How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present

Women in Culture and Society

by Alison Booth

How to Make It as a Woman outlines the history of prosopography or group biography, focusing on the all-female collections that took hold in nineteenth-century Britain and America. The queens, nurses, writers, reformers, adventurers, even assassins in these collective female biographies served as models to guide the moral development of young women. But often these famous historical women presented untrustworthy examples.

Beginning in the fifteenth century with Christine de Pizan, Alison Booth traces the long tradition of this genre, investigating the varied types and stories most often grouped together in illustrated books designed for entertainment and instruction. She claims that these group biographies have been instrumental in constructing modern subjectivities as well as relations among classes, races, and nations.

From Joan of Arc to Virginia Woolf, Booth examines a host of models of womanhood—both bad and good. Incorporating a bibliography that includes more than 900 all-female collections published in English between 1830 and 1940, Booth uses collective biographies to decode the varied advice on how to make it as a woman.

Genres: History

424 pages, Paperback

First published November 25, 2004

About the author

There is more than one author with this name

Alison Booth, Professor of English at the University of Virginia with a Ph.D. from Princeton (1986), specializes in Victorian studies, the novel, and women writers, while her teaching and research also range broadly--across the Atlantic and up to contemporary cultural studies--to encompass narrative theory, biography and autobiography, and celebrity. Her numerous articles and essays have appeared in distinguished journals and collections. She is the author of two acclaimed critical books: the prize-winning How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (2004), and Greatness Engendered: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf (1992), and co-editor of the Norton Introduction to Literature (now in its ninth edition). Her current research, reflected in the Longman Cultural Edition of Wuthering Heights, involves the popular genre of "homes and haunts" of famous people, literary tourism, and the character of famous writers' houses.
(from publisher's author profile )