Book excerpt: It is partly the absence of recorded history which sends women now to the lives of women past for the detailed documentation of their daily lives. It is partly because of the way in which biography, the writing of a life, can synthesize, blend and transcend the realms of the public and the private, that women are fascinated with what the genre can provide. It is partly because women have a literary culture in the developed world, and partly because women have a vested interest in the nature of power and representation - in the construction of silence, in the dynamic distortion and denial - that women want to concentrate on the methodological questions of biography. All Sides of the Subject aims to encompass and open up the significant issues in this remarkable area of study.