‘A journal of my feelings, mind & body’: narratives of ageing in the life writing of Mary Berry (1763-1852)

This article contributes to studies of gender and old age in the Romantic period through an exploration of the life writing of the biographer and historian, Mary Berry (1763-1852). In her manuscript journal, Berry provides a self-conscious and intimate commentary on the experience of ageing, mixing chronological, personal, cultural, and physical definitions. Yet this account of her feelings, mind, and body is radically reshaped for a Victorian readership in the posthumously published work of 1865. Beyond the journal, Berry’s correspondence provides insight into intragenerational sociability through the exchanges of a network of older letter-writers. The theme of ageing also manifests in her biographical works, in which she refuses to treat old age as an epilogue to a life and complements the critical reflections presented in the journal. Read in dialogue, these texts therefore provide valuable perspectives on old age, gender, and sociability and establish age as an important category within studies of life writing

Women's life writing 1760-1830 : spiritual selves, sexual characters, and revolutionary subjects

PhDThis thesis uses print and manuscript sources to analyse and interpret women's life writing at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. I explore printed works by Catharine Phillips, Mary Dudley, Priscilla Hannah Gurney, Ann Freeman, Elizabeth Steele, Mary Robinson, Helen Maria Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft, Grace Dalrymple Elliott, and Charlotte West and discuss the manuscripts of Mary Fletcher, Mary Tooth, Sarah Ryan, and Elizabeth Fox. Of these sources, five have never been analysed in the critical literature and six have received little attention. Considered as a group, this large corpus of texts offers new insights into the personal and political implications of different models of female selfhood and social being. In chapter one, I compare the religious identities presented in the spiritual autobiographies of Quakers and Methodists. For these women, religious identification provides a powerful sense of social belonging and enables public participation. However, it may also lead to a loss of self in the demand for religious conformity and self-abnegation. In chapter two, I consider the life writing of late eighteenth-century courtesans. These women adapt available models of femininity and female authorship in order to establish themselves as socially connected subjects. However, their narratives also reveal that dependence on the sexual and literary marketplace puts female selfhood under pressure. In chapter three, I explore the eyewitness accounts of British women in the French Revolution. I argue that, for these writers, connecting personal identity to political history is an enabling source of self-definition but it also exposes them to the risks of self-fragmentation. In my focus on the social function of women's life writing, I present an alternative to the traditional alignment of the eighteenth-century autobiographical subject with the autonomous self of individualism. These narratives allow us to reconsider the productive and problematic dialectic between personal expression and representative selfhood, self-authorship and collective narratives, and individualism and social being. They suggest that women's life writing has the potential to be both the self-expression of a unique heroine and the self-inscription of a politicised subject

The Marine Viromes of Four Oceanic Regions

Viruses are the most common biological entities in the marine environment. There has not been a global survey of these viruses, and consequently, it is not known what types of viruses are in Earth's oceans or how they are distributed. Metagenomic analyses of 184 viral assemblages collected over a decade and representing 68 sites in four major oceanic regions showed that most of the viral sequences were not similar to those in the current databases. There was a distinct “marine-ness” quality to the viral assemblages. Global diversity was very high, presumably several hundred thousand of species, and regional richness varied on a North-South latitudinal gradient. The marine regions had different assemblages of viruses. Cyanophages and a newly discovered clade of single-stranded DNA phages dominated the Sargasso Sea sample, whereas prophage-like sequences were most common in the Arctic. However most viral species were found to be widespread. With a majority of shared species between oceanic regions, most of the differences between viral assemblages seemed to be explained by variation in the occurrence of the most common viral species and not by exclusion of different viral genomes. These results support the idea that viruses are widely dispersed and that local environmental conditions enrich for certain viral types through selective pressure

Linking protective GAB2 variants, increased cortical GAB2 expression and decreased Alzheimer's Disease pathology

GRB-associated binding protein 2 (GAB2) represents a compelling genome-wide association signal for late-onset Alzheimer’s disease (LOAD) with reported odds ratios (ORs) ranging from 0.75–0.85. We tested eight GAB2 variants in four North American Caucasian case-control series (2,316 LOAD, 2,538 controls) for association with LOAD. Meta-analyses revealed ORs ranging from (0.61–1.20) with no significant association (all p>0.32). Four variants were hetergeneous across the populations (all p<0.02) due to a potentially inflated effect size (OR = 0.61–0.66) only observed in the smallest series (702 LOAD, 209 controls). Despite the lack of association in our series, the previously reported protective association for GAB2 remained after meta-analyses of our data with all available previously published series (11,952-22,253 samples; OR = 0.82–0.88; all p<0.04). Using a freely available database of lymphoblastoid cell lines we found that protective GAB2 variants were associated with increased GAB2 expression (p = 9.5×10−7−9.3×10−6). We next measured GAB2 mRNA levels in 249 brains and found that decreased neurofibrillary tangle (r = −0.34, p = 0.0006) and senile plaque counts (r = −0.32, p = 0.001) were both good predictors of increased GAB2 mRNA levels albeit that sex (r = −0.28, p = 0.005) may have been a contributing factor. In summary, we hypothesise that GAB2 variants that are protective against LOAD in some populations may act functionally to increase GAB2 mRNA levels (in lymphoblastoid cells) and that increased GAB2 mRNA levels are associated with significantly decreased LOAD pathology. These findings support the hypothesis that Gab2 may protect neurons against LOAD but due to significant population heterogeneity, it is still unclear whether this protection is detectable at the genetic level

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

British women's life writing, 1760-1840: friendship, community, and collaboration

British Women’s Life Writing, 1760-1840 brings together for the first time a wide range of print and manuscript sources in order to explore the innovative ways in which women wrote the stories of their lives and the lives of others. It argues for the importance of personal relationships, communal affiliations, and creative collaborations in these texts, in order to challenge the traditional conception of autobiography as an individualistic practice and offer new insights into female relationships and networks in this period. By focusing on the spiritual writing of Methodist preachers, the memoirs and journals of courtesans, and British travellers’ accounts of the French Revolution, this book provides a critical assessment of the complex and often indeterminate genre of life writing and its place within women’s literary history. This is combined with detailed case studies which illuminate the self-representational strategies of canonical writers, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson, and Helen Maria Williams, while also introducing new figures into the history of women’s self-narration

[Entries for] Sarah Crosby, Ann Freeman, Sarah Ryan, Mary Tooth

Abstrac

Life Writing

This essay addresses developments in religious life writing in the Romantic period through examination of auto/biographies, journals, and letters in both print and manuscript. Particular interests include the genre of the spiritual conversion narrative, literary uses of confession and conversion, life writing and religious historiography, and women’s auto/biographical practices and place within this tradition

The sentimental satire of Sophia Baddeley

The article explores the literary significance of Elizabeth Steele’s The Memoirs of Mrs. Sophia Baddeley (1787) and considers the relationship between satire and sentiment in the self-representations of late eighteenth-century courtesans. The Memoirs establishes the courtesan Sophia Baddeley as a sentimental heroine and translates her experience of domestic violence and sexual double standards into a satire of fashionable society. Elizabeth Steele’s narrative therefore anticipates the sentimental self-portraits of nineteenth-century women writers and looks back to an earlier tradition of the referential scandal chronicle. In addition, it reveals the impact of the commercial exchanges of the literary marketplace on female self-representations

‘Some uncalled-for revival of by-gone scandals’?: editing women’s court memoirs

Women’s court memoirs of the Regency period could inspire hostile reactions in their early readership. For nineteenth-century readers, these works were unseemly (if fascinating) violations of privacy that revivified Regency scandals perhaps best forgotten in the Victorian era. But for a twenty-first century editor, engaged in reviving such ‘uncalled-for’ works for a contemporary readership, court memoirs present rather different pains and pleasures on which this essay reflects. Editing court memoirs provides a welcome opportunity to explore the interactions of women’s life-writing texts with the social, political, literary and commercial contexts of their day. Such work also invites us to reconsider women’s experiments with pseudonymous and anonymous authorship and the relationship between gender and genre in order to address the implications of this for editorial practice. Furthermore, tracing the processes of textual transmission of these works, from the early nineteenth century to the present day, highlights the contingency of the editorial process and the influences of a critical and cultural moment on editions of women’s writing within a broader history of recovery