Writing Lives Launch

We are very excited to announce the launch of Writing Lives, a blog devoted to working-class life-writing.  The blog is created by students in the English department at Liverpool John Moores University but we hope that other people will participate in our project.

Since January we have each been studying a memoir from the , held by Brunel University Library.  In our on-going Author blogs you can read about the lives of the individual writers we are researching and about their memoirs. You can compare how our authors experienced and wrote about home and family life, education, work, leisure and politics by browsing our Themes pages.

 

If you are studying working-class history or literature, if you are researching your family or local history, or if you are writing your own memoir, you will find information about online resources, museums and archives through our Links and Resources pages. The Bibliography pages contain introductory reading lists on all aspects of working-class lives, history and writing. You can also find out about News & Events relating to working-class writing and history.

We are very grateful to Brunel University Library for allowing us to read and cite the memoirs. In the near future, Liverpool John Moores University Digital Collections will be making all the memoirs from the Burnett Archive available online. In coming years, we hope that students at LJMU and other universities, and indeed any interested readers, will make use of these fascinating autobiographies and create additional blogs and materials for this website. We hope, too, that researchers and students from outside LJMU will join with us to help develop this site to include other kinds of writing. Please contact us if you would like to collaborate.

Please feel free to comment on our posts. If you know about any of the authors we are studying we will be delighted to hear from you and to share what we have found. If you have a memoir in your possession that you would like to be made publicly available, please contact us.