SOURCE: Swindells, Julia. “Women's Issues.” In Victorian Writing and Working Women: The Other Side of Silence, pp. 137-61. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.

In the following excerpt from her book-length study of Victorian working women's writing, Swindells explores the various literary modes adapted by nineteenth-century women autobiographers (from romance and melodrama to religious discourse), and describes these writers' interest in the advancement of women's rights through their literary pursuits.

I have been placing the emphasis, in writing about working women autobiographers, on an experience which, though it has its individualistic and gender-specific aspects, is in important ways shared with the experience of working-class men. From now on I intend (indeed, I can do nothing else) to give more emphasis to gender differentiation. This is to say that, in my reading of the autobiographies, I am concentrating more specifically than before on the subjects and subjectivities of adulthood and...