A History Of English Autobiography (Cambridge University Press, 2016) -- Uncorrected Proofs

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A HISTORY OF ENGLISH AUTOBIOGRAPHY
A History of English Autobiography explores the genealogy of auto-
biographical writing in England from the medieval period to the
digital era. Beginning with an extensive introduction that charts
important theoretical contributions to the field, this History includes
wide-ranging essays that illuminate the legacy of English autobiogra-
phy. Organised thematically, these essays survey the multilayered
writings of such diverse authors as Chaucer, Bunyan, Carlyle,
Newman, Wilde and Woolf. Written by a host of leading scholars,
this History is the definitive single-volume collection on English
autobiography and will serve as an invaluable reference for specialists
and students alike.
adam smyth is the A. C. Bradley-J. C. Maxwell Tutorial Fellow in
English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford and University Lecturer
in the History of the Book. He is the author of Autobiography in Early
Modern England (Cambridge, 2010) and ‘Profit and Delight’: Printed
Miscellanies in England, 1640–1682, and coeditor, with Gill
Partington, of Book Destruction from the Medieval to the
Contemporary. He writes regularly for the London Review of Books.

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A HISTORY OF ENGLISH
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
ADAM SMYTH
Oxford University

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© Adam Smyth 2016
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First published 2016
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Contents
List of contributors page ix
1 Introduction: The range, limits, and potentials of the form 1
Adam Smyth
part 1 autobiography before ‘autobiography’
(ca. 1300–1700) 11
2 Medieval life-writing: Types, encomia, exemplars, patterns 13
Barry Windeatt
3 Autobiographical selves in the poetry of Chaucer, Gower,
Hoccleve, and Lydgate 27
David Matthews
4 The radicalism of early modern spiritual autobiography 41
Molly Murray
5 Inscribing the early modern self: The materiality of autobiography 56
Kathleen Lynch
6 Re-writing revolution: Life-writing in the Civil Wars 70
Suzanne Trill
7 Money, accounting, and life-writing, 1600–1700: Balancing
a life 86
Adam Smyth
part 2 religion, gender, things (ca. 1700–1800) 101
8 Structures and processes of English spiritual autobiography
from Bunyan to Cowper 103
Tessa Whitehouse
v

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9 ‘Written by herself’: British women’s autobiography in the
eighteenth century 119
Robert Folkenﬂik
10 The lives of things: Objects, it-narratives, and ﬁctional
autobiography, 1700–1800 133
Lynn Festa
11 Empiricist philosophers and eighteenth-century autobiography 148
John Richetti
part 3 the many nineteenth centuries (ca. 1800–1900) 163
12 Working-class autobiography in the nineteenth century 165
David Vincent
13 Romantic life-writing 179
Duncan Wu
14 Nineteenth-century spiritual autobiography: Carlyle, Newman,
Mill 192
Richard Hughes Gibson and Timothy Larsen
15 Emerging selves: The autobiographical impulse in Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, and Annie Wood
Besant 207
Carol Hanbery MacKay
16 Victorian artists’ autobiographies: Transgression, res gestae,
and the collective life 221
Julie Codell
17 Victorian print culture: Periodicals and serial lives, 1830–1860 237
Stephen Colclough
part 4 relational lives and forms of remembering
(ca. 1890–1930) 253
18 ‘Fusions and interrelations’: Family memoirs of Henry James,
Edmund Gosse, and others 255
Max Saunders
19 Queer lives: Wilde, Sackville-West, and Woolf 269
Georgia Johnston
vi Contents

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20 Anecdotal remembrance: Forms of First and Second World
War life-writing 284
Hope Wolf
21 Experiments in form: Modernism and autobiography in Woolf,
Eliot, Mansﬁeld, Lawrence, Joyce, and Richardson 298
Laura Marcus
22 Psychoanalysis and autobiography 313
Maud Ellman
part 5 kinds of community (ca. 1930–contemporary) 329
23 Poetry and autobiography in the 1930s: Auden, Isherwood,
MacNeice, Spender 331
Michael O’Neill
24 Documenting lives: Mass Observation, women’s diaries, and
everyday modernity 345
Nick Hubble
25 Postcolonial autobiography in English: The example of Trinidad 359
Bart Moore-Gilbert
26 Around 2000: Memoir as literature 374
Joseph Brooker
27 Illness narratives 388
Neil Vickers
28 Breaking the pact: Contemporary autobiographical diversions 402
Roger Luckhurst
29 The machines that write us: Social media and the evolution
of the autobiographical impulse 417
Andreas Kitzmann
Contents vii

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List of contributors
joseph brooker is Reader in Modern Literature at Birkbeck, University
of London. He is the author of Joyce’s Critics (2004), Flann O’Brien
(2005), and Literature of the 1980s: After the Watershed (2010), and has
edited special issues of New Formations, Textual Practice, and Critical
Quarterly.
julie codell is Professor of Art History at Arizona State University and
aﬃliate faculty in English, Women’s and Gender Studies, Film and
Media Studies, and Asian Studies. She wrote The Victorian Artist (2003;
rev. ed. 2012) and edited Transculturation in British Art (2012), Power
and Resistance: The Delhi Coronation Durbars (2012), The Political
Economy of Art (2008), and Imperial Co-Histories (2003). She also co-
edited Orientalism, Eroticism and Modern Visuality in Global Cultures
(2016, forthcoming), Encounters in the Victorian Press (2004), and
Orientalism Transposed (1998). She has won fellowships from the
National Endowment for the Humanities, Yale’s British Art Center,
The Getty, The Huntington, the Ransom Humanities Center, and the
American Institute for Indian Studies.
stephen colclough is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century
Literature in the School of English, Bangor University. He is the author
of Consuming Texts: Readers and Reading Communities 1695-1870 (2007)
and a contributor to a number of recent collections on the history of the
book, including The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume
VI- 1830-1914 (Cambridge 2009), The History of Oxford University Press:
Volume II- 1780-1896 (2013), and The Oxford History of the Novel in
English Volume Two: English and British Fiction 1750-1820 (2015).
maud ellmann is the Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Professor of the
Development of the Novel in English at the University of Chicago. She
has written widely on modernism and literary theory, including
ix

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psychoanalysis, feminism, and animal studies. Her most recent book is
The Nets of Modernism (Cambridge 2009), a study of James, Woolf,
Joyce, and Freud.
lynn festa is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University. She is
the author of Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain
and France (2006), and the co-editor, with Daniel Carey, of The
Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and
Postcolonial Theory (2009).
robert folkenflik, edward a. dickson emeritus Professor
of English at the University of California, Irvine, writes mainly on
eighteenth-century narrative. He has published Samuel Johnson,
Biographer (1978), The English Hero, 1660-1800 (1982), and The Culture
of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation (1993), as well as
editions of Swift, Smollett, and Sterne.
nick hubble is Reader in English at Brunel University London and the
author of Mass-Observation and Everyday Life (2006; 2nd edn. 2010), as
well as chapters and articles on Mass Observation. He was a co-organiser
of the Mass Observation 75th Anniversary Conference in 2013.
richard hughes gibson is Associate Professor of English at Wheaton
College. He is the author of Forgiveness in Victorian Literature:
Grammar, Narrative, and Community (2015) as well as essays on
Robert Browning, Thomas Hardy, and T. S. Eliot.
georgia johnston is Professor of English at Saint Louis University,
where she studies the cultures and literature of the early twentieth
century. She has particular interests in Modernist autobiography in
terms of sexual theories of the period. Her publications include The
Formation of 20th-century Lesbian Autobiography (2007).
andreas kitzmann is Associate Professor of Humanities at York
University, Toronto. He has written widely on the impact of commu-
nications technology on the construction and practice of identity,
electronic communities, and the inﬂuence of new media on narrative
conventions. His publications include Memory and Migration:
Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies (2011) and Saved From
Oblivion: Documenting the Daily from Diaries to Web Cams (2004).
timothy larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought, Wheaton
College, Wheaton, Illinois. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he
x List of contributors

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has been a Visiting Fellow in History at Trinity College, Cambridge,
and All Souls College, Oxford. His monographs include Crisis of Doubt:
Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England (2006) and A People of One
Book: The Bible and the Victorians (2011).
roger luckhurst is Professor of Modern and Contemporary
Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of
numerous books and articles, including, most recently, The Mummy’s
Curse: The True Story of a Dark Fantasy (2012), and Zombies: A Cultural
History (2015).
kathleen lynch is Executive Director of the Folger Institute. She
researches the material culture of early modern English literature. Her
book, Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone
World (2012), directs critical attention to the collaborative processes by
which truthful texts of spiritual experience were constructed and
endorsed.
carol hanbery mackay is the J. R. Milliken Centennial Professor of
English literature and Affiliate of Women’s and Gender Studies at The
University of Texas in Austin. Her most recent relevant publications
include Creative Negativity: Four Victorian Exemplars of the Female Quest
(2001) and a critical edition of Annie Besant’s Autobiographical Sketches
(2009).
laura marcus is Goldsmith’s Professor of English Literature and Fellow
of New College, Oxford University. Her research and teaching interests
are predominantly in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and
culture, including life-writing, modernism, Virginia Woolf and
Bloomsbury culture, contemporary fiction, and literature and film.
Her book publications include Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory,
Criticism, Practice (1994), Virginia Woolf: Writers and their Work
(1997/2004), The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist
Period (2007; awarded the 2008 James Russell Lowell Prize of the
Modern Language Association), and, as co-editor, The Cambridge
History of Twentieth-Century English Literature (Cambridge 2004).
david matthews is Senior lecturer in Middle English Literature and
Culture at the University of Manchester. He is the author of Writing to
the King: Nation, Kingship, and Literature in England (Cambridge 2010)
and Medievalism: A Critical History (2015), and recently completed a six-
year stint as editor of Studies in the Age of Chaucer.
List of contributors xi

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bart moore-gilbert is Professor of Postcolonial Studies and English
at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he works on colonial and
postcolonial literatures, postcolonial theory, and autobiographical writ-
ing. He is the author of many books and articles including Postcolonial
Life-Writing: Culture, Politics and Self-Representation (2009) and The
Setting Sun: a Memoir of Empire and Family Secrets (2014). He is
currently working on a monograph about Palestine and postcolonialism.
molly murray is Associate Professor of English and Comparative
Literature at Columbia University, New York. She is the author of
The Poetics of Conversion in Early Modern English Literature: Verse and
Change from Donne to Dryden (Cambridge 2009), as well as numerous
articles and essays on the literature and culture of sixteenth- and seven-
teenth-century England. She is currently at work on a book-length study
of literary communities in the early modern English prison.
michael o’neill is Professor of English at Durham University. His
books include Auden, MacNeice, Spender: The Thirties Poetry (1992; with
Gareth Reeves) and The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and
Renewals in British, American, and Irish Poetry since 1900 (2007), as editor,
The Cambridge History of English Poetry (Cambridge 2010), and, as a poet,
The Stripped Bed (1990), Wheel (2008), and Gangs of Shadow (2014).
john richetti is A. M. Rosenthal Professor of English, Emeritus, at the
University of Pennsylvania. His interest in the three British philosophers
he writes about in this volume dates from his book Philosophical Writing:
Locke, Berkeley, Hume (1983). He has published a number of books on
the English novel and in particular on Daniel Defoe, including his The
Life of Daniel Defoe: A Critical Biography (2005), and he has edited The
Cambridge History of English Literature 1660-1780 (Cambridge 2005).
max saunders is Director of the Arts and Humanities Research
Institute, Professor of English and Co-Director of the Centre for Life-
Writing Research at King’s College London. He is the author of Ford
Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 vols (1996) and Self Impression: Life-Writing,
Autobiograﬁction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (2010).
adam smyth is the A. C. Bradley-J.C. Maxwell Tutorial Fellow in
English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford, and University Lecturer
in the History of the Book. His most recent books are Autobiography in
Early Modern England (Cambridge 2010) and, co-edited with Gill
Partington, Book Destruction from the Medieval to the Contemporary
xii List of contributors

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(2014). He writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and the
London Review of Books.
suzanne trill is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University
of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on women’s writing in England
and Scotland (c. 1550–1700), especially devotional literature. Her pub-
lications include Lady Anne Halkett; Selected Self-Writings (2008). She is
currently working on a modernised edition of Halkett’s True Account of
My Life for ‘The Other Voice’ series.
neil vickers is Reader in English Literature and the Medical
Humanities at King’s College London. He led the project on illness
narrative and subjective experience at the Centre for Humanities and
Health. He is the author of Coleridge and the Doctors (2004), and of
several articles on the literature and medicine.
david vincent is Emeritus Professor of Social History at the Open
University and Visiting Professor at Keele University. His publications
include Bread, Knowledge and Freedom (1979, 1982); with John Burnett
and David Mayall, The Autobiography of the Working Class: An
Annotated Critical Bibliography, 3 vols (1983, 1987,1988), and studies of
the history of literacy and secrecy in Britain and Europe. His most recent
book is I Hope I Don’t Intrude. Privacy and its Dilemmas in Nineteenth-
Century Britain (2015).
tessa whitehouse is Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature at
Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of The Textual
Culture of English Protestant Dissent 1720–1800 (2015) as well as chapters
and articles on dissenting education, manuscript circulation, and epis-
tolary culture. She currently researches friendship, memorial practices,
and nonconformist women’s writing.
barry windeatt is Professor of English in the University of Cambridge,
and Fellow and Keeper of Rare Books at Emmanuel College. Among
many other publications, he has edited The Book of Margery Kempe
(2000).
hope wolf is a Lecturer in British Modernist Literature at the University
of Sussex. Previously, she held a Research Fellowship in English at
Girton College, University of Cambridge. An AHRC-funded
Collaborative Doctoral Award between the Imperial War Museum
and King’s College London supported her PhD research. Her most
recent publication is an anthology, A Broken World: Letters, Diaries
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and Memories of the Great War (2014), which she co-edited with
Sebastian Faulks.
duncan wu is Professor of English at Georgetown University; a former
Fellow of St Catherine’s College, Oxford; formerly Professor of English
Language and Literature at the University of Oxford; and former
Professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow. Among
his many books are William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man (2008), New
Writings of William Hazlitt (2007), and, with Tom Paulin, Metaphysical
Hazlitt (2005).
xiv List of contributors

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chapter 1
Introduction
The range, limits, and potentials of the form
Adam Smyth
I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not
thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the
woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to
be developed, carefully printed, fixed.1
Christopher Isherwood
[T]he whole matter is reduced to the papers.2
Algernon Sidney
The twenty-nine chapters and 170,000 words that comprise A History of
English Autobiography take as their subject autobiographical writing in
England from the medieval period to the digital contemporary. The chapters
represent the critical state of play in the field, and intervene in urgent ways
with current thinking, often through the deployment of new research. Thus,
running through several chapters is an engagement with the latest scholarly
issues of debate, including, for example, the medical humanities; the materi-
ality of texts; the history of reading; and objects and thing theory. The
narrative is an English one, but it frequently engages with non-English
authors (including Augustine, Rousseau, and Freud) who were important
for the development of English autobiographical writing.
The book is structured chronologically, and has a spine of canonical
texts: in this sense, English Autobiography will serve as the ideal source for a
reader coming to the topic for the first time, or seeking to set their period-
specific knowledge in a broader context. But alongside this robust cover-
age, the collection also treats ‘autobiography’ in ways that are expansive,
imaginative, and suggestive. The collection does this in part by greatly
expanding the chronological range normally given over to histories of
autobiography: backwards, into the medieval and early modern, and for-
wards, into the contemporary world of social media, smartphones, and
omnipresent digital cameras.
1

One of English Autobiography’s central contentions is that autobiogra-
phy, in its widest sense, is not an exclusively modern, post-Romantic
phenomenon, but a way of writing and reading that has a much richer,
longer history. Standard histories of the form often discuss Augustine’s
Confessions and perhaps one early modern writer (usually either Montaigne
or Bunyan), before finding a real beginning with Rousseau’s Confessions
(1782). The pre-1750 serves as a space for throat-clearing or limbering up –
but this is to miss a wealth of significant texts, authors, and lives. In Part 1,
‘Autobiography before “autobiography” (ca. 1300–1700)’, coverage of
medieval and early modern forms of autobiographical writing provides a
crucial pre- or counter-history to the better-known story of autobiogra-
phy’s nineteenth-century origins. Early chapters demonstrate how writers
in England between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries made vibrant
records of their lives, in letters and visions like Julian of Norwich’s
Revelations, or, spectacularly, in the Book of Margery Kempe (ca. 1373–
ca. 1440): an ‘uneasy hybrid of an autobiographical saint’s life or auto-
hagiography’, Barry Windeatt suggests in Chapter 2 (p. XX), possessed of
both a mould-breaking originality and an acute awareness of tradition.
These texts, and the early modern life-writings that followed them –
diaries, spiritual testimonies, financial accounts – challenge us to rethink
our idea of autobiography in a period of English literary history in which
the modern notion of a written life as (according to one definition) ‘a
retrospective prose narrative produced by a real person concerning his own
existence, focusing on his individual life, in particular the story of his
personality’ (Lejeune 1989, 4) was not yet fully recognisable.
The chapters do this in part by challenging the link between self-writing
and inwardness. Autobiography is so powerfully yoked in modern formula-
tions to notions of interiority and depth that the concept of a written self,
assembled through surfaces and things, seems counter-intuitive or lacking.
But such a life is possible, as suggested here in discussions of seventeenth-
century financial accounting, where the death of a wife might be narrated
through the columns of funeral expenses in an account book, and in a
chapter on eighteenth-century ‘it-narratives’ – that is, fictional autobiogra-
phies narrated, as Lynn Festa describes in Chapter 10, by inanimate objects
(coins, canes, and clothing) and animals (birds, fleas, dogs). Autobiography
may be ‘the literature of subjectivity’ (Marcus 1994, 231), but subjectivity has
a history and can mean different things at different times.
Early autobiographies rely, too, perhaps counter-intuitively, on the
overt redeployment of existing scripts: they produce a sense of self not
through a process of detachment or alienation from other life-stories, but
2 adam smyth

rather through a series of alignments and overlappings. Augustine’s
Confessions provides one crucial paradigm across the full chronological
range of this collection, with its emphasis on a pre-conversion spiritual
wandering, a child’s voice heard in a garden (‘tolle, lege; tolle, lege’: ‘pick up
and read; pick up and read’), and the sudden conversion on reading part of
Paul’s letter to the Romans (Augustine 1992, 152–3). The spiritual auto-
biography that flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
worked in part by redeploying already-known Biblical narratives to order
and make sense of a life: thus in The Vocacyon of Johan Bale (1553), Bale
describes a year’s hardships endured by a Protestant reformer under Queen
Mary I by using St Paul as a template, stretching the story of his own trials
in Ireland over St Paul’s last journey to Jerusalem: ‘Sanct Paule also
rejoyced’, Bale writes; ‘Whie shulde I than shrinke or be ashamed to do
the lyke?’ (Bale 1553, f. 5). Far from erasing Bale’s story, his life is conveyed
through a reworked retelling of a narrative of virtue under fire – a process
that invokes the dual meaning of ‘identity’ as both sameness (he is St Paul)
and uniqueness (he is not St Paul, he is himself). Past written lives, in Bale’s
conception, are ‘left to us for example that we shulde do the lyke whan we
fele the lyke’ (Bale 1553, f. 5).
Donald Stauffer calls Bale’s text the first separately printed English prose
autobiography, and it may well be this (Stauffer 1964, 178, noted in Skura
2008, 49). But a language of firsts and origin points is not always the best
way to talk about autobiography, not only because it can result in an arid
kind of literary history concerned with the trumping of one origin point for
another (d’Israeli in 1809?; Rousseau in 1782?; Augustine in 397?; the earlier
stories of other Christian converts on which Augustine drew?), but also
because a sense of the seminal usually works to exclude texts that fall
outside of that particular and often very male genealogical line of descent,
‘returning the critics to the same set of texts with the same set of demands’
(Marcus 1994, 2). Moreover, the uses of convention that we see in Bale and
spiritual life-writing more generally reveal a tension that is always at the
heart of autobiography, across all periods: on the one hand, the writing of a
life through an inherited pattern, a formal, generic, or moral duty to
conform to a legible template, to produce a life that is comprehensible as
a life; on the other, the writing of a life as a departure from those existing
patterns, a breaking away, a sense of the inadequacy of what has been said
before. It is tempting to figure this tension in terms of an opposition
between constraint and liberation, and to settle on a notion of authentic
self-writing as a writing away from past forms. But the earliest life-writing
was always a restless tussle with the available (that is, inherited) literary
Introduction 3

traditions, just as the newness of contemporary forms of self-accounting is
often indebted to older traditions, even if an excited rhetoric of digital
newness often conceals those continuities. Moreover, that separation of life
as experience, and autobiography as written representation of experience –
of life as the thing lived, and the written account as subsequent – can
become blurred, too: an awareness of the conventions of autobiographical
forms might feed back into the lived life, as Nick Hubble describes in his
account of Mass Observation and its prescribed forms of self-accounting.
To live knowing one will soon write about living means the present-tense
life will be shaped by genres: conventions of representation (like, for
example, a modernist self-reflexivity) tumble out of the text and into the
world. This pressure or feedback is certainly evident in the second decade
of the twenty-first century, when a sea of smartphones and tablets rise up at
a pop concert or a school play.
Early forms of autobiography highlight two particular pressures that
weigh heavily on much autobiographical writing across the whole of this
collection. First, the relationship between the writing self and the written
self is a relationship both of identity and difference: the autobiographical
contract (Lejeune 1989, 4, 17) demands that these two figures are one, but
the form’s investment in a narrative of development or at least change
requires differentiation. And second, within the autobiographical text
there is a toggling between the particular and the exemplary: the detail of
one day (a view from a bridge in the early morning) is amplified, by virtue
of its inclusion, to suggest an aesthetic or moral pattern, but at the same
time the text recoils from that condition of exemplarity by stressing its
stubborn singleness. Different autobiographical texts, at different times,
have different ways of negotiating these tensions, but they remain refrains
across the centuries covered by this collection.
Literary histories often fall into a narcissistic pattern: an older period of
foundation-laying leads to the modern complexity or radicalism that we
frequently identify with our own historical period; homogeneity breaks
into a diversity that we claim as our own. English Autobiography attempts to
avoid this predictable and excluding arc of progress or sophistication. As
Molly Murray notes, the word ‘radical’ comes from the Latin radix, or
root: it suggests a concern with sources, as much as a growing away from
them. Life-writing from all periods is frequently radical in this double
sense: forward-looking, in the production of new kinds of text, and back-
ward-looking, in the sense of being self-consciously indebted to earlier
textual roots. To write a life – and indeed to write in general – means
necessarily to engage with patterns, types, and conventions and, through
4 adam smyth

those engagements (and engagements can describe a range of responses,
from recycling to agonistic struggle to rejection), to be aware of the over-
laps and the gaps between pattern and life and to feel the twin pull of the
documentary and the parable. In the words of Patricia Meyer Spacks, ‘[t]he
crucial literary problem of autobiography is to articulate a significant form
for the relative incoherence of human experience’ (Spacks 1976, 434). The
always-changing nature of those engagements is the subject of this volume,
rather than a story of the gradual shedding of skins of convention. These
engagements between autobiographical convention and text take many
forms, but running throughout the chapters in the collection are three
recurring modes: negotiation (adjusting conventions to meet new forms of
experience and circumstance); improvisation (taking conventions sharply
in surprising, unforeseen directions); and patchwork (gathering parts of
distinct texts or conventions to produce new hybrids). Each form of
engagement produces new texts which in turn become available precedents
or, if repeated sufficiently, conventions for future writers.
This sense of autobiographical writing in a state of development or,
more neutrally, flux, is reflected in the terminology deployed throughout
this volume. Autobiography was, from its first coinage, a difficult term, a
word that could more easily be pushed away than embraced. The earliest
recorded use, in 1797, was a call for its rejection:
The next dissertation concerns Diaries, and Self-biography. We are doubtful
whether the latter word be legitimate: it is not very usual in English to
employ hybrid words partly Saxon and partly Greek: yet autobiography
would have seemed pedantic. (‘autobiography’, Oxford English Dictionary)
The term blossoms in the nineteenth century, although the alignment
between word and concept is never entirely tidy: if a term comes into being
to describe a practice that is already legible, then it must lag behind that
practice, rather as writing can never quite keep up with experience.
Nonetheless, the historical contingency of the term raises immediate
questions about the applicability of the word to periods before and after
its moment of coining (Davis 2006, 19–34). Contributors to this volume
deploy a multiplicity of terms to describe their texts: alongside autobio-
graphy jostle (among many other descriptors) life-writing, self-accounting,
self-writing, reflected autobiography, memoir, family or relational mem-
oir, anecdote, automated biography (life narratives produced on social
media often featuring branding and implied corporate loyalties), autobio-
grafiction (Max Saunder’s revival of an early-twentieth-century term to
describe a relation ‘between fiction and a self’s autobiography’ (Saunders
Introduction 5

2010, 7–8)), autography (first-person writing which offers no ‘claim to any
systematic relation to documentable truth’ (Spearing 2011, 7)), and even, in
Joseph Brooker’s discussion of Alasdair Gray’s A Life in Pictures (2010),
‘autopictography’. Moreover, as the chapters in this collection describe,
autobiography might be understood not as a genre in itself but an impulse
or, as Barry Windeatt puts it in Chapter 2, ‘an act of self-assertion’ (p. XX)
that finds expression within literary genres as diverse as Chaucer’s The Book
of the Duchess (ca. 1368) and Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s novel The Story of
Elizabeth (1863). Autobiography can be a form of writing, or it can be a
presence within a form of writing (thus an ‘autobiographical novel’), or it
can be, as Paul de Man argues, a way of reading (de Man, 1984).
Autobiography might be the unforeseen, or secondary consequence of a
literary project: not the primary intention of the author but a way of
understanding his or her text nonetheless.
These terms overlap but are not quite synonymous. What does this
chatter of related but different terms suggest? For past critics it might be a
cause of anxiety: how can we write about a kind of writing if it evades
categorisation, or, to be more exact, doesn’t quite conform to categorisation?
But alongside an expansion of chronological range, English Autobiography is
committed precisely to this widening of the kinds of texts that fall under the
category of ‘autobiography’. An instability, or variability, of forms of life-
writing3
has traditionally been seen as a problem for criticism: one account of
British autobiography opens with a wish to ‘frame a definition which
excludes the bulk of random or incidental self-revelation scattered through
seventeenth-century literature’ (Delaney 1969, 1); another focuses on narra-
tive autobiography, precisely defined, ‘to clear the air by imposing limits on
autobiographical emissions’ (Mascuch 1997, 7). Mascuch’s use of ‘emissions’
is a deliberately provocative word in a book published the year of the Kyoto
Protocol, but a sense of generic unfixity and experimentation has always
been, and continues to be, a central trait of autobiography. Questions about
autobiography as a genre lead quickly and inexorably to questions about the
referential stability of the text, the relationship between truth and fiction,
and authorial intention – that is, they lead away from the formal properties
of the text on which definitions of genre usually depend. In this sense,
while Derrida is right to note that all texts have a tentative relationship to
genre(s) – ‘[e]very text participates in one or several genres . . . yet
such participation never amounts to belonging’ (Derrida 1980, 65) –
autobiography presents particular challenges. Lejeune’s influential definition
identifies formal properties even if it is possible to problematise those terms
(how retrospective does a retrospective prose narrative have to be; and how
6 adam smyth

can writing about an event be anything other than retrospective, occurring as
it must do after experience?), but he also needs to invoke traits that reside
outside the text, or that straddle both outside and inside, pointing to what he
calls an autobiographical pact or contract affirming the identify between the
names of author, narrator, and protagonist (Lejeune 1989, 4, 17).
But if autobiographical writing qua genre ‘has proved very difficult to
define and regulate’ (Marcus 1994, 229, 1), that trickiness is not a problem
that needs cordoning off, or a pollution clouding the skies: it is a condition
of autobiographical writing. Max Saunders’s important recent book, Self
Impression (2010), is concerned precisely with the productive overlaps
between auto/biography (that is, autobiography and/or biography) and
literary modernism: indeed, and even more expansively, Saunders suggests
‘one story of the novel in English is of a troubled relation between fiction
and autobiography, from fictive autobiographies by Robinson Crusoe . . .
to autobiographical novels like Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage or D.H.
Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers’ (Saunders 2010, 8). English Autobiography
acknowledges, and tackles, this sense of shifting, evolving, various
forms – taking forms, again, to mean both formal or literary properties,
and the material instantiations these texts might assume. Thus in Part 2,
‘Religion, gender, things (ca. 1700–1800)’, chapters covering eighteenth-
century materials consider spiritual autobiographies such as Bunyan’s
Grace Abounding; John Wesley’s printed journals; letters; philosophical
works by Locke, Berkeley, and Hume; and – in response to recent compel-
ling theoretical work on the social lives of objects – so-called ‘it-narratives’.
What happens to our sense of autobiography when it is organised around
an object, not a person?
English Autobiography’s widening of chronology and of written forms is
accompanied by an attempt to place established or dominant narratives
about the history of autobiography alongside newer, revisionist conceptions
of the written life. We see this clearly in Part 3, ‘The many nineteenth
centuries (ca. 1800–1900)’. The nineteenth century is traditionally, and to
some degree rightly, regarded as the period in which a recognisably modern
sense of autobiography came into being: when writers began to produce
retrospective, chronological, richly interior life narratives. English
Autobiography recognises and describes this important paradigm, and attends
to vital nineteenth-century figures such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron,
Carlyle, and John Stuart Mill. But the collection also supplements and
complicates this story by offering a series of alternative conceptions of
autobiography in the period. Thus, sustained attention is given to the
great burgeoning of working-class autobiography (described in Chapter 12
Introduction 7

by the pioneer in the field, David Vincent); to the variety of forms of
women’s life writing, including the rich overlaps between novel and auto-
biography, and the generically dizzying hybrids such as Elizabeth Barrett
Browning’s autobiography-poetry-novel-epic Aurora Leigh (1856); to
Victorian artists’ autobiographies; and to the interface between cheap print
culture and written lives in penny journals like the London Journal: journals
which achieved remarkable circulation figures, and which offered extracts
from existing autobiographies for an often working-class readership.
Part 4, ‘Relational lives and forms of remembering (ca. 1890–1930)’,
sustains this interest in the new forms autobiographical writing might
assume by considering the first third of the twentieth century, and the
radical (once more: both backward- and forward-looking) developments of
English literary modernism. Queer lives, such as those by Wilde, Sackville-
West, and Woolf, challenge an often naturalised heterosexual script that
continues to shape modern expectations of autobiography; while experi-
ments in the forms of fiction produced new possibilities for generic overlaps
between the novel, letter, diary, and autobiography, as seen in the writings of
Woolf, Eliot, Mansfield, Lawrence, Joyce, and Dorothy Richardson.
The twin emphasis on the urgency, and difficulty, of remembering one’s
life is a strain running throughout this volume. The autobiography is a
combination of a drive towards the all-seeing, ‘the evocation of a life as a
totality’ (Marcus 1994, 3), and a recognition of the impossibility of that task:
the baffling challenge to fully represent the life from within the life, ‘the
conceptual problem of how a mind can simultaneously observe and be
observed’ (Marcus 1994, 5). This is, in Kathleen Lynch’s words, one of the
conditions of autobiography: ‘a simulacrum of completion against the
impossibility of the task’ (Chapter 5, p. XX). This sense of struggle and
adversity was amplified by the trauma of two world wars and the enormous
influence of Freudian psychoanalysis, the latter leading to a new emphasis on
the adventitious and the unintentional, rather than the rational and delib-
erate; and on the need, as Maud Ellman explores in the present volume, to
find literary forms ‘responsive to the dynamics of regression, deferred action,
compulsive repetition, and other temporal upheavals characteristic of the
primary process of the unconscious’ (Chapter 22, p. XX). Life narratives
determined by trauma might be narratives in which crucial shaping experi-
ences left, as Roger Luckhurst suggests, no trace in conscious memory. Such
a conception of a written life puts tremendous pressure on ideas of truthful-
ness and the autobiographical pact.
Part 5, ‘Kinds of community (ca. 1930–contemporary)’, tracks across
various social groups: literary, political, and digital. Running through these
8 adam smyth

culminating chapters is an exploration of the interplay between affinity and
difference that is crucial for the creation of a written self. We see this in
chapters on literary writing and its relation to a life. In the poetry of the
1930s, for instance, Auden uses an ‘I’ to illuminate a broader social condi-
tion, while Spender’s verse represents a contrasting, and uniquely con-
structed, self (‘My parents kept me from children who were rough’), often
as a means to suggest, as Michael O’Neill notes, that ‘what we share is
difference, obstinate singleness’ (Chapter 23, p. XX). The literary memoir
(including books by Martin Amis, Jeanette Winterson, Hilary Mantel, and
Alasdair Gray) often rests on a dynamic of aligning with, and withdrawing
from, a sense of literary tradition. Political community is explored in
Chapter 24, which focusses on Mass Observation (MO), founded in 1937
as a scientific study of human social behaviour in Britain, which established
a focus on everyday life. By asking participants to keep diaries to be read by
others, MO encouraged an ‘intersubjective autobiography’ built around
both an individual and collective sense of self. Postcolonial life-writing
further complicates a sense of the autobiographer’s relationship to conven-
tion and tradition, and challenges models of unified, or ‘sovereign’ auto-
biographical subjectivity which have often been prized in Western
autobiographical studies. The degree to which an existing autobiographical
discourse can, or cannot, provide a script for a written life is also considered
in Chapter 27, which discusses illness narratives (an important, emerging
area of scholarship): is it still true that, as Virginia Woolf noted, for pain
‘language runs dry’?
Part 5 concludes by asking whether the collective mediations of
digital technology represent a fundamental paradigm shift in terms of
autobiographical practices and possibilities, or a continuity with exist-
ing modes. What links might we posit between the dissemination of life
data via images, video, timelines, charts, real time video/audio feeds and
tweets, and centuries of shifting autobiographical writing? If the forms
of life generated by social media break, as Andreas Kitzmann puts it, ‘the
link between humanism, life narrative, and the impulse towards
“mastery”’ (Chapter 29, p. XX), is this a bold new chapter, or the latest
iteration of centuries of exploration of the paradoxes of autobiographi-
cal writing?
Notes
1. Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin (1939. St Albans: Triad/Panther,
1977), p. 11.
Introduction 9

2. Algernon Sidney, Colonel Sidney’s speech delivered to the sheriff on the scaffold
December 7th 1683 (1683), p. 3.
3. By form I mean both genre and materiality: unlike many accounts of auto-
biography, organised around the individual author as source, the present
collection is interested in the production and circulation of texts.
Bibliography
Augustine. 1992. Confessions. Edited and translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Bale, John. 1553. The vocacyon of Iohan Bale to the bishiprick of Ossorie.
Davis, Lloyd. 2006. ‘Critical Debates and Early Modern Autobiography’. In Early
Modern Autobiography: Theories, Genres, Practices, 19–34. Edited by Ronald
Bedford, Lloyd Davis, and Philippa Kelly. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press.
Delaney, Paul. 1969. British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
De Man, Paul. 1984. “Autobiography as De-Facement.” In The Rhetoric of
Romanticism, 67–81. New York: Columbia University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1980. ‘The Law of Genre’. In Critical Inquiry, 7.1: 55–81.
Lejeune, Philippe. 1989. ‘The Autobiographical Pact’. In On Autobiography, 3–30.
Edited by Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine M. Leary. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Marcus, Laura. 1994. Auto/biographical Discourses: Criticism, Theory, Practice.
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Mascuch, Michael. 1997. Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-
Identity in England, 1591–1791. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Oxford English Dictionary. ‘Autobiography’. Oxford English Dictionary. www.oed.com
(accessed 9 September 2015).
Saunders, Max. 2010. Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the
Forms of Modern Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Skura, Meredith Anne. 2008. Tudor Autobiography: Listening for Inwardness.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Spacks, Patricia. 1978. Imagining a Self. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Spearing, A. C. 2012. Medieval Autographies: The “I” of the Text. Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press.
Stauffer, Donald A. 1964. English Biography before 1700. New York: Russell and
Russell.
10 adam smyth

part 1
Autobiography before ‘autobiography’
(ca. 1300–1700)

chapter 2
Medieval life-writing
Types, encomia, exemplars, patterns
Barry Windeatt
And in case things which should be remembered perish with time and
vanish from the memory of those who are to come after us, I, seeing so
many evils, and the whole world placed, as it were, within the grasp of
the evil one – and being myself as if among the dead, waiting for death
to visit me – have put into writing truthfully all the things that I have
heard. And – lest the writing should perish with the writer, and the
work fail with the labourer – I leave parchment to continue this work,
if perchance any man survive, and any of the race of Adam escape this
pestilence and carry on the work which I have begun.
(Butler 1849, 37)
So writes John Clyn, a friar of Kilkenny, after the plague has left him all
alone, the sole survivor of his brethren, and soon to succumb himself. This
longing to leave behind at least some testimony that we ever existed may be
universal, but it is a powerful part of the various forms of self-
commemoration and self-fictionalisation through which an autobiogra-
phical impetus manifests itself across medieval English textual culture. It is
high time to challenge the orthodoxy that the Middle Ages are irrelevant to
understanding the evolution of those more recent autobiographical forms
which so satisfyingly mirror back to us the complexity and subtlety of our
modern selves. When the craft of life-writing was pursued so frequently
and so perceptively as it was in the Middle Ages, it would seem intrinsically
unlikely that – as is so often repeated – medieval authors regarded writing
about the self as a profitless vanity and rarely did so. Auto(bio)graphy in
medieval English texts is more an action than a form, an act of self-
assertion, only exceptionally expressed through any extended narrative,
which itself may appear discontinuous and bitty.1
But modes of auto(bio)
graphical activity can be identified as subsumed and implicit, bubbling up
across very different medieval genres, which poses the question whether
medieval representations of selves in more fragmented forms – interstitial,
13

implicit, in unnerving fusions of fact and self-fictionalisation – may not
offer their own compellingly unillusioned readings of how far the self may
be represented.
Constructing commemorations of the self might take many forms in
medieval culture. When John Hoo (d. 1492) paid for an inscription on the
exterior of the church at Hessett in Suffolk –
Prey for the sowles of John Hoo and Katrynne his wyf the qweche hath mad
y chapel aewery deyl, heyteynd y westry and batylmentyd y hele [who hath
made the chapel every bit, heightened the vestry and battlemented the aisle].
(Munro Cautley 1982, 295) –
he left an account of his life and charity as many other medieval benefactors
did. At an altogether grander level is the proud inscription in Latin
hexameters on Richard II’s tomb in Westminster Abbey:
Prudent and elegant, Richard the second by right, conquered by fate, lies
here depicted under this marble. He was truthful in discourse and full of
reason. Tall in body, he was prudent in mind as Homer. He favoured the
Church, he overthrew the proud and threw down whoever violated the royal
prerogative. He crushed heretics and laid low their friends. O merciful
Christ, to whom he was devoted, O Baptist, whom he venerated, may you
by your prayers save him. (Lindley 1997, 72)
This – ‘which we may presume Richard himself commissioned’ (Barron
1993, 19) – is a notable instance of an autobiographical self-inscription, in
which the qualities and achievements highlighted provide a revealing
insight into how this most self-absorbed king regarded himself.
To put together a book can hardly not be a revealing form of self-
inscription, as is witnessed by both the humblest and most accomplished
medieval English examples. It is possible to delineate a character at work
behind the selection of contents in some surviving medieval English
commonplace books, just as the sermon-diary of a busy prelate, with its
notes in the first person, was planned as a record of his diocesan activity,
showing him at work over twelve years (Gwynn 1937). The commonplace
book of John Colyn, a London mercer (in British Library MS Harley 2252),
witnesses to his concern with economic politics and commercial rights,
while the contents of the commonplace book of Robert Reynes, of Acle in
Norfolk, reveal its compiler to be a man of the rural middle class: essentially
conservative, especially in matters of faith; apolitical but with a strong sense
of community; mentally curious but uninterested in intellectual specula-
tion and above all, practical (Louis 1980). As such, it offers a snapshot of the
mindset of a fifteenth-century Englishman, his personality and way of life.
14 barry windeatt

The mindset of an altogether more accomplished fifteenth-century figure,
a doctor of theology and chancellor of Oxford University, is revealed in the
massive Liber Veritatum of Thomas Gascoigne, a hybrid of theological
dictionary with waspish biographical sketches of contemporary and past
English notables, often accompanied by autobiographical commentary. So
Gascoigne’s nostalgic admiration for Bishop Robert Grosseteste prompts
reflections into which Gascoigne insinuates a self-endorsement:
Things now are not as they were then. When Henry VI spoke to me at his
castle at Windsor and asked me ‘Dr Gascoigne, why aren’t you a bishop?’, I
replied to him, ‘My Lord, I’m telling you, the state of things in England
these days is such that if I wanted to make a pot of money, I’d rather be a
good shoemaker than the most learned academic in England’ – for I’d rather
that many good preachers of God’s word multiplied amongst the English
people than possess all the material goods of the richest man in England.
(Rogers 1881, 176–7)
This gossipy report is characteristic of how Gascoigne writes himself into
his historical analysis, as when his notes about seeing a manuscript of
Grosseteste at Oxford lead on within Gascoigne’s notebook to careful
provision for how this version of himself created for posterity will be
completed within his manuscript after his death:
And I saw this in the year 1445 AD and then wrote this. And in the year of
Jesus Christ one thousand four hundred and [space left for the date of
Gascoigne’s death] died Thomas Gascoigne, called to be a priest and doctor
of theology, born in the county of York in 1402, son and heir of Richard
Gascoigne, sometime lord of the manor of Hunslet in that same county.
(Bodleian Library, MS Lat. theol.e.33, ff. 40–1)
In writing other lives the bookish Gascoigne’s autobiographical impetus is
to commemorate himself, whereas in his Philobiblion (1344) Richard of
Bury writes with such captivating enthusiasm about his life-long mania for
book collecting that his account of this consuming passion of his life
becomes a version of that life (Thomas 1960, ch. viii). His prominent
career is mentioned only because of the opportunities it affords for book
collecting: people realise that the more customary bribes of gifts and gems
should be replaced in his case by ‘soiled tracts and battered codices,
gladsome alike to our eyes and heart’, and to please him monasteries
throw open their libraries, normally (he drily observes) the preserve of
mice and moths. Embassies abroad on the king’s business enable more
book collecting, and Richard writes a lover’s paean to Paris and its
opportunities for book lovers. In divulging how he chose his company
Medieval life-writing 15

and colleagues to ensure he was always surrounded by fellow book lovers –
while maintaining ‘in our different manors no small multitude of copyists,
binders, correctors, illuminators’ – Richard reveals something of the tone
and quality of his life and career. Yet the hunt for books also leads him into
exchanges with humble schoolmasters, in a confraternity of book lovers
which links him to his society at its broadest: ‘All of both sexes, and of every
rank and position, who had any kind of association with books, could most
easily open by their knocking the door of our heart’, and when he declares
with disarming fervor, ‘In books I find the dead as if they were alive’, he
might be describing how his own personality springs to life again for each
reader of his book.
Chaucer’s literary personality, his self-fictionalisations within his poems
as a somewhat anxious and deferential authorial persona, had a significant
posterity in licensing his successors to intrude themselves into their works,
as in the self-image as author projected by the fifteenth-century
Augustinian friar Osborn Bokenham. One version of his lives of female
saints is interspersed with chatty and gossipy passages which set his com-
positional activity in the context of requests for his writing received alike
from dear friends and grand patronesses. Bokenham appears comically
over- conscious about being middle aged, worried about how his works will
be received, and anxious to authorise his life of St Margaret through his
own experience of her shrine in Italy and her effective miracles (Serjeantson
1938, lines 1407–16, 5040, 41–2, 100–58). The recent discovery of another
manuscript without such personal interjections suggests the production of
different copies for known and unknown readerships, where some texts are
still couched as if communications from a writer personally familiar to his
readers. Bokenham’s is a self-characterisation as a writerly persona, endear-
ingly fussy, with mention of real places and some historical persons of his
acquaintance, but he is communicating more a stylisation of a manner of
life than a sustained and continuous autobiography.
Autobiographical self-expression in medieval texts may be disguised
from later readers by the genre ostensibly adopted by the text or given it
by later editors. It would seem likely that the remarkable ‘Life’ of the
recluse Christina of Markyate – describing so intimately such a hidden and
secret existence – was written with input from its redoutable subject
(Talbot 1959). What is usually termed Jocelyn of Brakelond’s ‘chronicle’
of Bury St Edmund’s Abbey reads more like a biography of one masterful
abbot, but it also reads as a personal diary-cum-history of its author’s
fluctuating and ambivalent feelings about Abbot Samson, and as such a
history of its writer’s own disappointments (Greenway and Sayers 1989). In
16 barry windeatt

his prison dialogue modelled on Boethius, Chaucer’s associate Thomas
Usk constructs a self by inscribing allusions to his own circumstances,
hence importing an implicitly autobiographical dimension (Shawver
2002). Implicit autobiography also characterises the untitled corpus of
English poems which Charles d’Orléans created as an independent version
of his collected poems in French. These English poems are designedly a
sequence, differing from the French series precisely because Charles strives
to thread a significantly more continuous dramatic unity through his
English poems, which cumulatively build an identity as a fictionalised
autobiography of a very courtly lover’s intently personal and inward
feelings (Arn 1994). The ‘I’ of the poems is identified proudly within the
text as Charles, Duke of Orleans, but the ladies for whom he longs so
passionately or grieves so intensely remain unidentified, so that although
few other authors writing in medieval English show more insight than
Charles into the human heart, or encode feeling more exquisitely, the
outcome remains more implicitly than directly autobiographical, a kind of
sublimated autobiography.
One of the key differences which makes Charles’s English poems into a
more sustained personal narrative is his introduction of the dream which
marks a turning point for the ‘I’ of the poems, and it is texts reporting
dreams and visions that present some of the most challenging mixtures of
literary convention with autobiographical composition. At a modest level
of writing, there survive such accounts as the vision of the other world in
1465 reported by Edmund Leversedge, of Frome in Somerset (Nijenhuis
1990), or the widower’s vision of his dead wife and children in 1492, which
is included in a Cheshire commonplace book (Youngs 1998). In such
reports the machinery and landscape of the vision tend to be of a piece
with other purgatorial visions, whereas the individualising details
of identity – Edmund’s obsessions as a fashion victim and his fondness
for kissing, or the unfaithful widower’s remorse at seeing his wife dressed in
her wedding-day outfit – bring conventionality and autobiographical
reference into the kind of encounters that are exploited by those such as
Langland or King James I of Scotland.
In Piers Plowman the person who narrates his dream is named Will, an
appropriate allegorical name for the dreamer but also the real name of the
poet, William Langland, who includes within his dream poem various
allusions to his actual circumstances, his wife and daughter, and – in an
especially autobiographical passage (C.5.1–104) – how his father and family
friends paid for his education until they died, leaving him, half-trained for a
clerical vocation, to shift for a living (Pearsall 2008). This coexistence of a

version of personal experience with a dream poem provides an enigmatic
interface between a particular identity and its imaginative exploration
through the surreal developments of the dream. Much of the dreamer’s
life, as he belatedly realises, has flashed by in the course of the poem, which
thus makes a fictionalised autobiography of a questing spirit part of its
restless continuum, although the degree of fictionality remains tantalisingly
indeterminate, as in some poems in the Chaucerian tradition. In the dream
poem The Kingis Quair, attributed to James I of Scotland, the dreamer’s
encounters with such goddesses as Venus, Minerva, and Fortune are part of
what appears a coded representation of the historical James’s love match with
Joan Beaufort, a relative of Henry IV, and his gaining of freedom and
resumption of kingship after long political imprisonment in England –
rather poignantly, with the hindsight that James I would soon be brutally
assassinated back in his homeland (Norton-Smith 1971). A stylised account of
courtship, written as if by a close reader of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, is part of
the same poem that also includes a salt-sprayed recollection of how the
young heir to the Scottish throne had been kidnapped on the high seas by
the English foe, while fleeing from enemies at home to exile in France. The
dream poem’s first-person narrative allows a stylish and allusive celebration of
a destiny realised, where autobiography and convention comment upon each
other and a degree of fictionalisation implicitly has its place in telling the self.
Telling about himself and his failings was something that one of the
most celebrated Englishmen of the later Middle Ages seems to have been
unable to resist in his prolific writings. Richard Rolle’s autobiographical
reflections, bubbling up as confessional asides in his spiritual treatises and
even in his biblical commentaries, recur to the theme of his attraction to
women, as in his Melos Amoris (Arnold 1957, 63–4). In his commentary on
the first verses of the Canticles he digresses to give an account, later
circulated separately in the Nominis Iesu Encomium, of how he was
tempted one night by an apparition of a beautiful young woman, whom
he already knew and knew loved him:
Scho laid hire beside me, and when that I felyd hir thare I dred that
scho sulde drawe me to ivell, and said that I would ryse and bless us in
the name of the Haly Trynytee, and sche strenyde me so stallworthely
that I had no mouthe to speke, ne no hande to styrre: and whene I sawe
that, I perceyvede well thare was na womane bot the devell in schappe
of a womane. (Perry 1866, 5)
Our hero has a humblingly narrow escape, from both himself and his own
weakness, just as in Incendium Amoris, his great treatise on spiritual longing
18 barry windeatt

and transcendence, he pauses to tell, against himself, the story of his
humbling rebuffs by four women:
There was a time when I was rebuked quite properly by three different
women. One rebuked me because in my eagerness to restrain the feminine
craze for dressy and suggestive clothes I inspected too closely their extra-
vagant ornamentation. She said I ought not to notice them enough to know
whether they were wearing horned head-dresses or not. I think she was right
to reprove me. Another rebuked me because I spoke of her great bosom as if
it pleased me. She said, ‘What business is it of yours whether it’s big or
small?’ She too was right. The third jokingly took me up when I appeared to
be going to touch her somewhat rudely – and possibly had already done so –
by saying, ‘Calm down, brother!’ . . . A fourth woman – with whom I was in
some way familiar – did not so much rebuke me as despise me when she said
‘You’re no more than a beautiful face and a lovely voice: you’ve done
nothing’. (Deanesly 1915, ch. 12, 178-9)
A crestfallen Rolle adds ruefully:
When I came to myself I thanked God for teaching me what was right
through their words . . . I’m not going to put myself in the wrong with
women from now on. (Ibid., ch. 12, 179)
Rolle’s significance for an account of medieval English life-writing is the
manner in which his writings of mystical counsel are framed with accounts
of his intensely personal experience, which are as beguilingly sensuous and
as warmly enthusiastic as the model of mystical experience that he is
encouraging. The unforgettably spontaneous opening of the Incendium
would buttonhole anyone’s attention with its personally felt immediacy,
inviting the reader to share in the experience it evokes:
I cannot tell you how surprised I was, the first time I felt my heart begin to
warm. It was real warmth too, not imaginary, and it felt as if it were actually
on fire. I was astonished at the way the heat surged up, and how this new
sensation brought great and unexpected comfort. I had to keep feeling my
breast to make sure there was no physical reason for it! But once I realized
that it came entirely from within . . . I was absolutely delighted, and wanted
my love to be even greater. ( Deanesly 1915, prologue, 145
In the Incendium the conviction of a personal calling and special divine
favour allow for an intense but dehistoricised projection in the text of a
self at prayer, where conventional chronology and development are
irrelevant. Rolle’s Incendium is one of the books which Margery Kempe
records by name as having been read to her in The Book of Margery

Kempe, which was evidently composed with some recollection of Rolle’s
construction of himself.2
The Book of Margery Kempe is often described as the first autobiography in
English, whereas the Revelations of Julian of Norwich are not usually con-
strued as autobiographical writing, yet both include autobiographical
accounts of a key moment of crisis, in which the vocation that underpins
the two women’s lives meets a challenge and overcomes it, as the very
existence of their books proves. For Julian, it is the moment of crisis that
she records when she has already seen fifteen of her sixteen revelations
(Windeatt 2015, ch. 66). Julian amuses a priest who visits her on her
supposed deathbed by telling him that she has been having hallucinations
and raving. But his face changes when Julian tells how she saw the crucifix
bleeding, and the priest’s reverence for what little she divulges to him causes
Julian an intense inner turmoil over her lack of faith in her revelations and
therefore in God. The existence of authentic shorter and longer versions of
Julian’s revelations witnesses to how that early crisis of doubt was overcome,
and to how Julian’s struggle to interpret initial revelation through subse-
quent meditation remained an ongoing challenge. The survival of two
versions, and the differences between them, enables readers to map devel-
opments in a mystic’s mind and art over the twenty years between 1373 and
1393 and probably longer. Developments between the two textual states
represent an archive of the stages in a developing spiritual autobiography,
albeit never written as such. Indeed, Julian goes to some lengths to excise
those few clues to the author’s identity that were originally in her short text:
deleting all reference to the author’s being a woman and to her mother being
present at Julian’s deathbed. Yet even as Julian’s meditation seeks to divest
itself of a particular identity, its record of a search for understanding
promotes such a sense of questing and discovery as to represent a kind of
implicit autobiography of the contemplative soul from that early moment of
doubt (‘For thus have I felt in myselfe’, ch. 41, 93).
Julian’s sole authorship of her Revelations is never seriously questioned,
whereas Kempe’s account of how her Book comes to be written down raises
questions for some about how far Kempe can be considered the author of
this writing of her life. For Kempe, a key moment of intense crisis is when a
friar’s hostile preaching turns many against her, amongst whom ‘the same
preyste was one that aftirward wrot this boke’ (Windeatt 2004, ch. 62),
although the story is partly told to recount how his faith is restored, as the
Book’s existence demonstrates. By her own account illiterate, Kempe must
rely on others to get her text written down, once she is convinced, when in
her sixties, that God wishes it to be written. Initially Kempe dictates a
20 barry windeatt

version of her book to a visiting Englishman who has been long resident in
Germany (possibly her son), but this proves to be illegible. After a four-year
delay, a priest – probably her confessor and long-term spiritual adviser –
rewrites the illegible first version by reading it over word for word in
Kempe’s presence as he writes, ‘sche sumtym helpyng where ony difficulte
was’. The priest possibly transcribed the Book much as a clerk in a legal
proceeding would tidy a witness’s spoken testimony into the third-person
discourse of a court record. If the priest had translated Kempe’s testimony
into Latin he could have exercised greater control, and the Book does not
read as if composed out of Kempe’s replies to the writer’s questions. In a
transcription process through collaborative conferral Kempe evidently
exercises a decisive role in determining the substance of what is written
‘at hom in hir chamber wyth hir writer’ and ‘ocupiid abowte the writing of
this tretys’. Based on this account, Kempe is no less the author of her book
just because she uses an amanuensis, who records her narrative in the third
person. In places the priest probably shaped the text more interventively:
some passages read as if recast into a more clerical discourse than Kempe
was likely to use, while some chapters (24, 25, 62) are apparently written
from the priest’s perspective, although these only underline how unclerkly
is the viewpoint from which the Book is generally written. Anachronistic
modern assumptions about sole authorship undervalue the intellectually
dominant role that Kempe’s account of the composition process attributes
to her, and overvalue the priest’s essentially secretarial contribution in
phrasing and tidying a text which would never have existed without the
life and character of the indomitable personality that animates its every
page. The Book of Margery Kempe is not the unedited transcript of an old
lady’s tape-recorded reminiscences. This earliest self-account by an
Englishwoman must be read in the knowledge that her words have been
mediated by a man, however supportive of her. Yet how vividly and
unstoppably her voice is heard, despite whatever editing: the voice of a
Norfolk housewife, mother, pilgrim and self-styled holy woman. The
contrast between the somewhat preachy tone in the proem and the rest
of the Book suggests how relatively superficial and unsystematic has been
any male clerical project to re-voice Kempe’s speech.
The Book of Margery Kempe is indeed the earliest account in English of a
life ostensibly authored by the subject of that life narrative, although
focussed so selectively that it constitutes a ‘Life’ and conforms only
partially to more recent conceptions of autobiography as a retrospective
narrative charting the development of a stable ‘I’. Yet rather than assessing
Kempe’s text by anachronistic comparisons, it is more revealing to let the

seeming strangenesses and occlusions in the Book establish the text’s nature
to us on its own terms. Kempe’s casualness about matters important in
later life-writing, and the idiosyncratic structure of her Book, are to be
celebrated as tokens of how she sees her inward life. The way in which the
Book does not match sustainedly with any single genre is mimetic of how
Kempe’s own way of life could never fit comfortably with established roles
and lifestyles. Saints’ lives, or medieval pilgrimage and other travel narra-
tives, are nothing like the actual texture of writing in the Book. For Kempe,
travel is a means to an end and of scant interest in itself: all that concerns
her is her spiritual destination and any obstacles to that. The Book often
gives a vivid sense of being a saint’s life in modern dress and domestic
circumstances – with the difference that martyrs are not usually in a
position to dictate their memoirs, nor is their sanctity such a point of
extended controversy and communal discord. These are the experiences
of a would-be saint, the uneasy hybrid of an autobiographical saint’s life or
autohagiography, not yet written from the posthumous retrospect of
accepted sanctity. Dictated by the aspiring saint during her lifetime, the
autohagiography cannot include either the saint’s heroic final martyrdom,
nor her posthumous cult and miracles. Even so, the Book does project a
powerful image of martyrdom, albeit not literally. Here the assaults and
tortures of a martyrdom have been updated into a middle-class housewife’s
endurance, for her convictions, of her society’s contemptuous humiliation
and character assassination. The climactic mutilations and humiliations of
martyred women like Saints Catherine or Margaret have been translated
into the barbs and rack of spiteful gossip, sneers, and accusations of
hypocrisy, played out in an unending martyrdom at the hands of her
community in everyday life.
Within its structure the Book conflates several narrative trajectories: an
account of conversion, followed eventually by a frenetic mid-life story of
her flight from domesticity and matrimony into a restless devotional life-
style, succeeded by a lengthy anticlimax of living at home again, in poor
health, and seemingly strapped for cash. As a conversion narrative, the Book
has nothing to report about childhood. The beginning, revealingly abrupt,
is with the marriage that is also an important ending – of the virginity
whose loss comes to seem to Kempe an abiding disadvantage to her
contemplative vocation. The Book then deals sketchily with the first twenty
years of her married life (actually nearly half the time span included within
the narrative), only concerned with experience that complements her later
vocation. Much of the Book focusses intently on the events of just five
hectic years (ca. 1413–ca. 1418), after Kempe negotiates with her husband an
22 barry windeatt

end to their sexual relations and embarks on her various pilgrimages
around England, to Jerusalem, Rome, Santiago, and in England again.
Back home in Lynn, the last twenty years of Kempe’s life allow for a
narrative of spiritual reflection as well as events. Such a trajectory has the
delayed flowering, the apparent lack of follow-through, and the lapse into
repetition which matches the unevenness of living and does not make for a
shapely narrative. Kempe’s life narrative is framed in turn by contempla-
tions of Christ’s life, with early chapters on contemplation of the Nativity
(chs. 6–7), an account of Kempe’s visits to the Holy Places near the middle
of her text and meditations prompted by the Holy Week observances near
the close.
The proem declares the Book’s aim to ‘schewen in party the levyng [life]’
of its subject, and this is a significant delimitation of scope. On various
occasions Kempe records, without further detail, how she confessed to a
priest her whole life ‘as ner as hir mende wold servyn hir, fro hir childhode
unto that owre’ (ch. 33), but her Book, however confessional she thought it,
comprises less than her whole life. Kempe’s Book seems uninterested in
what later readers might regard as the whole person and shows no ambition
to present anything other than that part of her life which is of spiritual
import as she sees it. Since Kempe has been assured of salvation by Christ
early in the Book she has nothing to prove by charting spiritual progress,
and, since outward history is largely irrelevant, occurrences need only be
located in relation to her inner story. Kempe is unconcerned to record
something of her lifespan from all its decades: her Book focusses on periods
of particularly intense activity and trying experience but is not concerned
to date them, and Kempe shows no sense of the felt time of her own years
passing, until those years suddenly catch up with her in the brief late sequel
she appends to her Book. Indeed, the Book is strikingly indifferent to
locating itself in historical time (except in the two dated prologues, perhaps
indicating further limits to the influence of her amanuensis). Kempe
explicitly notes that things are not written down in chronological order,
which she candidly admits she has forgotten, but nor does she elaborate on
what does order the materials. Events have significance not in themselves
but when read as signs and tokens of larger import. For Kempe it is enough
to record that a remembered incident occurred at a point in the liturgical
calendar – ‘on the Wednysday in Whitson-weke’ (ch. 44) – but the year is
never specified, perhaps not remembered and evidently not valued in itself.
On the other hand, the Book pays keen attention to time in recording the
duration of Kempe’s tribulations or how the passage of time proves her
right: here time is a token of value and precisely accounted for.

What Kempe feels herself divinely commanded to set down, as the Book’s
Prologue declares, is ‘hyr felyngys and revelacyons and the forme of her
levyng [i.e. living]’. Her Book aims less to chronicle a life than to commu-
nicate her way of living. As a contemplative, Kempe’s medium is not so
much visual as verbal, in prayerful dialogues with Christ, reported as if
verbatim in the present tense. What Kempe’s amanuensis records is her
characteristic mode of recollection through remembered exchanges of direct
speech, between Kempe and her contemporaries or between her and
members of the Trinity. Reported direct speech is the fabric and texture of
the Book (and the key to its continuing vitality), and for Kempe the point of
her book, as of her life, is that in it God speaks to her and she speaks to God.
By comparison with this, her difficulties with charges of illicit teaching and
supposed heresy – with disbelieving clerics and irritable archbishops, or the
disobliging mayor and lecherous steward of Leicester – are for Kempe only a
trying distraction. Her narrative of such encounters, recalled through
exchanges of dialogue, prompts comparisons with how The Testimony of
William Thorpe presents itself as an autobiographical account – presumably
embellishing any actual encounter – in which the Lollard Thorpe out-argues
an archbishop (Hudson 1993). Beyond this, the Book’s continuum of prayer-
ful colloquy with Christ reflects Kempe’s inward spiritual life, largely
indifferent to time and place, anxious, reiterative, and with the immediacy
of a stream-of-consciousness narrative. However stylised and formalised, it
represents states of mind, worry, and irresolution, never for themselves, but
as prompts for the resolutions that God gives her. Kempe’s inward dialogue
with God is necessarily contained within her interruptive and disputatious
outward dialogue with her generally disbelieving society, so that there
develops the strongest contrast between this imperfect, annoying outer
world and an inner world where, however uncertainly, assurance and endor-
sement may be sought.
Kempe’s Book recalls Kempe to life so powerfully as a presence and a
voice that modern response, although as divided as her contemporaries,
generally takes Kempe at her own valuation, determined to position the
Book at the start of English autobiographical writing. Kempe’s courage
moves readers to this, and the inconvenient honesty of her testimony (‘sche
wolde not for al this world sey otherwise than sche felt’, ch. 61). The Book’s
solemnly recorded narrative of spats, spite and put-downs can have a
disconcertingly Pooterish inconsequentiality. Yet here the self is being
presented through a collage of incidents, quarrels, and vindications, the-
matically associated and mimetic of the bitty unevenness of reiterated acts
of self-assertion. The Book is an astonishing exemplar of a view of the self
24 barry windeatt

found more widely across medieval English texts, which acknowledge the
self’s experience in this fallen world through writing that is as essentially
fragmented, discontinuous, and indeterminately fictionalised as Kempe’s
‘forme of her levyng’.
Notes
1. For discussions, see Porter Abbott 1988 and Spearing 2012.
2. Rolle’s influence is felt in Richard Methley’s autobiographical spiritual trea-
tises. For a day-by-day diary of graces received for two months in 1487, see
Hogg 1981.
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Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies.
Arnold, E. J. F., ed. 1957. The Melos Amoris of Richard Rolle of Hampole. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Barron, Caroline M. 1993. ‘Richard II: Image and Reality’. In Making and
Meaning: The Wilton Diptych, 13–19. Edited by Dillian Gordon London: The
National Gallery.
Butler, Richard, ed. 1849. Annals of Ireland. Dublin: The Irish Archaeological Society.
Deansly, Margaret, ed. 1915. Incendium Amoris. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Greenway, Diana, and Jane Sayers, trans. 1989. The Chronicle of the Abbey of Bury
St Edmunds. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gwynn, Aubrey, 1937. ‘The Sermon-Diary of Richard Fitzralph, Archbishop of
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Hogg, James, 1981. ‘A Mystical Diary: The Refectorium Salutis of Richard
Methley of Mount Grace Charterhouse’. Analecta Cartusiana 55.1: 208–38.
Hudson, Anne, ed. 1993. Two Wycliffite Texts. EETS, o.s. 301. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Lindley, P. 1997. ‘Absolutism and Regal Image in Ricardian Sculpture’. In The
Regal Image of Richard II and the Wilton Diptych, 62–74. Edited by D. Gordon,
L. Monnas and C. Elam. London: Harvey Miller.
Louis, Cameron, ed. 1980. The Commonplace Book of Robert Reynes of Acle. New
York: Garland.
Munro Cautley, H. 1982. Suffolk Churches and their Treasures. 5th edn.
Woodbridge: Boydell.
Nijenhuis, Wiesje Fimke., ed. 1990. The Vision of Edmund Leversedge. Nijmegen:
Katholieke Universiteit te Nijmegen.

Norton-Smith, John, ed. 1971. The Kingis Quair. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pearsall, Derek, ed. 2008. Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-Text.
Exeter: Exeter University Press.
Perry, George G., ed. 1866. English Prose Treatises of Richard Rolle of Hampole.
EETS, o.s. 20. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Porter Abbott, H. 1988. ‘Autobiography, Autography, Fiction: Groundwork for a
Taxonomy of Textual Categories’. New Literary History 19.2: 597–615.
Rogers, J. E. Thorold, ed. 1881. Loci e Libro Veritatum. Passages selected from
Gascoigne’s Theological Dictionary Illustrating the Condition of Church and
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Serjeantson, Mary S., ed. 1938. Osborn Bokenham: Legendys of Hooly Wummen.
EETS, o.s. 206. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Shawver, Gary W. (ed.). 2002. Thomas Usk: Testament of Love. Toronto: Toronto
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Spearing, A. C. 2012. Medieval Autographies: The ‘I’ of the Text. Notre Dame:
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Thomas, E. C., ed. and trans. 1960. Richard of Bury: ‘Philobiblion’. Rev. edn. by
M. Maclagan. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Windeatt, Barry, ed. 2004. The Book of Margery Kempe. Woodbridge: Boydell &
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Windeatt, Barry, ed. 2015. Julian of Norwich: Revelations of Divine Love. Oxford:
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26 barry windeatt

chapter 3
Autobiographical selves in the poetry of Chaucer,
Gower, Hoccleve, and Lydgate
David Matthews
Medieval culture was profoundly influenced by two great spiritual auto-
biographies inherited from late antiquity: Augustine’s Confessions and
Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. Late in the Middle Ages, their influ-
ence was undimmed: Geoffrey Chaucer translated Boethius into Middle
English in the fourteenth century, for example, and Augustine remained
very broadly influential. For many scholars today, the Confessions is the
origin of Western life-writing (see DiBattista and Wittman 2014, 5–6).1
Yet under this influence, the medieval period itself did not produce
many autobiographies as they are conventionally defined. Peter Abelard’s
Historia Calamitatum is generally thought to be one; Guibert of Nogent’s
Monodiae or Memoirs another (Fleming 2014). The Book of Margery Kempe
is also often said to be the first English autobiography, but this is a
complicated case, not least because Margery did not write the book herself
(for more, see the preceding chapter). Kempe’s book is known from a
single manuscript, while Guibert of Nogent’s work did not survive in any
manuscript. In all, the evidence is that there was little demand for or even
interest in what we call ‘autobiography’ in the Middle Ages. Hence, while a
recent account of autobiography like Linda Anderson’s might begin with
Augustine, it then leaps over the Middle Ages entirely to John Bunyan
(Anderson 2011).
Nevertheless, several late-medieval English literary writers appear to
present us with autobiographical fragments or moments and what appear
to be performances of self in their work. Such poems as the Divine Comedy
and the Canterbury Tales, as John V. Fleming puts it, ‘are narrated by
‘characters’ who are at once the poet and the poet’s invention’ (Fleming
2014, 43). We know from contemporary records that Geoffrey Chaucer
worked for several years as a controller of customs in the City of London, so
when we see the dreamer of the House of Fame named as ‘Geffrey’ and
described as spending his days on ‘rekenynges’ before coming home to sit
27

in front of ‘another book’ (that is, something other than accounts) until he
is dazed with his reading, it might appear that we have a fragment of the
Chaucerian real life.2
On the other hand, this particular moment occurs in
a dream and in the words of an eagle who is flying Chaucer to Fame’s
palace: a textual situation which frames the supposed ‘autobiographical’
moment and arguably compromises its claims to truth.
Chaucer’s fifteenth-century successors followed him in incorporating
themselves into their works and seem even more invested than he was in
the notion of writing the self. Thomas Hoccleve’s Compleinte and Dialogue
with a Friend are both first-person works which seem in many ways direct
and personal, with a speaker named ‘Thomas’ who is, like the real
Hoccleve, a clerk of the privy seal. The Testament of the prolific monk
John Lydgate seems similarly concerned with self-revelation, as Lydgate
looks back with candour on a misspent youth. All of these works seem
invested in self-revelation: Hoccleve’s as he relates the circumstances of a
serious depression which afflicted him, Lydgate’s as he surveys a dissolute
youth which continued even after he was professed as a monk.
Nevertheless, neither Hoccleve’s nor Lydgate’s text is immediately recog-
nisable as what we think of as autobiography. Very broadly speaking,
autobiography has become identified with first-person prose texts which
soberly recall past events and deliver some kind of narrative of development.
Hoccleve’s and Lydgate’s texts are poems, and in Lydgate’s case, it is a
particularly highly wrought and elaborate poem. Hoccleve not only writes
in poetic form but seems to be in the thick of the things he is narrating; his
narrative is not at all developmental but prone to dart off in unexpected
directions. Of these features, formal complexity does not on its own make
autobiography impossible: it probably came more naturally to Hoccleve to
write his narrative in rhyme royal stanzas than it would have done to write in
prose. But such complexity does suggest that life-writing and self-revelation
were not necessarily the primary aims of these writers, raising the possibility
that literary artifice was of at least as much interest to them. The modern
reader is therefore entitled to wonder how far such artifice might have
compromised their works’ claims to autobiographical truth.
It has recently been proposed that the category of autobiography is
altogether a mistaken one to use in the medieval context. A. C. Spearing
states that a great deal of medieval writing about the self is rather what he
dubs ‘autography’, a form of writing which in English suddenly became
popular in the fourteenth century. Autography, Spearing writes, is differ-
ent from what is now called autobiography ‘in not being based on a claim
to any systematic relation to documentable truth; it is first-person writing
28 david matthews

in which there is no implied assertion that the first person either does or
does not correspond to a real-life individual’ (Spearing 2012, 7). Spearing’s
contention is that a vast amount of criticism of the works of Chaucer and
other English writers is mistaken in seeing the use of the first person as
autobiographically expressive of the poet.
Making a somewhat different argument, Isabel Davis points out that
whereas modern biography and autobiography share conventions,
medieval first-person composition is quite different from biography.
She suggests that ‘medieval “autobiographers” dwelt only on those bits
that were thought to be important, leaving aside the story-arc provided
by the life-cycle’ (Davis 2009, 850). In a rather different conclusion
from Spearing’s, Davis does not suggest that there is therefore no
autobiographical writing in the Middle Ages. She proposes that ‘the
idiosyncrasy of medieval authorial representations – regardless of
whether they can be legitimately termed “autobiographies” – makes
them more than just failed early attempts at autobiography and offers
vital evidence of how the self was thought to be constituted in the
medieval past’ (849).
In this chapter, I survey the presentation of self in the works of late
medieval literary writers. As is already suggested above, there is reason for
scepticism about their autobiographical intentions. But what can be said
about the ways in which such writers might have entwined life-writing into
their larger literary projects?
The fourteenth-century ‘I’: the Harley Lyrics
to Geoffrey Chaucer
In fourteenth-century English writing, the first-person pronoun can seem
entirely generic. The longing lovers of some of the Harley Lyrics written
down in the 1340s, for example, could be voiced by anyone, and there is
little sense that any specific individual was trying to leave his mark with
these poems. Other writers, however, did apparently wish to record their
names for posterity. Adam Davy, the avowed author of a dream vision
about King Edward II composed around 1307, is one of these; Laurence
Minot, who wrote a series of poems about Edward III’s wars around the
middle of the century, is another. We have no documentary evidence of
the existence of either of these poets; in theory, they could be fictitious,
the names invented for the occasion of their verse. There is no particular
reason to think this, however, and it is possible that two men named
Davy and Minot were sufficiently moved by contemporary events (and
Autobiographical selves in the poetry 29

perhaps by the possibility of currying favour with their kings) to try their
hands at verse.
Whatever the truth of the matter, these poems do look like evidence for
an increasing tendency in the fourteenth century for English writers to
want to leave traces of their personae in their verse – even while, around the
same time, the Harley lyricist represents the typical medieval fashion of
effacing his identity in his writing. Spearing has noted that what he calls
autography suddenly becomes widespread in English in the later four-
teenth century and he relates this to the French form popular in the
thirteenth century, the dit (Spearing 2012, 8). This affects such urban
poetry as Chaucer’s, emanating from a place close to court. But it may
also be that in English this move away from the generic, lyric ‘I’ to a
personified speaker was a more widespread tendency.
It is clear that Geoffrey Chaucer, at the end of the century, inherited a
sense that the playful portrayal of himself in his work was a viable poetic
strategy. In The Book of the Duchess, a dream vision usually assumed to be a
very early work, readers are left to think that the speaking ‘I’ is a repre-
sentation of Chaucer himself. This is what makes sense of the fact that the
subject of the complaint, the Man in Black, represents Chaucer’s real-life
patron, John of Gaunt. In The House of Fame mentioned above, a further
step is taken when the eagle addresses the dreamer as ‘Geffrey’, apparently
clinching the link with the real author. From The Book of the Duchess
onward, this poet persona is roughly consistent: he is a little naive, not a
doer or a lover himself, but rather a poetic servant of love. In the Prologue to
The Legend of Good Women he is identified as a poet when the queen,
Alceste, defends him before a wrathful Cupid: ‘Al be hit that he kan nat wel
endite’, she says of the dreamer, ‘Yet hath he maked lewed folk delyte / To
serve yow, in preysinge of your name’ (Legend of Good Women, F 414–6).
Having told Cupid that Chaucer is not much of a poet, Alceste goes on to
list a comprehensive canon of his works, so this is an ironic moment in
which poetic authority is disavowed at the same time as it is claimed.
Chaucer’s image as a somewhat awkward and diffident figure is extended
in what was probably his next major work after the Legend: the Canterbury
Tales. Where the prologue to the Legend is a dream vision set in an
allegorical landscape, the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales looks
like realism, with its fourteenth-century setting in Southwark, where
Chaucer portrays himself as falling in with a group of pilgrims in the
Tabard Inn. Later called upon to tell a tale on the pilgrimage by its Host,
Chaucer is famously ridiculed as a ‘popet’ or doll-like figure with an
‘elvyssh’, otherworldly look on his face. Chaucer then launches on his
30 david matthews

doggerel tail-rhyme burlesque, the Tale of Sir Thopas, which is ultimately
cut short by a disgusted host, who notoriously says of Chaucer’s effort that
it is not worth a ‘toord’ (Canterbury Tales, VII.701, 703, 930).
This image of a slightly hapless figure is consistent with Chaucer’s earlier
self-portrayals. But, of course, it is at odds with the somewhat more assured
voice of Chaucer elsewhere, as narrator in such passages as the introduction
to the tale of the Miller. And it cannot but underline a distance between
this Chaucer, a character on the pilgrimage, who says that this is the best
poetry he is capable of, and the Chaucer who writes the Canterbury Tales
and is manifestly capable of more. But there is no way of realistically
resolving the metafictional play at work here, because Thopas is both a
piece of ‘drasty’ doggerel and a performance of comic genius. Geoffrey
Chaucer is a short, fat ‘popet’ but also a commanding poet. To portray
oneself in such an ironic mode suggests a certain confidence in one’s own
abilities. Nevertheless, the stance taken may also betray a real diffidence
about the status of English poetry in the period, a sense that however well
Chaucer thought he could write, a joke could certainly be made about the
project of making verse in English for ‘lewed folk’. If that possible anxiety
hovers over the project then the real author, Chaucer, and his fictional
creation, the pilgrim Chaucer, are perhaps not so far from one another as
criticism has often maintained.
The opacities are intensified by Chaucer’s so-called Retraction, which
stands after the Parson’s Tale and ends the Canterbury Tales in twenty-
eight of the manuscripts as well as Caxton’s first printed edition of the
text. In this short prose passage Chaucer disavows many of his works,
specifically ‘my translacions and enditynges of worldly vanitees’, which
include those Canterbury tales which ‘sownen into synne’ (X.1085–6). The
Retraction may well be a genuine disavowal, presenting the ‘real’ Chaucer,
now turning his thoughts unironically, like any late medieval Christian, to
judgement. It has been much discussed, with some past readers refusing to
accept it at all; at different times it has been explained away as a monastic
interpolation, or to be understood as the voice of the immediately preceding
speaker, the Parson, rather than of Chaucer. Still another explanation is that
it is the voice of ‘Chaucer the pilgrim’, and therefore as fictional as Thopas.
The Retraction can be usefully thought of in relation to the Prologue
of the Legend of Good Women. The latter is an enabling fiction (leading
to the commission of the legends) while the Retraction is a concluding
text (showing that the plan announced in the General Prologue has
been changed and that the performance is over). But they share the
characteristic that they are very concerned with Chaucer as author and,
Autobiographical selves in the poetry 31

A History Of English Autobiography (Cambridge University Press, 2016) -- Uncorrected Proofs

A History Of English Autobiography (Cambridge University Press, 2016) -- Uncorrected Proofs

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A History Of English Autobiography (Cambridge University Press, 2016) -- Uncorrected Proofs