As I revisit the beginning of my book and consider what makes the best sort of biographical opening, a friend suggests to me that maybe when you’re writing about a woman’s life, the family part is more important than if you were writing about a man. This has sent me back to Carolyn Heilbrun’s Writing a Woman’s Life, first published in 1988, and…
Where should a biography begin? Now that I am in the revision stage, more or less, I’ve gone back the start of it all, which I haven’t seen in two years. Typically a life story starts with birth and a discussion of the subject’s antecedents, particularly the parents and their lineages. Rather boring stuff, usually. Yet a certain degree of family history is…
We live in an age of self-promotion: twitter, facebook--need I add blogging? A blog post by Nancy K. Miller about how Emily Dickinson might feel about our era’s publicity-consciousness got me thinking about how Woolson felt about her own literary celebrity. She loved it and hated it at the same time. She wanted recognition, but she didn’t want to ask for it and…
Woolson decided to end her life when she was fifty-three, almost fifty-four, years of age. Her last year was full of pain and worry about how she would financially and physically manage to maintain her independence. It is easy to see that there was a complex set of reasons she chose to end her life. But was it a “choice”? I have been…