"...Heilbrun builds an eloquent argument demonstrating that writers conform all too often to society's expectations of what women should be like at the expense of the truth of the female experience. Drawing on the careers of celebrated authors including Virginia Woolf, George Sand and Dorothy Sayers, she illustrates the struggle these writers undertook in both work and life to break away from traditional 'male' scripts for women's roles"--Back cover....

Chronicles the life of Harriet Tubman based on the text of stories she told about her life, discussing her childhood in slavery, her religious beliefs, her escape to the North, her role in the Underground Railroad, and other related topics.

"In Sovereign Stories, Annette Angela Portillo examines Native American women's autobiographical discourses and multiple-voiced life stories that resist generic conventional notions of first-person narrative. She argues that these 'sovereign stories' and 'blood memories' not only reveal the multilayered histories and identities shared by each author, but demonstrate how their narratives are grounded in ancestral memory and land. These autobiographies...