Book excerpt: In Composing Selves, award-winning author Peggy Whitman Prenshaw provides her most comprehensive and theoretically sophisticated treatment of autobiographies by women in the American South. This long-anticipated addition to Prenshaw's study of southern literature spans the twentieth century as she provides an in-depth look at the life-writing of eighteen female authors. Drawing on so many notable authors and her own life-time of scholarship Composing Selves is Prenshaw's master work.