Memoirs of women of pleasure: the whore biography
Peakman, Julie (2007) Memoirs of women of pleasure: the whore biography. Women's Writing 11 (2), pp. 163-184. ISSN 0969-9082.
Abstract
Autobiographies written by courtesans became a popular form of reading entertainment towards the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Their memoirs fit into a corpus of erotic literature which ranged from euphemistic racy tales to explicit pornography. This cache of material created images of female sexuality. Yet the autobiographies are particularly important as they include images of the sexually active woman as seen/created by the women themselves. Their titillating revelations, in the form of affair-studded memoirs, became best-sellers, thereby offering the women an important new source of earnings, and throwing a revealing light on the dilemmas of the sexual women at this time.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Historical Studies |
| Depositing User: | Sarah Hall |
| Date Deposited: | 12 Jun 2017 14:43 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2023 17:33 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/18901 |
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