Brownley, Martine Watson, and Allison B. Kimmich, eds. Women and Autobiography. Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1999. 215 pp.

by Stacy Shotsberger Russo

In the introduction to Women and Autobiography, Brownley and Kimmich describe reading autobiography as an act of "voyeurism" and "self-discovery" (xi). From these introductory definitions, which few would argue over, they move to the more problematic aspects of the genre. Defining what is and is not autobiography, for example, is an area of much debate. Are diaries and letters autobiographies, or must they be classified elsewhere? The notion of self, tied closely to the difficulty in defining the genre, is equally hard to pin down. If a self, defined in traditional male terms, is a unified whole, then what can be made of the multiple selves, those that often pull toward and against each other, that exist within many women's stories? To be labeled autobiographical, must the unified self be present, or do fragmented voices also fit within the genre?