"'The past' is with me, seen anew"

biography's end in Dorothy Richardson's pilgrimage

Joanne Winning

pp. 212-223

in: Warwick Gould, Thomas F. Staley (eds), Writing the lives of writers, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1998

Abstract

Whilst the writing of autobiography has always allowed the author certain opportunities to revision his or her life history, the writing of autobiography as a fictional narrative offers even greater scope for the reinvention of self, and in particular the representation of difficult or hidden life-events. Through a fictional narrative, the writer can utilise textual practice to privilege certain events or to encode and submerge them subtextually In this sense, autobiographical fiction is a hybrid text, existing somewhere between the two genres of autobiography and fiction and utilising the tropes of both. In the light of this hybridity, what status does the material of autobiographical fiction hold for either the biographer or the literary critic? How, in effect, is one to write the life of a writer who has already fictionalised it? And, similarly, how is one to analyse a text which is a complicated self-representation?