A Genre of Her Own

A Genre of Her Own makes a claim for feminist literary beginnings in life narratives during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries in India. It demonstrates a range of aesthetic intonations and self-determinations by women in varied genres including pamphlets, letters, travelogues, essays, autobiographies and novels. Paying close attention to style and intentionality in select pioneering texts, this study traces complex affective notes such as pride, despair, wit, lament, nostalgia, anger, hope and celebration. As active participants in the print culture of their times, the writers were often self-reflexive about their overlapping identities as writer and woman, and actively sought to create a full-fledged gendered formalism in conversation with the normatively male literary milieu. The writers overtly engage with the centrality of writing, the dangers and secrecies involved, the precise global horizons that the textual mode access-of marriage and motherhood, domestic labour and caretaking, romance and sexuality, public service and intellectual prowess, illness and aging, religious quests and scrambles for livelihood, and an everyday effervescence of humour and desire. It is within these lived and recollected perspectives that this study is anchored, especially as they emerge, coalesce, and evolve over time through morphing sites of literary production.