These four essays explore works by female writers who have forged feminist traditions with candor, revelation, and intimate portrayals of women’s lives. Spanning several centuries, these writers’ works have pushed the boundaries of acceptable female behavior, claimed women’s authority over their authorship, and asserted the political utility of the personal story. These women “broadened the narrative space for each other,” and yet female life writers continue to face a gendered critique that has persisted for generations.

To begin, in “Candor and Reticence: Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Robinson,” Sarah Cohn explores the space between published memoir and truth through a reading of two late eighteenth century memoirs of radical intellectuals–Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Robinson. Each text uses the evolving genre of memoir for different personal and political purposes. In “Too Much Shame, but No Shame: Controversies in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior,” Maple Wu examines the ways in which shame operates in Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel/autobiography Woman Warrior, an influential text in the Asian American literary community. Patricia Wadsley then follows with “Lena Dunham: Women’s Bodies and Contested Space,”  an analysis of Lena Dunham’s fictional television series Girls and memoir Not That Kind of Girl to look at current sexual attitudes through the various issues of embodiment that Dunham presents–from nudity to sexual exploration. Finally, Destry Sibley broadens the frame with a discussion of “ethical betrayal” in feminist life writing in “The Betrayal Is Political: An Ethics of Exposure for Feminist Life Writing.”