Life Writing and Victorian Culture (review)

Concluding her contribution to this volume, Trev Lynn Broughton argues, "[W]e need to move beyond exclusive concentration on 'the text,' and to a study of life writing as a complex and multifarious cultural field" (118). Life Writing and Victorian Culture works impressively toward the goal of delineating this field, documenting Victorian life writing's complicated networks of writing, editing, publishing, and reading practices, shaped crucially by their sociocultural moments even as they shape and reproduce those moments anew. Ultimately, the collection bears out the promise implicit in its broad title, offering a vital reevaluation of both life writing and the Victorian period itself.

In focusing on "life writing," as David Amigoni explains, these essays emphasize "practices of inscription, reading and interpretation that invite us to suspend and re-examine the historically received functions of, and hierarchical relations between, genres" (2). Amigoni's introduction presents the diary as a textual site for "mapping relations between different acts of life writing" (3); urges us to situate and explore life writing within the "context of technologies of print, publication, audiences and communities" (2); and stresses the need to question ideas of autobiographical or biographical "tradition," so as to recognize "the subtle contexts of conflict and contestation that connect acts of life writing" (12). He makes a persuasive case that Victorian life writings were "premised on experiments that played restlessly upon the boundaries between public print and private inscription" (17).

Each of these ten essays, in turn, provides a model for considering both the contents and the complicated textual forms of life writings, subsequently calling us to apply these models to an ever-wider range of life writing materials with increased sensitivity to the complexities of composing, archiving, publishing, and consuming those materials. Martin Hewitt explores the extensive diaries of Samuel Bamford, Benjamin Robert Haydon, and Beatrice Webb with an eye toward illuminating "the complex cultural, symbolic and textual operations of the diary" (36), insisting that we pay "much greater attention to the forms which diaries took, and to . . . their intratextualities, the exchanges which took place between the different elements of the text" (28). In discussing George Ives, Matt Cook also stresses the importance of attending to what Hewitt calls diaries' "layered textuality" (29): Cook makes great use of the verso notes Ives inscribed (mostly after 1918) in the copious diaries through which he defined and redefined his "sense of homosexual selfhood" (202). In Ives's case, we glimpse a life writing subject's active, textually manifested reconsideration of previously recorded memories and self-conceptions; Cook argues that the verso notes represent a "parallel text," "mark[ing] a shifting sense of self and possibility . . . [and] a changing cultural climate" (208) that surrounded questions of sexuality and identity as Ives's life writing grew, from 1886 to 1950, to fill 122 diaries.

This volume's essays repeatedly succeed in presenting such complex interplays between life writing texts and the lived selves writing and written by them. Some of these essays make their arguments about how and why to read Victorian life writing by focusing on lesser-known figures. For instance, Helen Rogers discusses the biographical work of Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner and Theophilia Carlile Campbell, as well as Josephine Butler, arguing that their processes of writing their fathers' lives should reopen questions about what biographical authorship (and paternal relationships) meant for Victorian women. Other contributors reframe familiar Victorian life writers and writings in illuminating ways: Martin A. Danahay examines the life writings of Arthur Munby, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Carlyle, investigating the function of masochism as a "psychic self-defense against feelings of anxiety and inadequacy" rooted in Victorian gender ideologies (102). Julie F. Codell's study of Gandhi's Autobiography (1927) also approaches Carlyle's work—particularly Sartor Resartus (1833–34)—from a new angle, showing how it shaped the "discontinuous, fragmented, constantly changing self" and "dialectically created identity" (128) that undergird Gandhi's autobiographical writing.

The complicated life writing practices these essays explore are interactive, collaborative, revisionary...