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Articles

Volume 14, Number 1 (1989)

"The Dear Domestic Circle": Frameworks for the Literary Study of Women's Personal Narratives in Archival Collections

  • Helen M. Buss
Submitted
May 22, 2008
Published
1989-01-01

Abstract

Theorists and critics concerned with the recovery of a woman's tradition in literature must expand the realm of what is considered worthy of literary examination to include material by women once thought valuable only as social history -- journals, diaries, letters, memoirs, autobiographies, and essays. Since these documents are just now beginning to be examined by literary scholars, it is an appropriate time to establish some frameworks for this task: one must identify the generic influences of the accounts; one must discover the context of each account; and, finally, one must be aware of the possibility of influence from other non-public texts, such as private letters, reports, and journals. This framework is applied to two nineteenth-century travel journals written ten years apart by two sisters who travelled with the Hudson's Bay Company from England to the Red River Settlement: Frances R. Simpson and Isabel (Simpson) Finlayson.