Lives Like Loaded Guns

In this gripping book, British author Lyndall Gordon explores the family constellations surrounding Emily Dickinson and the publication of her work.  These constellations include the family that ED knew during her lifetime as well as the family of Mabel Loomis Todd, the woman who edited and regularized ED's poetry after her death.  (She called it preparing the poems for publication, and she did do much to promote them.)  After ED's death in 1886, her remaining family came into a long, sustained conflict with the Todds.  This conflict continued throughout the lives of the last remaining Dickinson and the last remaining Todd, and the echoes of this conflict continue even today in the way that scholars and students read ED's poems and the people who inspired her.

Let's begin with a pictorial family tree of the Dickinsons!


Apologies for the size of the picture, but it shows the details much more clearly.  Gordon looks at more of ED's extended family: a grandmother Gunn with a fierce temper, an invalid male cousin who probably suffered from epilepsy, a maternal aunt who mothered ED, and cousins who were ED's lifelong friends and withheld her letters from the Todds.  Of course, Gordon gives us a stronger sense of what ED's mother was like and how her marriage constrained her.   These constraints were a social phenomenon.  As Gordon points out, poet Julia Ward Howe's husband forced her to abandon her introspective, critical style of poetry.  He threatened to divorce her (which meant that he would have custody of their children) unless she stopped writing poetry--or started writing less controversial poetry.  We know this less controversial poetry as "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."  Closer to home, ED's sister-in-law Sue was bullied and cajoled into marriage to a man whom she did not love.  She was not able to pursue the teaching career that she loved.  ED's sister Lavinia could not marry the man she loved.  On the other hand, ED chose not to marry, a choice that enabled her to write.

Or...as Gordon speculates...did ED's epilepsy free her to write?  Here are links to poems that may indicate her epilepsy.

http://www.sanjeev.net/poetry/dickinson-emily/my-first-well-day-since-many-ill-163327.html

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I_like_a_look_of_Agony,

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I_felt_a_Funeral,_in_my_Brain,

Keep in mind that, in the 1800s, epileptics were not allowed to marry and that they at best lived in seclusion.  At worst, they were sent to psychiatric hospitals, and women were more likely be admitted to these institutions.  Medical treatment was very primitive, and the most insightful doctor whom ED consulted advised her to stay away from experimental cures and pursue a calm, home bound life.

Below is a picture of a psychiatric hospital on NYC's Blackwell's Island.  If you've taken EN 211, you may recognize this place from Margaret Fuller and Fanny Fern's non-fiction.


Below is a picture of ED's home in Amherst, MA. 


Although ED did not marry, perhaps because she did not marry, she experienced several intense relationships.  In my previous entry, I mentioned her intimacy with her sister-in-law, Sue, and then with editor, writer, and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson.  ED's relationship with married newspaper editor Samuel Bowles could be described as an entanglement.  She sent this poem to him.  Could it be about their relationship?  Or, as Gordon suggests, could it be a persona poem?

http://www.kalliope.org/digt.pl?longdid=dickinson200108301072

Her correspondence with classmates is both compelling and awkward.  Frequently, her classmates chose not to respond to her.  Later in life, after her father's death, she became involved with his friend and colleague, Judge Otis Lord, a widower.  Her letters to him are lively, charming, and more down-to-earth.  The couple even discussed marriage, but it was not to be.  Below is a picture of Judge Lord.




I also like how Gordon discusses ED's year at Mount Holyoke Seminary, the first American college for women (pictured above).  Academically, her year was successful as the future poet thrived on the college's challenging curriculum.  (She studied geology, chemistry, and astronomy among other courses.)  However, the college's emphasis on evangelical Christianity isolated ED, for she was very much a skeptic and resisted the college president's attempt to convert the student body en masse.  Worse, the college president encouraged students to spy on each other and discouraged them from forming close friendships.  ED's roommate and cousin, Emily Norcross, spied on her.  Eventually, ED left the college due to "ill health."  Does stress bring on seizures?


I did not forget the Todds!  It was very hard for me to find a picture of this family: the bewitching Mabel Loomis Todd; her husband, David, a professor of astronomy at Amherst College; and their daughter, Millicent Todd (later Bingham), who continued her mother's work on a more scholarly note.  Instead, I found the cover of a collection of Mabel's correspondence with her lover and ED's brother, Austin Dickinson.


Married to a very junior professor at Amherst who was also unfaithful to her, Mabel Loomis Todd was a bright, beautiful young woman in search of...something!  Initially, she was Sue Dickinson's protege, but then her flirtatious ways attracted first Sue's son--and then Sue's husband.  (Where is Carolyn Hax when you need her?)  Mabel also wanted to become friends with ED herself but was unable to.  However, after the poet's death, she helped ED's sister Lavinia transcribe the poems for a collection.  Mabel's role in the collection became greater and greater even as she strove to alienate her lover from his wife and children and to "feather" her family's nest.  (Austin Dickinson was a wealthy, powerful lawyer in Amherst and the college's treasurer.  Ironically, he didn't recognize his sister's greatness, but he did help his lover's husband.)  I must add, though, that Lavinia didn't pay Mabel and that she didn't recognize how much the younger woman did.


Ultimately, after her lover's death and the publication of two volumes of poetry, Mabel attempted to wrest a parcel of land away from his family.  Below is a picture of the Todds' house.  It is now a bed and breakfast.



Back to my story...In order to get the land she wanted, Mabel had to first get Lavinia's signature on a deed...as it turned out...under questionable circumstances.  It goes without saying Lavinia and Mabel could no longer work together.  They went to court over the signature.  Lavinia won the suit and its appeal; Mabel locked away the poems and letters that she had been working on.  This was in 1898.

By the way, here is a picture from a 2000 recreation of Mabel and her husband's presentations on their expeditions together.  One was to Japan where she climbed up to the sixth stage of Mt. Fuji, a remarkable feat for a woman of those days.


The picture below is of a 1906 *summer* climb of Mt. Fuji.



For many years, in fact, over the course of much of the 1900s, the Todds and the Dickinsons fought over ED's work and her public image.  Mabel Loomis Todd's editing was heavy handed by our standards, and she fought to slander Sue Dickinson's character and diminish her role in ED's life, but she did much to promote the poet's work, including lecturing on it.  Her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, a professor of geography, continued the task of promoting ED's work--and her mother's work after MLT died in 1932.  She also argued against Martha Dickinson Bianchi's attempts to romanticize her aunt's life.  However, MDB's 1914 edition of her aunt's poetry and her subsequent biography drew readers' attention to ED's poetry.  Moreover, the critical climate in the early 1900s was more receptive than it had been in the 1890s.  A romance novelist, MDB provided her aunt's story with a master narrative: one unhappy love affair had caused her to retreat from society and write poetry.  MTB, on the other hand, specifically argued against this master narrative.  She published ED's letters to Judge Lord as part of her argument, and she encouraged Yale professor Richard Sewell to write a scholarly biography of ED.  This two-volume biography would appear in 1974.  Then readers and scholars would be even more receptive to ED and her work.

I'll close with a picture of Sewell's book


and of some pictures from the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, MA.

This picture shows more of the museum's gardens.

Below is a picture of Emily Dickinson's bedroom.



Finally, below is the cover of the first edition of ED's poems.  The painting on the cover is by Mabel Todd Loomis.

The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad (part two)

I don't like writing super long Multiply entries, so here is part two of my entry on the lives and works of Joseph Conrad. 

The picture above is of Conrad with his wife and younger son.  I think that it fits John Batchelor's bio nicely since this biographer does a better job of putting Conrad in context than Stape did.  Also, I suspect that Stape might have lost patience with Conrad.  Unsurprisingly, this can be an occupational hazard with biographers, and if one shies away from Conrad's work and hones in on his letters, it is easier to lose patience with him.

Since Stape, however, does a better job of writing about Conrad's earlier life (in Poland, France, and the merchant marines), this entry will focus on his later life as a writer. 

I wonder how an ESL teacher or theorist would look at Conrad's work.  After all, he was writing in a language that he did not learn until he was an adult.  (English was his third or fourth language, perhaps even his fifth.  I suspect that living in an area that Russia occupied, he had to know some Russian.)  An ESL teacher or theorist would shed interesting light on Conrad's struggles with writer's block and his collaboration with native writer Ford Madox Ford during the 1900s. 

Also, of course, a large part of Conrad's life in England was his attempt to establish and sustain an identity.  I imagine that this added to his tension.  Early on, Polish writer Eliza Orzeszkowa criticized him for writing in English even though he had not lived in Poland since he was a teenager.  Later, English natives such as Lady Ottoline Morrell & Bertrand Russell and would-be natives such as Henry James patronized him as an exotic foreigner.  When Conrad and his agent Pinker were quarrelling in 1909 & 1910, the agent struck back at him by claiming that he did not speak or understand English well enough.  Conrad, of course, responded with a stinging retort.  He also changed agents for a time.  Moreover, when Conrad did go to Poland in 1914, as Batchelor notes, his customary depression and anxiety lifted, only to return once he was in England again. 

Here is a quick outline of some of Conrad's work.  Although Heart of Darkness is perhaps his most celebrated and read work, he wrote many other novels, novellas (short novels), and short stories.  In fact, Marlow (the chief narrator in Heart of Darkness) narrates several other of Conrad's works: Youth, Lord Jim, and a later novel, Chance.  Some critics speculate that Marlow may have been Conrad's English-self or the Englishman he would have liked to have been.

In part 1 of this entry, I mentioned Almayer's Folly (1894), Conrad's first novel.  It is set in Borneo, quickly establishing Conrad's identity as an author who set his stories in exotic places.  At this point, Conrad had been a British citizen for 14 years, but he had spent most of this time at sea in the merchant marine.

Here is a picture from Borneo, a place known for its rainforests and wildlife.

As with Marlow, Conrad would continue to revisit one character from Almayer's Folly, Lingard, in "An Outcast of the Islands" (1895) and The Rescue (published 1920 but begun in the mid-1890s). 

Both Batchelor and Stape discuss Conrad's habit of beginning novels only to drop them and begin a short story that would ultimately become a novel or novella.  Heart of Darkness (1902) began this way, as a short story called "An Outpost of Progress."  Similarly, his novel Lord Jim (1900) began as "Jim: A Sketch."  However, as I have mentioned above, Conrad struggled with writer's block, and moving from project to project seemed to be his best way of dealing with it...even though this strategy was annoying to his agent and his publishers.

Below is a picture of the cover of Lord Jim, a novel about a young man who attempts to redeem himself after he jumps ship.  Batchelor compares the novel's protagonist, Jim, to Hamlet.

 

  Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911) are Conrad's most overtly political novels.  The first is set in South America; the other two are set in England and Europe.  In each of these novels, Conrad views political radicalism and intrigue with extreme skepticism. 

 

With Chance (1914), Conrad had his first popular success.  This novel, like several of his earlier works, is set at sea, and it concerns a captain's attempt to ship explosives safely.  (The story that became Chance was titled "Explosives.")  However, unlike his earlier works, Chance includes a love story between an Englishman and an Englishwoman that ends happily.  Prior to this, women did appear in Conrad's work, but as you may notice from "Heart of Darkness," they are often vehicles for the author's social criticism or, as with Winnie Verloc of the Secret Agent or Emilia Gould in Nostromo, voices for this criticism.  In Victory (1915), Conrad's next novel and another success, he places a love story between Heyst, the son of a cynical philosopher, and Lena, a prostitute, at the center of his work; however, she is killed, in part because her relationship with Heyst probably could not exist outside their island.

Conrad continued to write during and after World War I.  His works received much acclaim and respect, perhaps more than their share.  He also tried his hand at adapting several of his works for the stage.  Probably his most successful adaptation was of his late novel Victory, which "ran for eighty-two performances" in 1919.  In 1923, he traveled to the United States.  When he died in 1924, Conrad was working on a novel set during the Napoleonic era in the early 1800s.   

     

The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad (part one)

Once again I thought that I'd blow the dust off of this blog before it's too late.  This time, though, I am going to post a little about the life of Joseph Conrad, author of Heart of Darkness, the first work that we will be reading.

On my way back from Maine, I read John Stape's recent biography of Conrad, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad.  Mr. Stape often refers to Conrad as a man who was caught between two centuries: the nineteenth and the twentieth.  We will be especially conscious of this as we read Heart of Darkness, a work that literally straddles the turn of the century in its writing and publication.

Although Conrad has written one of the greatest English-language novels and is known as a stylist, he did not grow up speaking English.  Although his family was Polish, his birthplace is now in what is the Ukraine.  Throughout almost the whole of Conrad's life (1857-1924), though, Russia controlled much of Poland and all of the Ukraine.  Conrad's parents protested against Russian rule and were sent into exile because of their activism.  Their young son often accompanied them.  However, perhaps unsurprisingly, Conrad himself was not politically active and refused to be involved in various causes.  He ultimately became a British citizen, and his most notable political writing was on behalf of his adopted country's involvement in World War I. 

Here is a photo from Warsaw, one of the places where Conrad lived as a child:

 

Shortly before his father's death, Conrad moved with him to Krakow and therefore outside of Russia.  Here is a picture of that historic city:

 

After the death of both of his parents, Conrad was raised by his grandmother who lived in the part of Poland not under Russia's control but that of the more tolerant Austria-Hungarian Empire.  His uncle soon took responsibility for him, guiding him into a profession and helping him out as need be. Conrad chose to go to sea, as part of what we would now call the merchant marines.  He ultimately became a captain although, as Stapes notes, he rarely had the kind of job he was qualified for.  In part, this happened because technology was advancing and ships needed fewer men. 

Below is a picture of the Joseph Conrad, a ship built in 1882 and later renamed after him.  It is now docked at Conneticut's Mystic Seaport:

 

At first, Conrad worked on French ships, sailing to the Carribbean and South America.  He may have run guns in Colombia.  He later worked on English ships, sailing to Africa, Malaysia, and, ultimately, Australian.  Towards the end of his career, he was employed by the Societe du Commerce du Haut-Congo, a Belgian concern.  This job would take him to the Congo, and his experience in what is now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo would be the basis for Heart of Darkness.    Below is a picture of the Congo River:

Here is a picture from 1918, almost thirty years after Conrad's time in Africa.  However, I think that it will give you a better idea of what Conrad saw there.

After working in the Congo, Conrad became very ill.  He did recover, but as it turned out, his health was permanently affected and he would not work on such a long voyage again.  He sailed on short runs off England's coast, and by 1895, he had left the merchant marine to become a full-time writer. 

A year earlier (1894) he had published his first novel, Almayer's Folly, a story set in Borneo, an island near Malaysia and the Phillippines.  This novel was written in English.

A year later (1896) Conrad would marry Jessie George, a young woman from London.  He was 39, and she was 23.   At first their lives were quite difficult.  Both were not in good health, and Conrad's novels were critical successes but not popular ones.  It also appears that writing could be very difficult and painful for Conrad. 

Here is a picture of Conrad with his older son, Borys.  The white-bearded man in the picture is their landlord.

 Joseph and Jessie Conrad had another son, John.  These are both sons as young men.  The picture was probably taken after Borys had served in WWI.

 

Joseph Conrad did not achieve financial success as an author until right before WWI.  As I had mentioned, he had achieved critical success long before then.   

Interestingly, Conrad and his family did not return to Poland until 1914.  The outbreak of war stranded them in Zakopane, a resort town in the part of Poland ruled by Austria-Hungary.  The Conrads fortunately managed to return to England in the late fall of 1914 although their journey back was perilous and uncertain.  Here is a picture of Zakopane:

 

Argh!  I didn't mean for this picture to be so big.

Here is a picture of one of Conrad's homes in England. 

 

Today I received another biography of Conrad from Amazon.  This biography by John Batchelor emphasizes the writing more, so I'm looking forward to starting it.  The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad is interesting at first, but once Conrad turns to writing, it is less so.

Midterm Study Guide for Spring 2008 -- part 1: Life Writing

This study guide will be the first of three or four that I will put up before our midterm on March 5 and 7.  To begin with, I will focus on the genre of life writing, a form of history that focuses on individuals' lives and a form of literature that provides evidence about individuals' real lives.  This genre is non-fiction, unlike plays, poems, short stories, or novels.  Documentary films that narrate a person's life story could be considered in this category, but life writing generally consists of autobiographies, memoirs, biographies, letters, and diaries.  Novels may take on the form of life writing, but this is simply a device to intrigue people or perhaps even to further mimesis (the imitation of reality).

Note that memoirs are about one part of one's life.  Autobiographies cover one's entire life (so far).

We have read two examples of life writing in class: Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative and Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.  Both works are slave narratives, autobiographies written by former slaves to show the cruelty of slavery and argue for its abolition.  The slave narrative often encourages its readers to recognize what they have in common with the author.  Accordingly, Harriet Jacobs depicts her loving family who sheltered her as a young child, and Olaudah Equiano reminds his readers that he is a Christian like they are.

On the other hand, the contexts of Equiano's and Jacobs' autobiographies differ from each other.  Equiano's autobiography was published in 1789, during the year the Bastille fell and at the beginning of the anti-slavery movement.  Equiano may have been born in Africa (in present-day Nigeria), and his masters included Africans as well as Englishmen.  His autobiography was exceedingly popular and helped make him a wealthy man.  (I wonder if Benjamin Franklin read it.)  Jacobs' autobiography was published in 1861, the year that the Civil War began and two years before the Emancipation Proclamation.  The book was published anonymously, and in it, Jacobs referred to herself as Linda Brent.  Her authorship was not conclusively proven until the 1980s, and some sites continue to list Lydia Maria Child as her co-author.

Here is more information about the Interesting Narrative and Incidents respectively.

About The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano
-- Our anthology contains only part of this work.  The entire narrative is available online at  http://history.hanover.edu/texts/equiano/equiano_contents.html
-- The excerpt that our anthology includes begins with young Equiano being brought on board an English slave ship.  He is frightened, never having seen whites before, and expects that these strange spirits are going to kill him. 
-- In the next section, Equiano (who is 12) arrives in England and sees snow for the first time.  He believes that it is salt until he tastes it.  At this point, he is owned by Captain Pascal who will cheat him of his money and belongings.  Equiano befriends several Englishmen: a teenager named Dick who teaches him to read and a barber who teaches him religion and his trade.
-- Equiano is sold to another sea captain who brings him to the West Indies.  Eventually, he is bought by Robert King, a wealthy Quaker, but works for Captain Farmer, who helps him buy his freedom in an excerpt included in our anthology. 
-- Once free, Equiano works his way to England where he will become an antislavery activist and write his autobiography.

About Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
-- Harriet Jacobs begins her autobiography with a depiction of her happy, sheltered childhood.  Even though she and her family are slaves, she does not realize it until after her mother dies and she must work for her mistress.  We meet Jacobs' father, a strong-minded carpenter, and her grandmother, an industrious businesswoman.  Jacobs' grandmother will be the "friend of her youth."
-- Jacobs' first mistress appears to take into consideration that she is a child, letting her play.  However, she also borrows money that Jacobs' grandmother has saved in order to buy her family's freedom.  When the first mistress dies, she does not free her slaves as had been expected, but gives them to her family.  At this point, Jacobs is a growing girl, nearly a teenager.
-- After the death of her first mistress, Jacobs is given to the daughter of Doctor Flint, a "hoary-headed miscreant."  Jacobs' grandmother is sold at auction to an elderly relative of the late mistress who then frees her.  When Jacobs' father dies suddenly, she is not allowed to mourn but is forced to string together garlands for a party at the Flints' house.  Jacobs notes that whites criticized her father for his independence and strong-mindedness.
-- Doctor Flint attempts to seduce Jacobs, alternately threatening her and lavishing her with "kindness."  His wife is very much aware of this and is jealous.  Jacobs is repulsed by Doctor Flint and criticizes his wife for her jealousy and cruelty.  Nevertheless, the doctor tries to get Jacobs to sleep in his room when she works as his daughter's nurse.  Instead, Mrs. Flint demands that Jacobs sleep in her room.  She tries to find out how successful her husband's attempts at seduction have been.  (The doctor has raped other slave women before.  He sells them and their children when he loses interest in the women.  A slave who spoke about his partner's relationship with the doctor is savagely beaten.)
-- Doctor Flint builds a house for Jacobs who then informs him that she cannot live in this house because she is pregnant with another man's child.  This man is an unmarried white neighbor of the Flint's.  He appears to treat Jacobs kindly, and she is proud of his interest in her.  Later she is ashamed of this liaison. 
-- However, Jacobs must tell her grandmother that she is pregnant.  At first, the grandmother throws her out of her house.  Eventually she shows that she understands her granddaughter's situation but does not forgive her.
-- Several years later, after the birth of two children (Benny and Ellen), Jacobs decides to escape.  While making Doctor Flint think that she has fled to the North, she hides in a crawl space at her grandmother's house.  Benny and Ellen, in the meantime, are bought by their father who will eventually marry.
-- After seven years, Jacobs heads up North where she still must flee from first Doctor Flint and then his heirs.  When Emily Flint and her ne'er do well husband come to New York City to track Jacobs down, she must flee with her daughter to Massachusetts, and her friend Mrs. Bruce must buy her despite Jacobs' disapproval.  Only then are Jacobs and her children free.  At the end of Incidents, Jacobs and her children return to live with Mrs. Bruce.

Keep in mind that The Interesting Narrative and Incidents are only one type of life writing (autobiography/slave narrative).  Beginning with St. Augustine, other writers wrote spiritual autobiographies.  In the 17th century, Puritan Lucy Hutchinson wrote a biography of her husband who was executed by Charles II on his return to power.  In the 18th century, scandalous autobiographies were popular, but Benjamin Franklin wrote his autobiography in order to provide a model for readers.  Autobiographies and memoirs are also means of self-expression.  Some life writing was never intended to be published; in the 1660s Samuel Pepys kept his diary in code!  One wonders whether Anne Frank would have wanted her diary to be published if she had lived.

Life Writing

One genre that we'll be studying in EN 202 and that may seem new to you is life writing. Life writing includes autobiographies, biographies, journals, diaries, memoirs, oral histories, and even letters.  Although, at first glance, this genre seems to belong more to history or sociology, reading life history can shed light on the ways that literature shapes how we think and feel as well as influences on literature itself.  Some of the earliest novels like Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders even represent themselves as memoirs or autobiographies.  (A memoir covers a part of one's life whereas an autobiography treats the whole of one's life.)  And some life writing like Harriet Jacobs'  Incidents and Samuel Pepys' Diary is not only fascinating but well-written and worth studying as literature.  For example, how does Harriet Jacobs tell her life story in such a way that it appeals to her audience?!  How does she depict herself, Dr. Flint, and her grandmother?  (Note that although Pepys did not want people to read his diary, both Incidents and the Interesting Narrative were written to be read *and* to change people's minds about slavery.)

Here are some links on the study of life writing (or life history):

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/clhr/

http://www.latrobe.edu.au/english/usba/usba.html#field

For those of us who know (a little) French, this site is invaluable as it is associated with Philippe Lejeune, one of the literary scholars to focus on autobiography:

http://www.autopacte.org/

This list from California's Center for Autobiographic Studies explains the difference between autobiography and memoir as well as outlining the different forms of autobiography.  The audience is someone wanting to write and perhaps even publish an autobiography or memoir, but I think that you'll find this list to be useful.

http://www.storyhelp.com/autotypes.html

By the way, Beatrice Wood wrote her autobiography, I Shock Myself, when she was in her early nineties.  Almost ten years later she actively participated in a documentary on herself and her work.  Ms. Wood was also one of the models for Rose in Titanic.  Here is a link to a site with examples of her artwork:

http://artscenecal.com/ArtistsFiles/WoodB/WoodBFile/BWood.html

However, life writing is not simply published or unpublished autobiographies and memoirs.  Here is a link to a project from several universities in Hawaii.  It exemplifies the work that scholars are doing in this area.

http://www.hawaii.edu/biograph/cbrbiohiariyoshi.html

There is also the Legacy Project, a collection of correspondence between service members and their loved ones.

http://www.warletters.com/index.html

To read some of these letters, go to this site:

http://www.gilderlehrman.org/collection/battlelines/index_good.html

This database includes women's letters and diaries from the 1600s to 1950:

http://www.alexanderstreet2.com/NWLDlive/

Here writers discuss their motivations for keeping journals--and preserving their life writing:

http://fraglit.com/impassio/k-essay.htm

http://fraglit.com/lwc/archives/38

A literary scholar writes about her experience reading the published diaries of 18th c. novelist Frances Burney D'Arblay:

http://www.jimandellen.org/burney/fanny.divergent.html

Lifewriting is also an important part of national identity:

http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/segan/CANLIN.HTM

Of course, we must not forget biography and collections of biographies.  Lucy Hutchinson's biography of her late husband continues to intrigue literary scholars:

http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng211/Lucy%20Hutchinson.htm

I've cited a number of works by women, but one of the most famous literary biographies is James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson...and earlier Johnson himself wrote a collection of literary biographies:
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Johnson/Guide/lives.html

I really am only scratching the surface, but I think that adding life writing to EN 202 gives us a much fuller and richer idea of world literature.  If you know French, Spanish, or another language, I would be interested in seeing what you might find in the area of life writing!