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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 discusses the taxonomy of imaginary literary works (supplementing the taxonomy of fictionalized life‐writings proposed in Chapter 5), and their scarcity during the nineteenth century. It concludes the discussion of Joyce, and ends with an account of Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as an indisputable example of a fictionally authored auto/biography.

This chapter develops the preceding one's account of autobiographical writing which swerves into fiction. It explores the hybrid form identified in Stephen Reynolds's 1906 essay ‘Autobiografiction.’ Reynolds's arguments are examined in detail. The significance of the body of work he identifies, fusing spiritual experience, fictional narrative, and the essay, is discussed in relation to a growing resistance to conventional forms of auto/biography. One of Reynolds's chief examples is A. C. Benson. Two of his works — The House of Quiet and The Thread of Gold — are analysed in detail, with particular attention to his elaborate play with the forms of life‐writing, and with pseudonymity and posthumousness. Benson's approach to the spiritual through autobiografiction is contextualized in terms of secularization, psychical research, and the emergence of psycho‐analysis. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the trope (deriving from the Nietzsche–Wilde/subjectivist views outlined at the start) that fiction is the best autobiography; and by considering the light the concept of autobiografiction can shed on modernism.

Virginia Woolf's diary is her longest, her longest sustained, and her last work to reach the public. The Introduction presents the book’s main argument, the new view that Woolf entered a secondstage as a diarist (after her first experimental stage)—that of her mature, spare, modernist diaries of 1918 to 1929. Woolf deliberately curbs her number of diary entries per year in this second stage, pushing the periodic diary about as far as it can go and still convey a life. The Introduction also documents Woolf’s increasingly inward turn across the 1920s and her continued modernist experiments with form, especially with the fragment. A diary’s inherent oppositions, its “symmetry … of discords” (Woolf’s diary phrase) allowed Woolf to explore a string of paradoxes: continuity and discontinuity, motion and stasis, impersonal and personal time. The insights of the great French diary theorist Philippe Lejeune are used to undergird the book’s argument that diary-writing now becomes a way of life for Virginia Woolf, “life insurance” that brings high returns. The Introduction also previews the book’s second major insight: the heretofore unexplored role of other diaries in Woolf’s revered modernist works.

This chapter compares two of Julie Doucet’s comics stories: “The First Time” and “Monkey and the Living Dead.” Focusing on genre conventions, the chapter investigates the classification of the former comic as auto biography and of the latter as fiction. Side by side, the two stories of sexual becoming are in dialogue with one another, yoked by common visual symbols such as faucets, grates,and other abstract phallic and vaginal references. Building on Philippe Lejeune and Paulde Man, the chapter demonstrates Ann Miller’s theory of autobiographical bande dessinée. This chapter ultimately argues that while “The First Time” follows traditional, generic norms of auto biography, this reading of the fictional “Monkey and the Living Dead” reveals an alternative, subliminal account of the author’s feelings about her virginity loss, there by challenging the concept of auto biographical truth.

Chris Ware is known for his fascination with modes of representing (and complicating) temporal progress, which can be attributed to his highly self-conscious and theoretical approach to the comics medium. This is evident in two of his works, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth and Quimby the Mouse. In the latter, Ware amplifies not only its autobiographical content but also the potential of autobiography itself. This chapter offers a reading of Quimby the Mouse to understand the connections between the slapstick antics of the Quimby comics and the autobiographical essay woven throughout the volume. Drawing on the autobiographical criticism of Philippe Lejeune, it argues that Quimby the Mouse is a multilayered disquisition on the interlocking categories of self, artwork, and time.

Virginia Woolf’s diary has been called “a high point in English diary keeping”; in fact, it is one of the great diaries of the world. Her diary is her longest, her longest-sustained, and last work to reach the public. Becoming Virginia Woolf reveals Woolf’s development as a diarist and her place among, and legacy to, the worldwide community of diarists she so greatly valued and admired. Diaries are still “terra incognita,” French diary theorist Philippe Lejeune noted in 2004—a fact (this book argues) that made the diary particularly attractive to Woolf. Becoming Virginia Woolf challenges several long-standing views of Woolf diary: it suggests that Woolf first articulates her aesthetic at age 17 (not 25); it offers a more nuanced reading of Woolf’s newly found 1909 diary, which has been treated as bitter and even as anti-Semitic; and it argues that Woolf’s diary-writing breaks into three stages—not two (the current view). A final new insight the book reveals is the crucial role of other diaries in Woolf’s creative life. Women’s diaries, the book reveals, greatly assisted Woolf’s own writing path. Woolf herself creates a diary more structurally experimental than any of the diaries she read.