When the supposedly deceased Julia Johnstone set out to write a scandalous memoir about her life as a Regency courtesan, she imagined her book in dialogue with that of her fashionable rival, Harriette Wilson. In her serialized 1825 memoir, Wilson had depicted Johnstone as venal, deceitful, and—perhaps most damning of all for a courtesan—unattractive. “How do you do, my old acquaintance?” (237), Johnstone began menacingly, launching a defense of her own character and condemning Wilson's personal and authorial credibility. Not only was Wilson prone to drink and dishonesty, Johnstone alleged, but her memoirs were little more than fiction, invented by Wilson, her husband, and her Grub Street publisher, John Joseph Stockdale. Yet we know little about Johnstone, including whether or not she was actually alive in 1825 and what role her publisher, William Benbow, played in shaping her narrative for the popular press. This brief example, one of many included in Amy Culley's engaging and carefully researched British Women's Life Writing, 1760–1840: Friendship, Community, and Collaboration, helps introduce the author's central scholarly intervention: women's self-writing in this period was relational. It was the product of intertextual relationships and rivalries, shaped by the commercial literary marketplace and characterized by hybrid genres and ambiguous authorship.

The majority of women's autobiographical and authorial relationships examined in this book were collaborative rather than combative, including personal friendships, religious and political networks, familial record keeping, oral transmission, and manuscript circulation. “Approaching life writing as an expression of personal feeling by a single author has tended to obscure its importance as an articulation of relationships and communal identities or as a contribution to the history of a family, community, or nation” (2), Culley argues, and she draws upon a growing body of scholarship that locates the theory and practice of life writing within relational modes of self-representation.

Culley pursues this argument through twelve case studies of women's self-writing, dividing her book into three parts, each of which uncovers intertextualities and communal identities within particular religious, social, and political groups. Part one focuses on the circle of Methodist women preachers surrounding Mary Fletcher, who joined John Wesley's London Foundry Society in her early twenties and established an orphanage and Methodist community at Leytonstone in the early 1760s with Mary Ryan, a former servant. Fletcher and Ryan were charismatic revivalist preachers, and their autobiographical writings—in Ryan's case, narrated to and compiled by Fletcher—record cross-class female spiritual intimacy, memorialize a shared history, and demonstrate collaborative self-writing through textual evidence of dialogue, transcription, and editing. Fletcher's household grew with the addition of Sarah Lawrence, Ryan's niece, and Mary Tooth. Both left extensive journals, preserving a cross-generational record of their shared past. Collectively, their life writing demonstrates the importance of female spiritual fellowship over traditional familial relationships, and challenges the erasure of early female preachers within histories of Methodism written during the nineteenth century.

In part two Culley shifts from Methodist women to examine the life writing of eighteenth-century and Regency courtesans, including scandalous narratives, family histories, and personal journals. It is here that Culley discusses Wilson and Johnstone, along with Sophia Baddeley, Mary Robinson, and Elizabeth Fox (wife to the Whig statesman Charles James Fox). While this fashionable milieu would seem to have little in common with the Fletcher circle, both groups rejected patriarchal familial models, forming intense personal friendships evinced by intertextual exchanges and collaborations in their life writing. Yet courtesans were entangled within webs of commercial exchange, not least of all the literary marketplace, which further disrupted these women's personal and literary autonomy. In part three Culley provides fresh insights about the place of the French Revolution in British women's life writing, exploring the works of Helen Maria Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft, Grace Dalrymple Elliott, and Charlotte West, all of whom lived in or traveled through Paris during the Revolution. Their texts were “highly innovative” generic hybrids that combined elements of travel and history writing, sentimental fiction, and autobiography (145), and Culley sheds new light on how radical, royalist, and nationalist politics influenced women's personal histories and authorial self-representations.

Ultimately the strength of this book is also its weakness: by pulling together so many diverse case studies, individual and analytic detail is sacrificed to the constraints of space and comparison. Literary scholars, for instance, have not previously discussed Elizabeth Fox's thirty-one volume journal covering the period between 1806 and 1841. Perhaps this is because she only started journaling the year that her famous politician husband died, or because Fox—a celebrated courtesan in the 1780s—avoided discussions of her scandalous early years. Regardless, I found myself wanting more. As Culley asserts, the journal reveals much about Fox's political milieu, and yet we get little sense of her continued role as a philanthropist and Whig patron through the 1830s. Partly this reflects the dual tendencies of “self-expression and self-regulation” characterizing Fox's self-writing strategies, including euphemisms, omitted names, and emotion disclosed and contained by “violent dashes on the paper” in place of verbal description (123). Communities of fellowship, friendship, collaboration, and competition shaped and sustained women's life writing, and yet the socially turned self was just as likely to feel constrained as liberated. If we have quite rightly moved beyond seeing “life writing as an expression of personal feeling by a single author,” did women writers ever aspire to this model of autonomous and unencumbered selfhood? Or maybe more relevant from the perspective our own frenzied moment of online social networking, how did networks—and women's relationships to them—change over time? And might the women life writers examined in this book be studied as parts of broader networks, enmeshed within self-shaping webs of connection that extended far beyond immediate family, friends, rivals, and publishers? These questions aside, this is an impressively researched book, and Culley does an excellent job of situating her findings within broader fields of literary and historical scholarship.