SOURCE: Corbett, Mary J. “Feminine Authorship and Spiritual Authority in Victorian Women Writers' Autobiographies.” Women's Studies 18 (1990): 13-29.

In the following essay, Corbett studies the influence of Tonna's evangelical Protestant views on her writing.

In a recent book on women's autobiography, Sidonie Smith has argued that “the woman who writes autobiography is doubly estranged when she enters the autobiographical contract,” with her estrangement founded on woman's historical subordination to male discourse and on her problematic relation to a reading audience always already configured as male. By usurping the male power of speech and writing, the female self-representing subject “unmasks her transgressive desire for cultural and literary authority” when she takes up the pen to author herself.¹ Feminist Victorianists will find this scenario familiar, for in its basic elements, it replicates the argument elaborated by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) and extends it...