Frances Power Cobbe's Life and the Rules for Women's Autobiography

The aberrations of memory have in them this peculiarity: we never remember that our remembrance is habitually, not merely fallible, but faulty. We treat all mistakes as exceptional, rather than instantial. We assume that when error is detected, there is either intentional falsehood or culpable inexactitude—or at the least, some singular accidental lapse.… Over and over again the same result occurs whenever we have occasion to verify any particular recollection by reference to memoranda, or to return to the scene of a past occurrence, or to discuss with another witness the details of any event.… Nevertheless, in the face of such experiences a hundred times repeated, we remark complacently again and again: "How strange that I should have mistaken such a fact! how singular that my memory (generally so accurate) should have made me fancy that house so much larger than it is!"1