SOURCE: Jowett, Lorna. “Lorine Niedecker: Auto/biography and Poetry.” In Representing Lives: Women and Auto/biography edited by Alison Donnell and Pauline Polkey, pp. 77-86. New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's, 2000.

In the following essay, Jowett explores how Niedecker's poetry engages her personal life and constructs her own autobiography.

Carolyn Heilbrun opens her book, Writing a Woman's Life, with the statement:

There are four ways to write a woman's life: the woman herself may tell it, in what she chooses to call an autobiography; she may tell it in what she chooses to call fiction; a biographer, woman or man, may write the woman's life in what is called a biography; or the woman may write her own life in advance of living it, unconsciously, and without recognizing or naming the process.

(1989: 11)

But there is a fifth way a woman's life can be written, which Heilbrun describes when discussing...