Self and Sisterhood: Female Identity and Relationships in the Lives and Writing of the Potter Sisters

This thesis explores the life-writing of Beatrice Webb and her eight sisters – the Potters. Beatrice, as the most famous sister, has received some attention within women’s history as an eminent, convention-breaking, and ambitious individual. Her life-writing, though not easily defined as representative of women’s autobiographical traditions in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, has similarly featured in broader feminist studies. The more ‘ordinary’ Potter sisters and the diaries, letters, and autobiographical texts that they produced, have received very little consideration. Rejecting the value system that this represents, I argue that placing Beatrice alongside her sisters allows one to more effectively examine how life-writing can be used to assert feminine identity, maintain relationships, and give shape and meaning to women’s experiences at this important period of transition in British history. Using a thematic structure, I consider issues such as citizenship, sexuality, middle-class identity, domestic and public work, and physical and mental health. My approach is interdisciplinary; not only do I recognise the value of the sisterhood’s life-writing as historical sources, but I also take all the sisters’ writing seriously, working against the tendency within the field of life-writing to consider only those texts deemed to have literary merit. Throughout this thesis, I maintain a focus on the sisters’ writing – the language that they used, the patterns that can be seen across decades of material, and the narratives that this produced. In doing so, I differentiate my approach from that taken, most notably, by historian Barbara Caine. Using the Potter sisters’ writing to explore women’s selfhood, I argue that it is important to recognise multiplicity and plurality in middle-class women’s experiences and understandings of identity.