Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn | Gabriele Helms (essay date 1995)
Gabriele Helms (essay date 1995)
SOURCE: "The Coincidence of Biography and Autobiography: Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë," in Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 4, Fall, 1995, pp. 339-59.
[In the essay that follows, Helms considers the manner in which Gaskell comes to understand herself in relation to Charlotte Brontë and thus combines the genres of biography and autobiography.]
The ongoing theoretical debates about the genres of biography and autobiography are often concerned with genre classifications, gender issues, intentions as well as techniques and methods, and a general rethinking of given paradigms. Many long-held categorizations and evaluations prove questionable in the context of post-structuralist and feminist theories. Victoria Glendinning has described the situation using an interesting image; she says that the "Berlin Wall between fiction and biography, between autobiography...
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