From the statement of the high sociability of women’s autobiographies and their cultural influence – a great number of female writers being famous today through their husbands, friends or lovers – this article takes up some autobiographies by women to interrogate the social conditions and the identity processes determining the becoming-writer of women in the nineteenth and the twentieth century. In order to do so, it reviews the different modalities of filiation and shows how the relationship with the feminine models is made simpler from one century to the other.