This essay deals with the challenges of interpreting female self-writing. less numerous in the early modern period and often apparently less expressive than their male equivalents. Using as evidence some examples from the genre of advice to children, I suggest readings that try to find the traces, even the most sublte, of a personal with to express oneself and to leave a memory. As some of these cases reveal, such a reading unveils richer and more complex biographical profiles of the authors (including unexpected international connections) that challenge the commonplace dichotomy between enlightened and cosmopolitan gentlement and pious and domestic ladies in the eighteenth century.... [Leer más...]