Life Writing

The category of “Life Writing” in Victorian literature includes not only the many thousands of autobiographies and memoirs that were produced in the period, but the hundreds of biographies as well, and the many novels and poems that borrow the form or share the motives of biography or autobiography. The Victorian taste for the writing and reading of autobiography connects with the allied, though distinct, taste for the writing and reading of biography. Carlyle merits a special place in this chapter as both the author and subject of Victorian biography. The major Victorian poets and novelists tended to make art of their experiences by reporting them obliquely. The great Victorian novelists found ways of engaging in life writing by blending elements of autobiography and biography into their fictions, notably into those novels that critics have called by the name Bildungsroman.