Afterword

Abstract

The writers whose work I have considered here all chose to explore, through the medium of autobiographical writing, events of a difficult and often painful nature. Not all of them wrote with the supposed benefit of hindsight; for diarists such as Woolf and Frank, however, the very act of writing can be considered a means of creating a perspective on their present experiences and, to some extent, exercising control over them. Yet even in the case of those writers who consider events that are at a temporal distance, the notion of completion, or of writing as a means of ordering and incorporating events into an individual life-story, is placed in question. The act of writing itself disallows any absolute separation between ‘then’ and ‘now’, or even between cause and effect. This is not to say that these writers must remain slaves to their pasts (or indeed their family histories) in perpetuity, or that traumatic events must remain incommunicable in order to warrant the name; rather I would suggest that works such as those considered here expose the extent to which traditional styles and genres fall short.