Life Writing

Life writing flourished in the nineteenth century. Defined here as a personal narrative that meaningfully recounts the events and experiences of an individual life or lives, it was mainly non-fictional, encompassing autobiography, biography, memoir, diary, and letters, extending to miscellaneous formats, such as personal prefaces, poems, essays, and autobiographical novels. Following an introductory overview, the essay is divided into four sections: Biography, Autobiography, Diaries, and Letters, each focusing on key nineteenth-century figures within a broader contextualization of timeframe, themes, and critical issues. Given the inevitable controversies surrounding the personal revelations of life writing, featured authors include the Carlyles, Harriet Martineau, John Ruskin, Margaret Oliphant, and John Stuart Mill; but the essay also shows how the flexible format of life writing gave a voice to women and working-class authors, besides encompassing subgenres such as reported interviews and childhood autobiography.

Introduction

Life writing is best defined as any form of non-fictional writing that narrates the events and experiences of an individual life or set of lives. Taken in its broadest sense, this encompasses autobiography, biography, memoir, diary, and letters, but may extend to miscellaneous formats, such as personal prefaces, poems, essays, or autobiographical novels. While its history can be backdated to ancient times, in Britain the nineteenth century was undoubtedly its heyday. During the period 1770–1914 life writing not only flourished, but expanded its range, developed new techniques, and was widely reviewed in the leading periodicals. From having been the preserve of male authors celebrating successful public lives, it increasingly appealed to women recounting both their professional and personal experiences, including their childhoods. The genre was sufficiently broad and flexible to accommodate everything from narratives of whole lives to hybrid memoirs mixing quoted correspondence and diary entries with retrospective analysis.

The academic study of life writing, now a thriving category of nineteenth-century studies, was significantly boosted by the development of a specialist critical industry, initiated largely in France and the United States. Beginning with Wayne Shumaker’s (1954) English Autobiography: Its Emergence, Materials, and Form, and Georges Gusdorf’s essay ‘Conditions and Limits of Autobiography’, the critical field broadened to include women’s autobiography, and many other forms of life writing, including prosopography (collective biographies). Key scholars in the field of nineteenth-century life writing include David Amigoni, Juliette Atkinson, Trev Broughton, and Linda H. Peterson. The most comprehensive reference work remains the Encyclopedia of Life Writing, edited by Margaretta Jolly (2001) who also edited the online Oxford Bibliography on Biography and Autobiography (2012). Valerie Sanders edited the Oxford Bibliography on Life Writing (revised 2023).

For ease of access, this essay is divided into sections on Biography, Autobiography, Diaries, and Letters. Each section begins with a brief overview of the subgenre, followed by discussion of selected examples.

Biography

‘Biography’ means ‘life writing,’ and in declaring that ‘Biography is the key to history’ Edwin Paxton Hood (1820–85) spoke for many of his generation in seeing every life as meaningfully didactic (Hood 1852, 11, in Sanders 2022, 94). Defined as the narrating of one person’s life by another, biography is, like autobiography, an ancient form that can be traced back to Biblical and classical narratives, though the Life, Times and Writings of Thomas Fuller (1661), author of History of the Worthies of England (1662) is often cited as the first modern example. Ideally, biography specialized in exemplary lives, designed to inspire readers with narratives of achievement and virtuous behaviour, but biography also examined personality and identified flaws as well as strengths. Monumental examples preceding the Victorian period were Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) and John Gibson Lockhart’s Life of Sir Walter Scott (1837–38), but Virginia Woolf was not alone in proclaiming the nineteenth century the age of biography. ‘Only in the nineteenth century,’ Woolf wrote in 1939, ‘was biography fully grown and hugely prolific’ (Woolf 1939/1967, 221). Equally, she notes, unlike novelists, who were free to write what they wanted, ‘the art of biography is the most restricted of all the arts’ (Woolf 1939/1967, 221). By the end of the nineteenth century many authors were questioning the traditional forms of biography and experimenting with less reverential ways of commemorating the lives of the great.

What most restricts biography, in Woolf’s opinion, is the intervention of surviving family members with a vested interest in preserving the subject’s reputation. Sir Edmund Gosse, in his essay ‘The Custom of Biography’, similarly cited ‘The Widow’ as ‘the worst of all the diseases of biography’(Gosse 1901, 11) because of her insistence on suppressing all evidence of flaws or oddities in her husband’s life. He also objected to the sheer bulk of Britain’s ‘big-biography habit,’ declaring that we ‘bury our dead under the monstrous catafalque of two volumes’ (Gosse 1901, 195). Having first done this himself with his traditional Life of Philip Henry Gosse (1890), Gosse, in Father and Son (1907), made a point of writing a very different kind of biography. Not only was the dual portrait brief, but also outspoken, making no attempt to conceal the absurdities of the way he had been raised by his Plymouth Brethren parents.

The most significant literary biographies of the period include Elizabeth Gaskell’s (1857) The Life of Charlotte Brontë, John Cross’s (1883/2010), George Eliot’s Life As Related in her Letters and Journals, John Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens (1872–4), and J.A. Froude’s (1882),Thomas Carlyle: A History of the First Forty Years of His Life. Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë stands out as the best-known nineteenth-century biography written by one female novelist about another. Having planned only to write personal recollections, Gaskell was ‘very much afraid of not doing it as it ought to be done; distinct and delicate and thoroughly well’ (Chapple and Pollard 1966, 360). As she admitted, ‘I never did write a biography, and I don’t exactly know how to set about it; you see you have to be accurate and keep to facts; a most difficult thing for a writer of fiction.’ She also observed that the style ‘was a bugbear. It must be grander and more correct, I am afraid’ (Gaskell in Uglow 1999, 397). It is now acknowledged that in the course of stressing the Brontë sisters’ originality she grossly exaggerated the cultural limitations of Haworth as their home environment. Indeed, each of the great mid-Victorian biographies cited above may be said to have suffered from the constraints of contemporary expectations. John Cross, to whom George Eliot was briefly married for the last year of her life, relied heavily on Eliot’s own correspondence to provide his narrative. He states in his ‘Preface’ that her Life had thus ‘been allowed to write itself’ (Cross 1885/2010, I, 5). For his ‘Introductory Sketch of Childhood’, however, where there were few relevant letters to cite, he declares himself indebted to Eliot’s brother Isaac Evans for his reminiscences, though he also draws on Eliot’s (1879) own quasi-autobiographical Impressions of Theophrastus Such, and a general reconstruction of ‘what the England was upon which this observant child opened her eyes’ (Cross 1885/2010, 1, 15). As Cross’s Preface indicates, for the Victorians there was a thin line between the writing of biography and autobiography, and he challenges the reader to accept at best a hybrid format: a biography by one author heavily dependent on the self-written reminiscences of its subject. In the event, Eliot, who regarded biographies as ‘a disease of English literature’ (Letters VII, 230), became the subject of what is often seen as a failed experiment in life writing.

Equally problematic, though in a different way, was Dickens’s biography. John Forster, as a close friend, was well equipped to include personal reminiscences and anecdotes in his three-volume biography (Forster 1872–4), but it was jokingly referred to at the time as ‘The Autobiography of John Forster with Recollections of Charles Dickens’ (Schlicke 1999, 248). Dickens had prepared his own ‘Autobiographical Fragment’, which stresses his misery at being sent to work at Warren’s Blacking Factory when he should have been at school. While Forster finds space for this in his own first volume, he faced far more difficult challenges in writing about Dickens’s separation from his wife Catherine (whom Forster had liked), and adopted what Elisabeth Gitter calls a policy of ‘partial disclosure, a rhetoric of reticence’ (Gitter 1996, 128). About Dickens’ affair with the actress Ellen Ternan, Forster remains silent, but it was a different kind of silence from Gaskell’s tactful handling of Mr Brontë’s opposition to his curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls’ courtship of his last remaining child, Charlotte, and their subsequent marriage. ‘Henceforward,’ Gaskell announces after briefly describing the wedding and honeymoon tour of Ireland, ‘the sacred doors of home are closed upon her married life’ (Gaskell 1857/1997).

Not so James Anthony Froude’s (1882)four-volume biography of Thomas Carlyle, the narration of whose troubled marriage to Jane Welsh became its most challenging episode. Carlyle had himself written an essay on ‘Biography’ (Carlyle 1832) which extolled the genre as an art form allowing readers to see the world as another person does. Biography, in his view, was ‘almost the one thing needful’ (Carlyle 1832, 254) and History and Literature ‘so many mimic Biographies’ (Carlyle 1832, 255); yet the only good English biography, he insisted (because authentic and truthful) was Boswell’s (1791) Life of Samuel Johnson. Although Carlyle trusted Froude to give a fair account of his life, he remained unenthusiastic about the project, and according to Froude’s preface would have preferred to have no biography at all. Their discussion of the project, delicately mooted, highlights both their concerns. Twenty years later, in 1903, Froude was still uncomfortable with the ethics of addressing the Carlyles’ relationship, writing in a journal article: ‘It was all left to my discretion, but how was my discretion to be exercised?’ (Sanders 2022, 277). The Froude-Carlyle case is significant in that it exemplifies a growing anxiety around the biographical representation of celebrities’ personal lives. As Froude indicates, if the troubled nature of a marriage was already known, a sympathetic biographer could hardly ignore it. Indeed, it would be his duty to ensure the details were accurately presented.

Perhaps the two most important developments in the field of late nineteenth/early twentieth-century biography were The Dictionary of National Biography (the DNB), and Lytton Strachey’s (1918/1986) debunking collection of biographical essays, Eminent Victorians. Launched in 1885 by the publisher George Smith, under the editorship of Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, the purpose of the DNB was to provide articles on all eminent Britons, written by contributors who themselves were reputable authors. Sixty-three volumes were published by 1900, and as a record of over 60,000 lives, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is now online and regularly updated. For Strachey, however, the notion of biographical eminence needed to be forcefully challenged. Strachey felt it was not the business of the biographer to deliver hefty tomes of adulation, but to ‘lay bare the facts of the case, as he understands them’ (Strachey 1918/1986, 10). Taking the four examples of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon, Strachey exposed not just their moral and psychological weaknesses, but also their hypocrisies. As far as the real Florence Nightingale was concerned, for example, he insisted ‘there was more that was interesting than in the legendary one; but there was also less that was agreeable’ (Strachey 1918/1986, 111). Even the Almighty became for her ‘a glorified sanitary engineer’ and ‘in some of her speculations she seems hardly to distinguish between the Deity and the Drains’ (Strachey 1918/1986, 154). This is a new way of writing biography, which, while not underestimating the value of Nightingale’s nursing reforms, makes witticisms at her expense.

Autobiography

While biography may have been a popular genre in the nineteenth century, Thomas Carlyle aptly referred, in Sartor Resartus, to ‘these Autobiographical times of ours’ (Carlyle 1834/1973:71). As a form of life writing, autobiography (or self-writing) dates back to Saint Augustine’s Confessions (c.AD 398–400), though its heyday, following rapid developments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was in the nineteenth century. Simply defined, autobiography is the story of a life narrated by the individual who lived it. The first usage of the term is often attributed to the poet Robert Southey in 1809, but an earlier claimant is William Taylor, who in a 1797 review for the Monthly Review, while disliking the hybrid word ‘self-biography’, worried that the alternative, ‘autobiography’, ‘would have seemed pedantic’ (Taylor 1797, 375). While Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s (1782) Confessions is commonly cited as the first significant autobiography of the modern age, the genre remained difficult to define and delimit, not least because celebrating public recognition alongside sensitive disclosure of personal feelings was difficult to balance. The philosopher David Hume (1711–76), wrote one of the shortest, claiming that ‘It is difficult for a man to speak long of himself without vanity’ (Hume 1777, 1). This remained a particular concern for women, whose autobiographies waited longer to be added to the canon. The key male-authored autobiographies of the nineteenth century include John Stuart Mill’s (1873/1971), Anthony Trollope’s (1883), John Newman’s (1864/1962) Apologia pro Vita Sua, and John Ruskin’s (1885–9/2012) Praeterita. That said, there was no standard format, and these examples differ significantly from one another: Ruskin’s reminiscences of his parents and childhood being only loosely chronological and serialised over many years, while both Newman’s and Mill’s focus on their professional lives and say little about their families. Praeterita (meaning ‘Things gone by’; 28 parts), subtitled ‘Outlines of scenes and thoughts perhaps worthy of memory in my past life’, adopts an experimental form, each chapter initially associated with a significant place, but pursuing digressive memories and backtracking to fill gaps, sometimes supported by diary entries. There is a bookish self-consciousness here about writing that we also find in the Brontë juvenilia; yet although Ruskin claims to have written ‘frankly, garrulously, and at ease,’ speaking of what it gives him ‘joy to remember’ (Ruskin 1885–9/2012, 5), Elizabeth K Helsinger calls it ‘a strangely self-destructive autobiography,’ evidently ‘written by a man who did not like himself’ (Helsinger 1979, 87).

It was common to voice a sense of obligation to write an autobiography, whether in self-defence, or (more often) to inform readers of a significant contribution to public life or their intellectual and religious development. Newman, for example, perhaps the most famous English Catholic convert of his generation, admitted that while it was a ‘great trial’ to write, he felt compelled to leave a record of his religious opinions (Newman 1864/1982, 1). A secular equivalent, also driven by the need for a meaningful set of beliefs, is John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography of 1873. His father, James Mill, is presented as the only significant figure from his childhood, but under his intensive tutelage, his son confesses to experiencing a year-long mental breakdown at the age of 20. Acknowledging that even if all the social reforms he had been working towards were to be realized, he would not feel any happiness, he confesses: ‘At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down’ (Mill 1873/1971: 81). The rawness of this confession remains striking; still more, perhaps, his recovery through reading the quiet, contemplative poetry of Wordsworth, having failed with Byron, whose weariness with life’s pleasures, he felt, too much resembled his own.

For women, autobiography, though appealing, was hedged about with self-doubt in the context of assumed social disapproval. As Linda Anderson argues, the pervasive and ‘slippery’, even slightly disreputable, nature of the genre has generated a ‘need to control and contain it within disciplinary boundaries’ (Anderson 2001, 2). Debates around intention and purpose were rife, along with pressure to provide an objective analysis of individual achievement. Autobiography was also meant to promote ‘a view of the subject as universal’ (Anderson 2001, 3), which immediately highlighted the contradictions of writing from a ‘marginal’ standpoint. Women especially were meant to avoid drawing attention to their achievements or criticizing others in this most public of confessional and analytical formats. For both sexes, one way of managing the immodesty of published self-analysis was through a hybrid compilation of different forms of life writing, such as memoirs, reminiscences, and diary extracts, mediated by a trusted editor, often a family member. The vogue for childhood autobiography, which provided a safe space to explore self-development, was especially prominent in women writers such as Charlotte Mary Yonge (1823–1901), Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849–1924), Anne Thackeray Ritchie (1837–1919), and E. Nesbit (1858–1924), whose reminiscences recalled extremes of emotion triggered by loneliness, difficult relationships, beautiful landscapes, nightmares, and religious indoctrination. Lorna Martens (2022), who read around 170 examples of women’s childhood autobiographies written over 120 years, affirms that Burnett’s text remained influential because of the way it had depersonalized, by referring to herself as ‘the Small Person,’ what might otherwise have been an overly emotional narrative.

Arguably, one of the most vivid nineteenth-century autobiographies was Harriet Martineau’s, written in 1855, but published posthumously in 1877. Martineau was unapologetic about the value of writing her autobiography, having felt, from her ‘youth upwards,’ that it was one of the ‘duties’ of her life to do so (Martineau 1877/2007, 34). This view was further validated by two other factors: her decision to ‘interdict’ the publication of her letters, and the realization that her life had become ‘a somewhat remarkable one’ (Martineau 1877/2007, 34). What most shocked its first readers was its sheer outspokenness about her childhood. Growing up in a prominent middle-class Norwich Unitarian family of eight children, Martineau (1802–76), best remembered as a populariser of political economy, journalist, and early sociologist, openly criticized her family’s ‘taking down’ system of child management, designed to regulate undisciplined behaviour (Martineau 1877/2007, 46). It would have been difficult for her to write about her efforts to launch her career without specifying her emotional suffering at being misunderstood and under-appreciated by her family, especially her mother, but as a gripping account of her meteoric rise to public prominence in 1832 with her Illustrations of Political Economy, her narrative reveals both the deep-seated prejudices and the extraordinary opportunities she experienced as a young female author.

At the other end of the spectrum is the prolific novelist, Margaret Oliphant (1828–1897), whose account of her own life (published posthumously in 1899), begins with several false starts as she tries to identify its purpose. Unlike Martineau, who never married, Oliphant’s life was punctuated by the deaths of her husband and children. At times she is nakedly open about her grief – ‘The hardest moment in my present sad life is the morning, when I must wake up and begin the dreary world again’ (Oliphant 1899/2002, 38) – and she rarely talks in detail about her writing. The loss of all her six children, including two sons in their thirties, overrides all sense of her achievements as both novelist and reviewer for Blackwood’s and other prestigious journals.

Working-class autobiography also flourished in this period, ranging from the early publications of Anti-Corn-Law activists, such as Ebenezer Elliott and Samuel Bamford, to the many examples of work-related reminiscences anthologized by John Burnett and David Vincent, who in 1984 also published the first volume of their annotated critical bibliography The Autobiography of the Working Class covering the years 1790–1900. Burnett notes in his anthology Useful Toil his surprise at how uncomplaining the authors were about conditions that ‘to the modern reader seem brutal, degrading and almost unimaginable’ (Burnett 1984, 14), though James R. Simmons and Janice Carlisle (2007), whose anthology of four Factory Lives includes contemporary documents and perspectives on the self-writing of their subjects, show how some authors directly appealed to politicians. Of these, James Myles (1850), author of Chapters in the Life of a Dundee Factory Boy as Autobiography, dedicated his work to Richard Oastler, a Tory Radical who led the movement for factory reform. After reading what he calls a ‘frivolous “Autobiography”’ of fashionable life, and finding it strangely ‘pleasing,’ Myles told himself ‘“after all, every man’s life is perhaps worth writing, if he had the ability to do it”’ (Simmons and Carlisle 2007, 229). It was this ‘democratic’ element of autobiography, and its seeming naturalness, that prompted writers from a wide range of occupations and backgrounds to narrate their experiences. If they could, in the process, draw attention to social ills, so much the better. Oral autobiographies, meanwhile, were collected by Henry Mayhew (1851) in his London Labour and the London Poor. Subtitled ‘The condition and earnings of those that will work, cannot work, and will not work’, Mayhew’s apparently verbatim interviews gave prominence to London street-traders who talked freely about the realities of their daily lives. Many function as mini-autobiographies: for example the eight-year-old Watercress Girl, who tells her story backwards, having been on the streets ‘a twelvemonth,’ previously caring for her aunt’s baby, learning needlework from her mother in the fur trade, and going to school (Mayhew 1851, 157).

At its best, nineteenth-century autobiography, like the autobiographical fictions of the period (such as David Copperfield and Jane Eyre), captures the fluctuations of human feeling in moments of self-realization and understanding. While having relatively little to say about children, husbands, and wives, most Victorian autobiographies describe their authors’ often problematic education, strong sense of self, and feeling of uniqueness or difference. Their alternative inner life, often suppressed when they were growing up, while not always shared in full, was widely acknowledged.

Diaries

Many diarists of the period might have agreed with Ruskin’s opinion that ‘It is a great bore to keep a diary but a great delight to have kept one’ (Diaries, 1.129) .A hybrid mode, sufficiently flexible to vary regular entries with passages of dialogue, memoranda, poetry, illustrations, or essays, many Victorian diaries also acted as sources for subsequent autobiographies. While some authors were lifelong diarists, others kept diaries briefly for a specific purpose. Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Darwin both began diaries to record the first months of a new baby, while for Emily and Anne Brontë, their five sets of brief, shared diary papers (1834–45) mark moments of personal stocktaking, juxtaposing mundane household activities at Haworth Parsonage with the exotic affairs of their imaginary kingdom of Gondal. More extensive diaries were kept by John Ruskin and Beatrice Webb, both social observers undergoing inner turmoil and uncertainty. While Beatrice Webb (1858–1943) begins her diary in 1873 with a family visit to America, she was also searching for a serious purpose in her life, and examining her religious belief. John Ruskin’s diaries, begun in 1830, and continued intermittently over the next 50 years until 1887, served numerous purposes, from travel journal to notebook reflecting his interest in geology, architecture, art, and landscape, and like many nineteenth-century diarists he rebuked himself for not accomplishing enough in the day. An entry for April Fool’s Day 1844 records: ‘I made a proper fool of myself today at the Geological society, trying to draw some mountains on a large scale, and had no notion of the difficulty’ (Evans and Whitehouse 1956–1959, 271). Many of the diaries have since been lost, including a so-called ‘Book of Pain’ reserved for the recording of feelings (Dubois 2015, 217), and overall they serve multiple purposes in capturing responses to his many external interests as well as his personal development. The broken and chaotic entries of the Brantwood Diary, begun in 1876, reflect the mental breakdown that affected the rest of his life. An entry for July 1883, for example, recalls ‘a frightful dream of being pursued by a centipede serpent,’ which, when confronted, ‘changed into a small dog, which I caught, and was strangling, when I woke all jaded and fevered’ (Viljoen 1971, 324).

Not all nineteenth-century diaries are as extreme as Ruskin’s; many indeed are more akin to personal memoranda, and they provided their authors with opportunities not just to build a record of their lives but to explore possible actions, make decisions, and take themselves in hand. Within them we see an interplay between self-discipline and free association, rebellion and conformity. Lawyer and social host Henry Crabb Robinson (1775–1867), used his Diary, Reminiscences and Correspondence, published posthumously in 1869, to reproduce conversation with famous contemporaries, while Arthur Munby (1828–1910) recorded his observations of working-class women, including his eventual wife, Hannah Cullwick (1833–1909), whom he instructed to keep her own diary. George Eliot, by contrast, kept diaries between 1854 and 1861 for specific journeys with her partner, George Henry Lewes, beginning with their elopement to Weimar in 1854 where they travelled happily as an unmarried couple for nearly four months. The diary describes their walks, sightseeing, and visits to galleries as well as some socializing, including with the pianist and composer Franz Liszt, but also records all the irritations of travel. A journey to Ilfracombe two years later notes a three-hour wait to change trains at Bristol’s ‘dirty Railway station,’ after which they set out with a ‘hamper of tall glass jars’ to collect specimens of sea life (Eliot 2000, 262). Eliot’s journals thus juxtapose realistic detail with scientific observation and the fluctuations of a day’s emotions, influenced as they are by uplifting scenery and personal frustration.

Letters

From the Queen to her lowliest literate subject, the Victorians were great letter-writers, as evidenced by the many volumes of correspondence published both in the nineteenth century and in recent scholarly editions. Letters were crucial to many varieties of communication in the nineteenth century, whether for business, news, travel, education, or maintaining relationships. They formed the backbone of traditional biographies, but were also a popular plot device in fiction, a continuing legacy from the eighteenth century epistolary novel, vestiges of which appear in nineteenth-century texts such as Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), where Laura Fairlie is first alerted by an anonymous letter to the threat posed by Sir Percival Glyde, and Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), which, like her sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights (1848), additionally incorporates the diary format. Collins’s own letters, many preoccupied with his precarious state of health, were later to be published in scholarly editions: the first collection of 600, edited by William Baker and William Clarke in 1999, was followed by a four-volume digital edition of nearly 3,000, The Public Face of William Collins edited by Andrew Gasson, Graham Law and William Baker (2005). The Lives of Victorian Literary Figures series, published by Pickering and Chatto/Routledge, assembles a range of critical responses, personal reminiscences, and memoirs of famous nineteenth-century authors, including Dickens, Gaskell, Ruskin, and Tennyson as recorded by their contemporaries. The Selected Letters of Vernon Lee (1856–1935) (ed. Sophie Geoffroy and Amanda Gagel (2016, ongoing) are the latest to be published by the Pickering Masters.

It is easy to forget that the letters of some major novelists remained unpublished for decades. An early review by Geoffrey Tillotson of the George Eliot letters edited by Gordon S. Haight (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954–1979), serves as a reminder that the Victorians were out of fashion when the project was first mooted: ‘It needed courage for Mr. Haight to start off his enquiries about George Eliot in the ’20s’ (Sewanee Review 63:3, July-September 1955: 494). The Letters, however, widely praised for their succinct and informative annotations and for the light they threw on Eliot’s early life as an earnest Evangelical and her burgeoning creative processes, remain the definitive edition of her correspondence. Other significant collections of letters include Margaret Smith’s three-volume edition of Charlotte Brontës (1995–2004), and Madeline House and Graham Storey’s Pilgrim Edition of The Letters of Charles Dickens (12 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982–2002). Notwithstanding the voluminous nature of these collections, it was by no means a foregone conclusion that they would be preserved or published. Charlotte Brontë and Harriet Martineau were among those who urged their friends to destroy their letters. Martineau, indeed, prefaces her Autobiography with a statement insisting that letters were ‘written speech’ (Martineau 1877/2007, 35) and their privacy violated by publication. The fact that many of her correspondents ignored her injunction testifies to the significance they attached to these dialogues. Even her first biographer, Maria Weston Chapman, who edited the third volume of her autobiography, the Memorials (1877), included excerpts from Martineau’s correspondence, and in 2007 Deborah Logan edited a five-volume comprehensive edition of her letters for Pickering and Chatto. As Logan puts it in her ‘General Introduction,’ the letters not only provide a range of insights into her life; they ‘may be considered her most significant literary production’ (Logan 2007, Vol I, xvii). Indeed Martineau used the letter format for several of her published studies of social and political problems, such as ‘Letter to the Deaf’ (1834) and Letters from Ireland (1852). Though she often warned her correspondents that what she was sharing with them was ‘entre nous’ [between ourselves], she must have suspected they would eventually be more widely disseminated.

The letters of many nineteenth-century authors are now available online (some continuing). These include the ongoing Brownings’ Correspondence edited for the Wedgestone Press by Philip Kelley and Ronald Hudson, begun in 1984. For readers wanting to focus on the romantic story of the Brownings’ secret courtship, crucially facilitated by the exchange of letters, Daniel Karlin’s (1985). The Courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett provides a detailed analysis, not just of their burgeoning relationship, but also of how it developed their style as self-conscious letter-writers broaching a secret correspondence. Karlin claims these are the only letters of Browning’s ‘which can be said to resemble his poems in the depth of mind they display’ (Karlin 1985, 11).

Conclusion

It was not unusual in the nineteenth century for any one individual to engage with all the principal forms of life writing, whether the two most private formats (the diary and autobiography) or the more sociable and public (letters and the biography or memoir). It is perhaps worth finishing with one prominent family of life writers, Edward White Benson (1829–96), Archbishop of Canterbury, and four of his children, Arthur Christopher (A.C. Benson), Edward Frederic (E.F.), Margaret (Maggie), and Robert Hugh (R.F.). From different perspectives, all the family address the intense emotional dynamics of their household: their autocratic father, the mother they all adored, the older brother Martin, who died of meningitis at Winchester College, their covert longing for same-sex relationships. A.C. (1862–1925), who also edited Queen Victoria’s letters, demonstrates his self-consciousness about life writing in his The House of Quiet (1904/1912), which opens with multiple prefaces and introductions. It can be considered an example of ‘autobiografiction’, a term coined in 1906 by Stephen Reynolds, and fully developed by Max Saunders (2010) to describe a blend of autobiography and fiction. Here, Benson imagines the life of a gentle soul lacking ‘joie de vivre’, but with a sense of responsibility. Pushed into ‘a backwater of life’, his hero wonders how he might still exist in a way that is ‘wholesome and contented and helpful’ (Benson 1907, vii–viii). Despite its effete, fin-de-siècle languor, or maybe because of it, Benson’s anxious fictitious self-analysis perhaps typifies the conflicted attitude of many Victorians to the whole concept of life writing. It was something they yearned to do, both for their own emotional catharsis as well as a public defence of their choices and actions; yet it was also something they were nervous about sharing with strangers. Hence its many troubled and complex formats, its subterfuges and apologies, but also the depth and humanity of its ever-vigilant self-analysis, and ultimate validation of the worth of every human life.

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