Giving an Epistolary Account of Oneself: Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy

leigh gilmore is a professor emerita of English at The Ohio State University and the author most recently of The #MeToo Effect: What Happens When We Believe Women (Columbia University Press, 2023); Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say about Their Lives (Columbia University Press, 2017), a 2018 Choice Outstanding Academic Title; and Witnessing Girlhood: Toward an Intersectional Tradition of Life Writing (Fordham University Press, 2019), coauthored with Elizabeth Marshall. Her pathbreaking book on trauma, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Cornell University Press, 2001) was reissued with a new preface in July 2023. Her research appears in numerous scholarly journals, including Signs, Feminist Studies, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Biography, and Profession, and in edited collections. Her public feminist scholarship appears in Public Books and wbur’s Cognoscenti.