AfricanaMemoirs.net is an online resource to encourage research grounded in Black women’s life stories. This open access database enhances narrative study and broadens the genres of autobiography, memoir, and epistolary writing. Most importantly, this website inspires the next generation of authors to read and write life stories for empowerment.
Francis John Stainforth (1797-1866), an Anglican clergyman, owned the largest private library of Anglophone women’s writing collected during the mid-nineteenth century. His library catalog lists 7,122 editions (over 8,000 volumes) authored and edited by more than 2,800 writers, nearly all of whom are women who have been left out of literary and book histories. By digitizing Stainforth’s library catalog manuscript and making it searchable, we draw critical attention to the unrecognized extent of authorship and women’s writing in circulation in the nineteenth century. We also point to the fact that these authors and their texts, many of which are now rare or “lost,” at one time counted.
