The lyrical and political power of nineteenth-century women reformers' life-writing
Paper Heroines studies the ways women represented their own and one another's lives in their personal diaries and their biographies of their contemporaries. Mollie Barnes urges us to read the life writing that emerged from among the relief-work networks of the South Carolina Lowcountry as deeply interconnected. By reading these women writers—Black and white, obscure and well-known—in conversation, Barnes presents entirely new portraits of these nineteenth-century freedom fighters. Like feminist and anti-racist leaders in our own moment, the women in Paper Heroines were often flawed. White women reformers sometimes created tensions, silences, revisions, and erasures within the print-culture networks that they developed, obscuring the lives and contributions of the Black women who they worked with and on behalf of. Meanwhile, Black women themselves developed counternarratives and counter-networks as they sought to reclaim their own life-histories. What emerges from Barnes's exploration of these textual conversations is a story of complicated relationships, rife with both tensions and connections, that reveal the dynamicism of women's lives in a place and time that was equally tumultuous and consequential.
Mollie Barnes is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina Beaufort and Vice President of the Margaret Fuller Society. She has published more than a dozen articles and book chapters on nineteenth-century women writers.
