Life Writing in the Nineteenth Century

A compelling study of a family's cross-generational experience of the clash between religious intensity and a son's escape into the secular world'

--Valerie Sanders, Professor Emerita, University of Hull, UK

This book explores the variety of forms and discourses employed by members of the Gosse family, tracing the intergenerational, intertextual, and interdisciplinary conversations between its members during the period from the 1820s to the 1930s. It argues that this middle-class family, through a passion for nature and religion, art and literature, produced accounts of biblical or literary figures which took autobiography and biography beyond family parameters, to the life cycles of flora and fauna, and even the 'afterlives' of books. With each generation, inherited models of life narrative are reshaped and repurposed. Kathy Rees draws on a plethora of Gosse manuscript materials as well as published texts to uncover writing intended for both private and public consumption, and to bring to light new works.

Kathy Rees is an independent researcher in Victorian literature specializing in the work of Edmund Gosse. She is the co-editor of Edmund Gosse's manuscript, Tristram Jones (2022), and the author of Victorian Non-Fiction Prose: A Companion (2023).