BIBLIOGRAPHY

Danahay, Martin. “Selected Bibliography of Victorian Autobiography Studies.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 2, no. 1 (spring 1986): 19-22, 27.

Bibliography of approximately sixty books and critical essays on the subject of Victorian autobiography published from the 1950s to the mid-1980s.

CRITICISM

Allen, Peter. “Trollope to His Readers: The Unreliable Narrator of An Autobiography.” Biography 19, no. 1 (winter 1996): 1-18.

Focuses on Trollope's efforts to challenge attitudes towards his writings, career, and personal nature in his An Autobiography (1883).

August, Eugene R. “Darwin's Comedy: The Autobiography as Comic Narrative.” Victorian Newsletter 75 (spring 1989): 15-19.

Evaluates Charles Darwin's construction of himself in his Autobiography (1876) as a gullible buffoon who heroically succeeds in transforming scientific theory and conventional wisdom.

Barros, Carolyn A. Autobiography: Narrative of Transformation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998, 248 p.

Endeavors to define the generic features of autobiography, especially its thematic concern with personal transformation, while offering individual chapters devoted to analysis of autobiographical writings by Thomas Carlyle, John Henry Cardinal Newman, John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, and Margaret Oliphant.

Broughton, Trev Lynn. “Making the Most of Martyrdom: Harriet Martineau, Autobiography, and Death.” Literature and History 2, no. 2 (autumn 1993): 24-45.

Studies the motif of martyrdom in Harriet Martineau's Autobiography (1877) in order to generalize about the idealized self-representation of Victorian women.

———. “Missing Her: Leslie Stephen, Anny Ritchie and the Sexual Politics of Genre.” In Men of Letters, Writing Lives: Masculinity and Literary Auto/Biography in the Late Victorian Period, pp. 60-79. London: Routledge, 1999.

Approaches Sir Leslie Stephen's Mausoleum Book as it encapsulates conflicts within the literary construction of masculinity, arguing that autobiography had become “a medium of gender relations” in the late nineteenth century.

Demoor, Marysa. “Women Authors and Their Selves: Autobiography in the Work of Charlotte Yonge, Rhoda Broughton, Mary Cholmondeley, and Lucy Clifford.” Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens 39 (April 1994): 51-63.

Discusses the strategies of self-representation employed by three Victorian women writers in their autobiographical novels.

Henderson, Heather. The Victorian Self: Autobiography and Biblical Narrative. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989, 205 p.

Book-length examination of Victorian spiritual autobiography featuring discussion of such works as Newman's Apologia pro vita sua and Ruskin's Praeterita.

Loesberg, Jonathan. Fictions of Consciousness: Mill, Newman, and the Reading of Victorian Prose. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986, 280 p.

Analyzes the relationship between the philosophical arguments and autobiographical narratives of John Henry Newman and John Stuart Mill within the contexts of Victorian intellectual and literary history.

Machann, Clinton. “The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds and Victorian Autobiography.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 9, no. 2 (fall 1994): 202-11.

Argues that Symonds's Memoirs (first published in 1984, more than a century after his death) largely adheres to the formal conventions of Victorian autobiography, despite a notable candidness regarding homosexuality.

———. The Genre of Autobiography in Victorian Literature. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994, 191 p.

Comparative analysis of eleven autobiographies by Victorian writers that seeks to establish the salient formal and narrative characteristics of the genre.

Malone, Cynthia Northcutt. “The Struggle of Father and Son: Edmund Gosse's Polemical Autobiography.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 8, no. 1 (spring 1993): 16-32.

Assesses the dialogic structure, dynamics of conflict, and thematic effects of progress and circularity in Gosse's autobiographical novel Father and Son (1907).

Marcus, Laura. “Identity Into Form: Nineteenth-Century Auto/biographical Discourses.” In Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice, pp. 11-55. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1994.

Traces the nineteenth-century development of autobiography and autobiographical criticism, illuminating a shift from moral and didactic to psychological and sociological concerns within these works.

Peterson, Linda H. “Margaret Oliphant's Autobiography as Professional Artist's Life.” Women's Writing 6, no. 2 (1999): 261-78.

Contends that Oliphant aimed to identify and resolve ideological tensions between motherhood and authorship in her 1899 Autobiography.

———. Traditions of Victorian Women's Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999, 256 p.

Regards women's autobiography as a distinct literary form, examining its origins, traditions, characteristic modes of expression, and development through the nineteenth century.

Sabin, Margery. “Working-Class Plain Style: William Lovett vs. Carlyle, Gaskell, and Others.” Raritan 18, no. 2 (fall 1998): 41-62.

Centers on stylistic contrasts between the working-class autobiography Life and Struggles of William Lovett in His Pursuit of Bread, Knowledge and Freedom (1876) and examples in the genre produced by mainstream Victorian writers.

Sanders, Valerie. The Private Lives of Victorian Women: Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century England. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989, 184 p.

Observes the domestic and psychological themes prevalent in autobiography and autobiographical fiction written by Victorian women.

Swindells, Julia, ed. The Uses of Autobiography. London: Taylor & Francis, 1995, 227 p.

Includes several essays on the subjects of gender, race, and women's autobiographical writing.

Walsh, Susan A. “Ruskin's Praeterita and the Mediated Self.” Victorians Institute Journal 19 (1991): 41-70.

Concentrates on the subject of experience recollected through the medium of literature in Ruskin's unfinished autobiography Praeterita (1885-89).