Mary Hays worked alone in compiling the 302 entries that make up Female Biography (1803). By contrast, producing a modern, critical edition of the work relied on the expertise of 168 scholars across 18 countries. Essays in this collection focus on the exhaustive research, editorial challenges and innovative responses involved in this project.

Mary Hays worked alone in compiling the 302 entries that make up Female Biography (1803). By contrast, producing a modern, critical edition of the work relied on the expertise of 168 scholars across 18 countries. Essays in this collection focus on the exhaustive research, editorial challenges and innovative responses involved in this project.

Publisher Description

As Charlotte Chandler did so well in her previous biographies, she will again draw on the recorded words of Joan Crawford and those who knew her well to paint a rich portrait of the woman and the star. Joan Crawford was born Lucille LeSueur in Texas in 1908. She became a chorus girl in silent films before finding her voice in Possessed(1931) with Clark Gable. Their affair would continue, on and off screen, for many years. Throughout the thirties, Joan continued to earn critical acclaim for her forte of playing career women who never gave up. Her Oscar-winning film Mildred Piercein 1945 began the long-running feud between Joan and Bette Davis, which reached its height with Whatever Happened to Baby Janein 1962. Joan was married four times including once to Douglas Fairbanks Jr, who spoke extensively to Charlotte Chandler for this book. Following her death, Joan's decision to cut her eldest children out of her will prompted her daughter Christina to write the damning bookMommie Dearest which changed Joan's image forever. Charlotte Chandler spent many hours recording interviews with Joan and also those closest to her. What emerges is a subtle portrait of a complex women and a new insight into the legendary actress.

The essays included in Mary Hays’s ‘Female Biography’: Collective Biography as Enlightenment Feminism emerge from the authors’ collaboration in producing the first modern edition of Hays’s work in the Chawton House Library Edition (2013, 2014). This book explores Hays’s larger ambitions to lay the foundation for an encyclopaedic work by, for, and about women. The scholars’ contributions to this volume engage with some of the multiple problems and possibilities that Female Biography presented. Drawing on this effort, individual scholars examine Hays’s attempts to correct existing masculinist constructs which framed the ‘universe of knowledge’ then and persist in our time. Hays perceived that these had the cumulative effect of rendering women invisible. She responded to such absence by providing examples of the extent of female worth across Western society. Other contributions focus specifically on the subjects of Hays’s entries, looking at how she used source material and laid the groundwork for future biographical studies of women’s lives. Both Female Biography and Hays herself have continually presented difficulties in categorization: not quite Enlightenment, not quite Victorian either. This book recontextualizes her work, demonstrating the radicalism and originality of her feminism, even in its post-Wollstonecraftian phase, as well as the longevity of her influence. As such, it will be of interest to those conducting research into Hays, her subjects, and the evolution of life-writing by women. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s Writing.