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This chapter examines naturalist Edmund Gosse's memoir called Father and Son in relation to childhood study in England during the 19th century. This memoir offered a study of the development of moral and intellectual ideas during the progress of infancy and it was written directly within the framework established by all those conscientious recorders of child and infant development of the 1890s. It was influenced by the child study movement, which allowed Gosse to rewrite his family history and give prominence to the perceptions and responses of the Son.

This is the first of four chapters exploring the turn‐of‐the‐century disturbances in the relation between life‐writing and fiction. It argues that ‘autobiography’ begins to seem a problematic category in the period, and gets displaced towards fiction. The chapter focuses on ‘Mark Rutherford’, not just for his autobiography, but for his later inclusion of the story ‘A Mysterious Portrait’. The concept of the heteronym is introduced, to be developed in Chapters 7 and Chapter 8. Other authors discussed here include George Gissing (The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft), H. G. Wells (Boon), Henry Adams, Samuel Butler (The Way of All Flesh), and Edmund Gosse (Father and Son). The various displacements of auto/biography are shown to complicate Lejeune's concept of the autobiographic contract guaranteeing the identity of author, narrator, and subject.

This chapter focuses on Edmund Gosse, Victorian man of letters, and his autobiography Father and Son. The book’s differences from the other works discussed in Writing Life are notable, but the very differences make Gosse’s narrative significant, for his unusual genre mixing generates a number of themes and motifs that resonate through the study: generational difference and influence; inheritance; the role of reading in shaping authorial individuality (Bloom); and a concept of autobiography as ‘fathering’ (or ‘mothering’) the self. The chapter concludes that as Father and Son subverts traditional spiritual autobiography in favour of an artist’s apprenticeship narrative, so Gosse’s struggle against inheriting his father’s religious beliefs enables his eventual individuation. Gosse is often viewed as critic rather than an author, but this chapter shows that his autobiography reveals an extremely versatile writer whose opinion mattered – and this is the persona that Father and Son projects in place of the creative artist.

This chapter discusses integrity in terms of the structure of principles and commitments to which the individual adheres and shows why integrity is not sufficient for the excellence of a human life. It cites a moving study of Edmund Gosse's father, a respected marine zoologist known for his intellectual honesty and a man of severely fundamental religious principles, who lacks integrity or what John Kekes calls “wholeness.” It reports that the elder Gosse suffered an intellectual crisis: on the one side was evolutionary theory, and on the other was his Christian fundamentalism with its literal reading of the Genesis account of creation. Gosse the dedicated scientist and Gosse the fundamentalist Christian could not cohere with each other in a unified life of commitment. The intellectual crisis was precipitated by his awareness of incompatible commitments, but the incoherence is not always recognized as such by the agent.