British Autobiographers

Book Reviews Volume 32:4, 1989 'Aunt Maggie,' Henley, &c, &c,—such as these celibate walls alone may listen to! So you see. Let this fetch you a little." We too are fetched but, alas, cannot hear all of the grand talk. Even so, this very large element in James's epistolary production, much of it not printed before yet focusing on a shared literary life and friendship with Gosse, makes it valuable to have the gathered correspondence conveniently to hand. James W. Tuttleton New York University BRITISH AUTOBIOGRAPHERS Carl Dawson. Prophets of Past Time: Seven British Autobiographers, 1880-1914. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. $29.50 CARL DAWSON'S STUDY is another contribution to a formerly neglected but in recent years quite intensively cultivated field: the analysis of non-fictional narrative prose forms, and particularly that of autobiography. His seven autobiographers are William Hale White, George Tyrrell, Samuel Butler, Edmund Gosse, George Moore, Ford Madox Ford, and W. B. Yeats. They are, as he admits, less a group than a cluster, and there is inevitably a degree of arbitrariness in the decision to undertake these case-studies. What they have in common, according to Dawson, is that they are all "men in crisis," both a "crisis of midlife" and a "crisis of history." This claim for the coherence of the subjects is, however, undermined by the fact that they represent more than one generation: Butler, for example, was thirty when Yeats was born, and Ford was even younger than Yeats. The interest and value of the book are in fact lessened by three self-imposed limitations. The "transition" period of 1880-1914 enables Dawson to place emphasis on "writers who worked in the new climate of the fin de siècle, who wrote with a self-consciousness that was as historical as it was personal." But this is to use fin de siècle in a very approximate sense, for whereas Butler begins as a mid-Victorian (Erewhon appeared in the same year as Middlemarch), Ford's career hardly got under way until the turn of the century and much of his best work appeared well after 1914 (he lived, indeed, until 1939). Even on its own terms, therefore, the "cluster" of writers tends to drift off in different directions. In any case, there are dangers in carving off a chronological slice from the overall nineteenth-century development of the genre. As the Preface concedes, "A writer like 485 Book Reviews Volume 32:4, 1989 Wordsworth matters enormously to late nineteenth-century autobiographical writers," and later it is noted that "Rutherford's evocation of his past is intimately connected with his response to Wordsworth." This would seem to be an argument for extending backwards the scope of a book that takes its title from a Wordsworthian fragment. Another limitation is that the chosen autobiographers are all authors: "they all approach their autobiographical works as professional writers, convinced that their reflections on past lives will be different in kind from the autobiographies of scientists, say, or other individuals unused to translating thoughts into writing or to contending with the burden of past literary authority." It is perhaps worth adding that one of the most important reasons why authors' accounts of their own lives are "different in kind" is that these lives have been largely spent not in observing animal behaviour or in fighting political or military battles but in producing other books: a writer's autobiography is a text about the sources of other texts. When we further add to this that several of the chosen subjects are novelists whose fictionmaking instincts and skills are unlikely to be totally renounced in writing their own life-story, it seems that a special category of autobiographical writing is in question. Chapter 1 opens with the declaration that "This is a book about men in crisis . . .," and feminists will not be the only ones to be startled by the second noun. The Preface has already granted that "autobiography is not exclusively a male genre" but, perhaps too readily embracing the tenets of feminist criticism, has argued that "women autobiographers present special problems and deserve a kind of attention I cannot give here." One...