Modern Language Review

This collection of essays, edited by María José Blanco and Claire Williams, originates from an international conference held in London at the former Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies in May 2011. Since then, the momentum that had been building since the 2000s has translated into an exponential growth in interest in life-writing within Hispanic and Lusophone Studies. With reference to the Peninsula, this has been particularly pronounced in the context of Memory Studies. The present volume thus contributes to a rich field of feminist and historical enquiry, perhaps not as well known as it should be to Anglophone audiences, but definitely not new. The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait, for example, was first published by Bloomsbury Publishing in a facsimile bilingual edition in 1995. In the mid 1980s the late Biruté Ciplijauskaité based her analysis of female-authored novels on the certainty that we were heading towards ‘una tipología de la narración en primera persona’, as indicated by the subtitle of her 1988 book—La novela femenina contemporánea (1970–1985): hacia una tipología de la narración en primera persona—published by Anthropos. She obviously meant a typology of life-writing and, in effect, anticipated the title and broad canvas of the edited collection under review. Then, particularly in the 1990s, the so-called Peninsular New Narrative captured Anglophone attention. Within it, life narratives were key. Laura Freixas, one of the contributors to Feminine Singular, was at that time one of these new voices, scrutinized by critics and academics. The generational connection to auto-fiction was widely discussed. Blanco and Williams solidly continue in this venerable tradition by bringing together ‘essays on life-writing ranging from the cloistered lives of seventeenth-century nuns to memoirs of living clandestinely during the Portuguese dictatorship, to pseudo-autobiographical twentieth-century fiction’ (p. 27). The fifteen essays are divided into six sections: Cloistered Lives, Diary Writing, Memoir and Confessions, Poetry, Fictional Auto/biography, and Visual Biographies.

The frontispiece of the book reproduces a painting by Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, showing her palette and brush. In truth, the image represents a form of lifewriting, and one with a clear precursor: the self-portraits by Madrid-born painter Marisa Roësset (1904–1976), who repeatedly painted herself painting, thus reproducing many versions of her authorial subjectivity and also of her palette, either [End Page 136] whole or fragmented. She gave these out to friends, or else exchanged them. Male authors tend to be less generous or more protective of their authorship. Roësset’s Autorretrato tumbada en el suelo (Self-Portrait Lying on the Floor, 1927) should come to mind on seeing Vieira da Silva’s piece. Only it does not, only it cannot. Because what Feminine Singular foregrounds is a broken genealogy—a situation it helps to remedy. Pepa Anastasio’s piece on performer Julia Fons (1887–1973) (pp. 287–310) is a case in point. It reminds us that the impulse to record one’s life has been strong enough to widen the gap between high and popular culture, thus forcing us critics to overcome it and resort to hidden archives and new materials to trace, bring to light, and better understand the development of life-writing in the Luso-Hispanic world, an area as large and influential as its Anglophone counterpart. The essays in this volume, contributed by important authors such as Anna Caballé and the aforementioned Laura Freixas, identify women who have shaped their sense of self via diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, travel writing, poetry, painting, drawing, collage, scrapbooks, and other artistic forms. Ultimately, the aim of these ‘I’s, as the editors and contributors remind us, is always not only to represent themselves...