LAUSR

My colleague teaches an undergraduate elective subject on eighteenth-century English literature, with the themes of sex and satire. He wants to set a whore biography (which fits the theme of sex) and wonders whether I, as the resident life-writing scholar, might be able to do a lecture. My colleague is keen to teach a specific whore biography—The Genuine History of Mrs Sarah Prydden, Usually Called, Sally Salisbury, and Her Gallants. Regularly Containing, The Real Story of Her Life—in its original typographic form so the students can wrestle with idiosyncratic type (“Vs” for “Us,” a lowercase “f” for “s”). He is a literary historian, so this kind of contact with original textual forms is an important part of his teaching and one I am not familiar with. I am not sure I know what use I would be to the subject, but once I read The Genuine History I can see the angle pretty quickly. We can, indeed, ask productive questions from the perspective of life-writing studies about this text, particularly regarding how the narrative is in dialogue with dominant discourses of the period in relation to subjectivity, agency, and gender. The text is clearly working across accounts of agency and subjectivity drawn from the Enlightenment and from Christianity. It is a work that seeks to capitalize on the infamy of its subject, so we can examine it as an early example of celebrity biography. The biography offers interesting material for us to explore the primary animating frisson of life writing—the interplay between textuality and “real life”—through its inclusion of genres such as letter and court testimony. The task I have been given is likely not an unfamiliar one to readers of this journal. Many of us have been asked to guest-teach life writing within the context of a larger survey course or a colleague’s elective course. Indeed, it may be the only opportunity we have to teach in our area of research expertise, particularly when we are newly appointed at an institution. When I was