Reviews

Abstract

Since its inception, the field of women’s history has aimed to redress how female historical subjects have been both omitted and misrepresented in traditional history writing. In Biographical Misrepresentations of British Women Writers, Brenda Ayres assembles fourteen essays that focus on the study of how late-eighteenth- to nineteenth-century female authors have been misleadingly portrayed, not only in traditional scholarship but also by female and feminist scholars. This book puts into question the long-presumed objectivity of biographical accounts by examining the interconnections between biographer and biographee, which includes well-known authors such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Mar- tineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot, among others.