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  • A History of English Autobiography ed. by Adam Smyth
  • Katherine Kickel
A History of English Autobiography, ed. Adam Smyth. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2016. Pp. xvi + 437. $99.99.

Appealing to generalists and specialists alike, Mr. Smyth's edited collection reconsiders the history of English autobiography in twenty-nine chapters, spanning the medieval period to the present. His introduction sketches the text's premise as "represent[ing] the critical state of play in the field, and interven[ing] in urgent ways." He begins by addressing the complexity of the term "autobiography" and challenging its dominant post-Romantic definition as a form of "inwardness" in self-expression. Encouraging his authors to employ a variety of designations to represent the genre (for example, life-writing, self-accounting, and memoir), Mr. Smyth highlights three modes through which all the essays can be read: negotiation (adjusting [End Page 181] autobiographical conventions), improvisation (employing autobiographical conventions in surprising ways), and patchwork (producing autobiographical hybrids). The narrative focuses exclusively on the historical evolution of English self-reflective discourse, but its contributors often employ non-English writers to consider the influence of specific texts (for example, Augustine's or Rousseau's Confessions). Many of the essays situate a traditional form of autobiography alongside a new one.

Part 2 (1700–1800) is particularly pertinent to Scriblerian readers. It opens with an interrogation of the phrase "spiritual autobiography," which Tessa Whitehouse sees as distinct because "God provides the form," thus allowing for a more varied expression than normal. Beginning with Bunyan's Grace Abounding (1666) and ending with William Cowper's Adelphi (1802), Ms. Whitehouse observes that in contrast to the traditional view, which privileges a "morphology of conversion," most of the spiritual accounts in the eighteenth century use a "composite" process, drawing on a combination of diaries, letters, hymns, and scriptures. Rather than originating primarily from Protestant Revival movements, eighteenth-century spiritual autobiographies extend across denominational, class, gender, and racial differences to encompass a multiplicity of testimonies and conversion patterns. Ms. Whitehouse cites the eighteenth-century practice of autobiographies composed collaboratively—for example, Carteret Rede, mediated by her parents; Melicent Sills, mediated by her spouse; Phoebe Barlet, mediated by her minister, Jonathan Edwards; and James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniousaw, a slave, mediated by a lady from Leominster—as evidence of the diversity of rhetorical positions the genre portrays. However, self-accounting here bears witness to more than spiritual conversion. In the case of the Quakers, via Elizabeth Stirredge and Alice Hays, such texts also detail persecution. Ultimately arguing that eighteenth-century spiritual autobiography is neither formulaic nor linear, Ms. Whitehouse counters prevailing notions epitomized by the sequential narrative of Bunyan and offers alternative testimonies of religious awakening.

Chapter 9 turns from spiritual autobiography to the less-examined work of female autobiographers. Robert Folkenflik notes that fewer "than thirty known narratives by women" of the eighteenth century have survived. He concedes that some may still be hidden in archives or stashed away in personal collections; nevertheless, the limited number poses a dilemma for scholars seeking to understand female contributions to the genre. Mr. Folkenflik begins with another important observation: most eighteenth-century female autobiographical texts do not conform to the standard definition in terms of scope, style, or topic. For example, the works of Mary Collier and Anne Elliott, he argues, are often omitted from accounts of the subject due to their length. Other noteworthy self-reflective texts by women are problematic in different ways. Delarivière Manley and Mary Delany both employ romance conventions, which imply fictionalization, while other apparently autobiographical accounts were embedded in works authored by someone else, as in the case of Lady Frances Anne Vane's memoir. Further, the provocative cross-dressing accounts by Mrs. Christian Davies and Charlotte Charke marred their critical reception and blurred the line between fact and fiction. Overall Mr. Folkenflik demonstrates [End Page 182] the constraint of the genre's traditional parameters and argues for a broader, more inclusive definition.

Lynn Festa's chapter 10 turns to a curious incarnation of the genre in the eighteenth century: the lives of objects (and less frequently animals), epitomized by the Adventures of a Corkscrew, an account of "A Quire of Paper," and...

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