Aging in Twentieth-Century Britain by Charlotte Greenhalgh

Author:Charlotte Greenhalgh
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780520298781
Publisher: University of California Press

WRITING AND PUBLISHING IN BRITAIN

Historians have traced the emergence of the modern autobiography to shifts in identity formation after the eighteenth century.31 The genre’s conventions include the use of first-person narrative, allegiance to truth telling, and attention to individual achievements. Philippe Lejeune has written influentially of the “autobiographical pact,” which requires the author’s commitment “not to some impossible historical exactitude but rather to the sincere effort to come to terms with and to understand his or her own life.”32 This pact has been a defining feature of modern autobiography. By the end of the nineteenth century, an increasing proportion of British autobiographies were authored by middle-class, professional men pursuing just this aim.33 In the twentieth century, male authors described wide-scale social changes that had influenced their accomplishments, such as the expansion of the education system in Britain. However, these autobiographers highlighted personal achievements above generational experiences by detailing the challenges they had encountered and overcome during their lives, and thus attributing their successes to individual effort. The individualistic model, however, did not fit with the way women described their lives as entwined with the needs and accomplishments of others.34

The presentation of the self via the life story was reformulated in the early decades of the twentieth century by the success of human-interest journalism and the competition for readers among British newspapers. Interwar newspaper editors commercialized the popular “crook life story,” for example, because it was salable.35 After World War I, the increasing flexibility of both social mores and hierarchies of class caused public concern. At the same time, individuals were increasingly able to purchase a new social identity when they shopped for ready-made clothing or engaged in new commercial entertainments. Autobiographies, too, were tools of self-fashioning—and sometimes reinvention—rather than only self-expression.36 Historians of subjectivity have identified the discovery by the 1920s of “the self within—a quite richly detailed self,” which became the primary subject of autobiographies.37 In the early decades of the twentieth century, a deepening interest in self-reflection coexisted with new opportunities for self-representation.

Especially before the 1960s, the cost of publishing and marketing books meant that most published autobiographies were written by upper-class and literary authors. Examples include the autobiographies that Marie Belloc Lowndes and Horace Horsnell published during the 1940s, when she was in her seventies and he in his early sixties. Lowndes was a successful and prolific writer, most well known for romances and crime novels, especially The Chink in the Armour (1912) and The Lodger (1913). Her four autobiographies were published between 1941 and 1948, to critical acclaim. Macmillan’s print run of the first volume sold out before its publication date. The Times Literary Supplement praised Lowndes for achieving objectivity about her younger self.38 Moving in the same literary world, Horsnell had acted as secretary to H.G. Wells, written the successful play Advertising for April, conducted a “varied and notable career” as a dramatic critic for the Observer and Punch, and published several novels.39 The autobiographies of these two notable individuals were celebrated for their famous characters, literary merit, and upper-class concerns.

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