Women have often chosen to tell their secrets, confide their dreams and express their deepest and most intimate thoughts in diaries, letters and other forms of life-writing. Although it is well established as a genre in the Anglophone and Francophone traditions, there has been very little publication of life-writing in the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds and even less scholarly criticism has appeared.

This collection of essays is the first volume to focus on the variety of women's life-writing in the Luso-Hispanic world. The authors analyse women who have written or expressed their sense of identity through diaries, autobiographies, biographies, memoirs, travel writing and poetry, as well as forms of visual art, examining how they represent themselves and others. The volume brings together critics and academics working in Europe and the Americas who are engaging with the work of women from different countries, produced in locations ranging from a sixteenth-century convent to a twenty-first-century kitchen. The book responds to a range of different literary genres as well as reaching beyond literature to analyse women's self-representation through painting, drawing and collage.