Reviews of publications by Steven King, Florence Boos, and Rachel Woodward and K. Neil Jenkings

Abstract

Over recent decades, scholars from a range of disciplines have used life writings from below to explore the lives of people outside elites and the secure middle class. Such texts offer information otherwise unavailable about the decisions people made, and the terms in which they understood or presented their experiences. Three recent monographs about life writings from below in Britain, although dealing with very different genres – pauper letters, working women's autobiographies, military memoirs – across two hundred and fifty years, demonstrate what can be gained from the comparative reading of a corpus of texts.