This chapter highlights the critical role of life writing as a tool to assert women’s agency over their own self-presentation. It argues that the close-reading analysis of Hayley’s correspondence enables us to recover her self-portrait and, consequently, to restore her personal and authorial agency. Further, it considers self-presentation as an exercise of resistance to the implicit androcentric and misogynistic bias of male intervention in the posthumous record of women writers’ lives and careers, which often, as is the case with Hayley, resulted in the public disappearance of women authors and their intellectual contributions.