during the era Prenshaw refers to as
the "late southern Victorian period," which began in 1861 and ended
in the 1930s. Belle Kearney's A Slaveholder's Daughter (1900) with
Elizabeth Spencer's Landscapes of the Heart and Ellen Douglas's
Truth: Four Stories I Am Finally Old Enough to Tell (both published
in 1998) chronologically bookend Prenshaw's survey.
She includes Ellen Glasgow's The Woman Within, Marjorie Kinnan
Rawlings's Cross Creek, Bernice Kelly Harris's Southern Savory, and
Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road. The book also examines
Katharine DuPre Lumpkin's The Making of a Southerner and Lillian
Smith's Killers of the Dream.
In addition to exploring multiple themes, Prenshaw considers a
number of types of autobiographies, such as Helen Keller's classic
The Story of My Life and Anne Walter Fearn's My Days of Strength.
She treats narratives of marital identity, as in Mary Hamilton's
Trials of the Earth, and calls attention to works by women who
devoted their lives to social and political movements, like
Virginia Durr's Outside the Magic Circle.
Drawing on many notable authors and on Prenshaw's own life of
scholarship, Composing Selves provides an invaluable contribution
to the study of southern literature, autobiography, and the work of
southern women writers.
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