At the heart of fame is the tricky business of image management. Over the last 115 years, the celebrity autobiography has emerged as a popular and useful tool for that project. In Limelight, Katja Lee examines the memoirs of famous Canadian women like L. M. Montgomery, Nellie McClung, the Dionne Quintuplets, Margaret Trudeau, and Shania Twain to trace the rise of celebrity autobiography in Canada and the role gender has played in the rise to fame and in writing about that experience.

Arguing that the celebrity autobiography is always negotiating historically specific conditions, Lee charts a history of celebrity in English Canada and the conditions that shape the way women access and experience fame. These contexts shed light on the stories women tell about their lives and the public images they cultivate in their autobiographies. As strategies of self-representation change and the pressure to represent the private life escalates, the celebrity autobiography undergoes distinct shifts—in form, function, and content—during the period examined in this study.

Limelight: Canadian Women and the Rise of Celebrity Autobiography is the first book to explore the history and development of the celebrity autobiography and offers compelling evidence of the critical role of gender and nation in the way fame is experienced and represented.

Katja Lee has recently completed a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia and now teaches at the University of Western Australia in Perth, Western Australia. She has published essays on celebrity, public identity performance, and life writing. Her most recent work has been published in Celebrity Studies, Life Writing, and The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies. With Lorraine York, she co-edited Celebrity Cultures in Canada.

Katja Lee's profile page

• Short-listed, Gabrielle Roy Prize

“Limelight charts the evolution of Canadian culture over a century and, in an engaging and accessible style, examines the way Canadian celebrities operate in a global celebrityscape—the ways in which the national and the global interact—with important implications for citizenship. Limelight is informative, entertaining, thought-provoking, and authoritative.”

Gillian Roberts, University of Nottingham, editor of Reading between the Borderlines (2018) and Parallel Encounters (WLU Press, 2013)