26 February 2018
Long before the rise of "autofiction", and the contemporary wave of authors drawing from their own lives for their novels - Rachel Cusk, Geoff Dyer, Sheila Heti, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Ben Lerner and others - many writers in the first half of the 20th century were experimenting with the limits of autobiography. Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, Wyndham Lewis, Gertrude Stein, HG Wells, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf: all wrote memoirs as inventive, in different ways, as their novels (which were often themselves very autobiographical). And that list is only the tip of the iceberg.