Biography, vol. 19, no. 3 (Summer 1996)

ARTICLES

Mr. Rushdie and Mrs. Gandhi, pp. 245-258
Katherine Frank
The libel suit brought by Indira Gandhi against Salman Rushdie in 1984, after the publication of Midnight's Children, was not merely the culmination of a personal and literary quarrel. With hindsight we can see that it raises key issues connected with the writing of biography concerning biographical authority, the fictional appropriation of history, political accountability, and the peculiar vulnerability of Indian widows.

A Good Country Gentlewoman: Catherine Clive's Epistolary Autobiography, pp. 259-282
JoAllen Bradham
Unable to play the gentlewoman on stage, Catherine Clive lived the part in retirement. Her letters document the days and ways of the gentlewoman, Clive's need to assume the role, and the actress's awareness that she performs. In all details, Clive's gentlewoman conforms to contemporary expectations of that figure.

Making Herself Born: Ghostwriting and Willa Cather's Developing Autobiography, pp. 283-301
Emmy Stark Zitter
Although she ghostwrote an autobiography of S. S. McClure early in her career, Willa Cather sublimated her own biographical impulse into her works of fiction. By applying Susan Stanford Friedman's paradigm for female self-writing to Cather's life and works, we can help explain contradictions and ironies in Cather's biographical/autobiographical stance and illuminate, as well, readings of the most biographical of Cather's novels.

REVlEWS, pp. 302-312
Reviews of new books.

REVIEWED ELSEWHERE, pp. 313-341
Extracts of reviews of biographies published in other sources.

LIFELINES, p. 342
Notes and announcements