Biography is the art of trying to understand what it means to be human by trying to reconstruct a life, but for many years, the stories we have chosen to tell have been limited to those who were a part of an accepted history: one that often didn't include all voices. What happens when we switch the perspective through which we perceive and remember history? When we let go of a set historical narrative and we begin to dig up the forgotten letters and diaries and photographs and artifacts? A different story emerges, one much closer to the truth. Women’s stories start to emerge: stories where women challenge gender norms and stereotypes. Stories where women persevere, are independent and hold power, or stories where women lead secret lives.

Martha Woodmansee will begin the session by opening up the idea of authorship as work done by a solitary genius. Thanks to her fundamental work the myth of a single author has been challenged and has begun to be dismantled. Using this lens, one begins to see how many women who were married to famous writers participated in writing works that were formerly only attributed to their husbands. For example, Charmian Kittredge London, the American author Jack London's wife, edited most of his books and wrote sections of many of his books including The Valley of the Moon and The Mutiny of Elsinore.

Then, building from Woodmansee’s work, Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s paper will explore why Charmian Kitteridge London’s active role in her husband’s writing and adventurous life has all but been forgotten. Her paper explores how by reading Charmian’s extensive diaries, letters, travel logs, photo albums, maps and artifacts one can reconstruct a different version of her life, one that differs from the narrative recorded in former biographies about Jack London. Charmian was an outgoing, New Woman who broke with the accepted gender norms of her era. When she first met Jack in 1900, she was working full-time as a stenographer in San Francisco. She had visited Europe and written a travel log about the trip, had toured the United States, owned rental property in Berkeley, kept a Swedish maid and a suite of rooms, rode and bred her own horse, read extensively, and was part of the literary group affiliated with the Overland Monthly magazine. Dunkle’s paper explores how uncovering Charmian’s life not only shows us what it was like to be a woman living in the turn of the century, but it also challenges our set perceptions regarding the life of a famous male author.

After analyzing how Charmian Kitteridge London’s documents reveal the life that had been hidden behind her famous husband, Donna Campbell’s work explores how one recreates the life of a famous female writer, the life of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edith Wharton (1862-1937), through diaries. Wharton is generally recognized as one of the finest American writers of the twentieth century. The literary reputation of her novels of Old New York, including The House of Mirth (1905) and The Custom of the Country (1913), along with the reminiscences of writers such as Percy Lubbock and Henry James, have etched an image of Wharton as something of a grande dame whose frosty exterior hid both an astute intelligence and a warm sense of humor. Wharton has been the subject of at least four major biographies—by Lubbock, R. W. B. Lewis, Shari Benstock, and most recently Hermione Lee—but she left her own record of her life in the form of her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934) and the unpublished fragment "Life & I." But when combined with her autobiographical writings and letters, Wharton's unpublished diaries reveal a different picture from that of the chilly society woman with the formidable intellect. Drawing from all these sources, Campbell explores the ways in which Wharton's recording of events shifts depending on which medium she uses to record them.

The session ends by exploring the life of Ina Coolbrith, former Poet Laureate of California. Aleta George, an independent scholar who recently received a fellowship to the Huntington Library discusses the art of recreating life through primary documents, but also how difficult it was to published a well-researched book-length biography on an important western literary figure because she is a woman.

Each of these panelists explores how biography as a genre is being challenged and expanded as an art form thanks to scholarly work about what it means to be an author, the release of archives (in the case of Charmian Kitteridge London) and their willingness to approach the once accepted stories of famous authors differently. When we uncover forgotten stories, and include the voices who have been misremembered or forgotten, we challenge history and widen the definition of what it means to be human.