writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

In 1829 Pálsdóttir moved to Reykjavík to work as a maidservant. There she met the love of her life
and married in 1833. Her husband became a priest at a vicarage (and a farm) in west Iceland. After
few years in marriage he became mentally ill and died tragically in 1839. Pálsdóttir married again in
1845, a priest, twenty years her senior, and settled in south Iceland. She died in 1871. Pálsdóttir had
six daughters. Three died in infancy.
Iceland was a rural society with the population of 59.000 people in 1850. Urbanisation and
industrialisation had hardly begun. Reykjavík was a small but growing village with 1100 inhabitants in
1850, eventually becoming the centre of administration, education and commerce. There was one
Latin school in the country but privileged young men sought education in Copenhagen (Iceland was
under Danish rule). No formal schools were for women until 1874. Home teaching was the norm,
which meant that children were taught to read and to know their catechism within the household.
Writing was much less common. Evidence indicates that in 1839 about 10‐30% of adult women could
more or less write and 20‐50% of adult men. Hence, being able to write was a privileged skill,
especially for women. Women were either self‐learned or were taught within the household, as was
the case with Pálsdóttir. This was non‐institutionalised learning but practical, and it enabled women
not only to keep in touch with friends and relatives but also to strengthen networks and social
relation – and to perform and construct their epistolary identity. Even to narrate their life stories. 5
Life in letters
Sigríður Pálsdóttir is not a known person in Icelandic history. She did not live an exceptional life, nor
was she a pioneer. But she wrote those 250 letters in times when writing was a privileged skill. It
might indeed be argued that this lifelong correspondence makes her extraordinary in her national,
cultural and social context. And the mere fact that the letters cover a lifetime makes her an
interesting subject of research.
Letters are fascinating accounts of events, life and relationships. Letters are always situated in
space and time, are like “’flies in amber’”, to use Liz Stanley’s apt phrasing. 6 Furthermore, letters
were thought of as providers of facts for biographical writing and believed to give almost direct
access to the life of the protagonist. 7 However, as William Merrill Decker argues in Epistolary
Practices, “letters do not really provide transparent access to history”. Moreover, “Letters tell stories
centred in the experience of historically real individuals, but the stories they tell depend on the
context in which they are read”. 8
Instead of being studied as the “truth” about the past letters are now seen as complex form of
communication and identity formation. Letters do reflect life, argues Stanley, they do however “not
contain evidence of ‘the real person’, but are traces of this person in a particular representational
epistolary guise“. 9 Furthermore, a letter is an expression, a representation, and even a deception. 10
Letters are shaped by the relationship of the signatory and the addressee; they are based on
reciprocity and answers were expected; problems were solved in letters; questions being asked. 11
This reciprocity is one of the main characteristics of correspondence and does distinguish it from
other forms of life writing. 12 And correspondences are fragmentary. Often only one side of a
correspondence has been preserved and there are gaps and silences – months or years could pass
between letters. Letters were deliberately destroyed, have vanished in time, others never reached
their destination.
Moreover, letters are more than texts, they are artifacts from the past and do as such tell stories
about social practices as networking, family relations, and about the act of writing letters. They
reveal how letters were written (privately or collectively); how people learned to write; how letters
were sent over long distances (with post and/or travelers). 13
Hence, letters are multifaceted and when used as evidence of the past, of lives and experiences,
they must be read carefully, contextualized, situated and evaluated, because, as Gerber has argues:
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