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25 - Diary and autobiography

from PART V - LITERARY GENRES: TRANSFORMATION AND NEW FORMS OF EXPRESSIVENESS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Stuart Sherman
Edited by
John Richetti
John Richetti
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
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Summary

In 1656 Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, published a short piece she named ‘A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and Life’. Near the end, she rather anxiously invoked some ancient autobiographical precedents: ‘I hope my Readers will not think me vain for writing my life, since there have been many that have done the like, as Caesar, Ovid, and many more, both men and women, and I know no reason I may not do it as well as they.’ There were, as she suggests, conspicuous antecedents for autobiography: mostly male, formidably famous, and widely scattered across space and time. But Cavendish's pronouncement works better as forecast than as retrospect. In England over the ensuing century and a half, ‘many more’ writers than ever before, ‘both men and women’, diverse in origin and status, working in both diary and autobiography, manuscript and print, found ample reason that they too, ‘as well as’ the more renowned practitioners of the past, could and should press their own lives onto the page. Some hundred years after Cavendish's assertion, such convictions received another imprimatur. ‘[T]here has rarely passed a life’, Samuel Johnson declared in one essay, ‘of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful.’ In another, he concluded that the most useful such narrative is not biography but autobiography: ‘Those relations are commonly of most value in which the writer tells his own story.’ The practice that Cavendish rather anxiously defended, Johnson confidently affirmed. In the years between, the stimuli towards self-inscription had become more varied, the models and precedents more promiscuous, the means and justifications more widely available.

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Chapter
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The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780 , pp. 649 - 672
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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