Life Writing

Abstract

“Life writing” is a broad term encompassing many varieties of personal narrative, including autobiography, biography, memoir, diary, travel writing, autobiographical fiction, letters, collective biography, poetry, case history, personal testimony, illness narrative, obituary, essay, and reminiscences—testimony to its flexible and vibrant format, with an outward-facing as well as introspective purpose. From the beginning, life writing acknowledged the possibility of a reader, while conveying a sense of intimacy. It applied to poetry as well as prose, with some of the greatest 19th-century examples being Wordsworth’s Prelude (1850) and Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850), but it equally applies to brief autobiographical statements, such as George Eliot’s “How I Came to Write Fiction” (1857) or summaries of domestic life in the Brontë sisters’ diary papers. Life writing is also multidisciplinary. In no sense should it be seen as confined to historians, literature specialists, and creative writers. Nor has it traditionally been the preserve of any one social class, as testified by the flourishing of working-class autobiography. The origins of the term can be traced back as far as the seventeenth century, but as a critical term it came to be more widely used from the 1970s onward. Virginia Woolf was using it in the 1930s, including in “A Sketch of the Past” (1939), where she stressed the importance of recording all the “invisible presences” in a person’s life, otherwise “how futile life-writing becomes.” In the nineteenth century, any one publication was likely to combine more than one form of life writing, the monumental “life and letters” being a prime example of the inseparability of the biographical narrative from the embedded correspondence and journals of the subject that allowed their “voice” to be heard from within the biographer’s controlling framework. Margaretta Jolly rightly argues, of life writing, that the “hope of describing fully a subject of such celebrated ambiguity and disciplinary iconoclasm is certainly vain” (The Encyclopaedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms, ed. Margaretta Jolly, vol. 1 [London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001], p. ix; see Reference Works). For the purposes of this article, the primary formats have been selected; namely, autobiography, biography, prosopography, diary, letter, and fictional life writing, with their accompanying critical literature on life writing issues. A brief section on French and German life writing and criticism closes the resource. See also the separate Oxford Bibliographies articles “Travel Writing” and “Autobiography,” with which there is some overlap here.