Contributions to this book analyse material from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, including biography, auto/biographical memoirs, letters, diaries, sermons, maps and directories, and the book closes with reflections and poems by contemporary life writers. It was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

Introduction - Writing Lives Together: Romantic and Victorian Auto/biography 1. Coherence and Inclusion in the Life Writing of Romantic-period London 2. Intertextual Sociability in Victorian Lives of the Romantic Poets: Thomas De Quincey's 'Lake Reminiscences' and Edward John Trelawny's Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron 3. Josephine Butler's Serial Auto/biography: Writing the Changing Self through the Lives of Others 4. Writing the Lives of Dissent: Life Writing, Religion and Community from Edmund Calamy to Elizabeth Gaskell 5. Life Writing by the Gosse Family: Family Portraits in Scientific, Evangelical and Auto/biographical Discourses 6. The Diaries of Mary Seton Watts (1849-1938): A Record of Her Conjugal Creative Partnership with 'England's Michelangelo', George Frederic Watts (1817-1904) 7. Janet Ross's Intergenerational Life Writing: Female Intellectual Legacy through Memoirs, Correspondence, and Reminiscences