My Life as I Remember It: Subjectivities, memory and narrative in twentieth-century British working-class women's self-representation

This project is an historical and literary study of British working-class women's lifewriting exploring how this historically neglected group engaged with autobiography as a form to construct a classed, racialised, and gendered 'selfhood'. While there have been important contributions in the field studying the relationship between working-class women, autobiography, and subjectivity, historiography has thus far largely focused on texts from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries where women represent less than ten percent of extant texts. This thesis intends to explore works written in the late twentieth century to consider how these authors responded to social and political change of the period. Historic and cultural contextualisation will accompany literary analysis to consider the contingent natures of language, emotions, and subjectivity. In doing so it aims to reorient the focus of present scholarship that uses working-class autobiographies primarily as empirical data. Where historians have focused on literary readings of such texts, they often express concern that they defy interpretation. It will thus offer a more nuanced picture of how working-class women drew upon genre, rhetorical devices, and models of identity to frame their experiences in the absence of traditional routes of material and social progress, and how historical experience shapes narrative and form. It will include works by Kathleen Betterton, Katherine Henderson, Adeline Hodges, Louise Shore, and Pauline Wiltshire, most of which have not previously received close critical attention. In reassessing the relationship between class, gender, and lifewriting with issues of race and intersectionality, this project will enhance understandings of how class and gender identity are inextricably linked and how working-class women's identities are produced intersubjectively, by prevailing ideologies, and textually.