In a rather wobbly Introduction, Maunsell characterises this current life-writing project as ‘something of a shape-shifter’. To the extent that it focuses on personal and textual interactions involving seven writers – Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, Edith Wharton, H.G. Wells, Gertrude Stein, and Wyndham Lewis – Maunsell regards the book as a ‘group portrait or group biography’. But it is sometimes argued that these genre terms aren’t synonymous; and Portraits from Life seems to offer seven portraits of variously connected figures rather than the more integrated and concerted narrative of a social group we might associate with ‘group biography’. And why these seven writers in particular? Maunsell explains that, in addition to their personal and textual interactions, the ‘seven writers collected here were chosen above all for their performance as autobiographers’. But ‘performance’ with respect to what? This is never quite clear. It doesn’t seem to refer to aesthetic considerations: Maunsell is far more interested in what these writers do in the liminal territory between autobiography and fiction than in how well they do it.

H.G. Wells, circa 1915–1920, negative, glass, 5 x 7 in or smaller (photograph via The Library of Congress/Flickr)

The closest the Introduction comes to a general thesis is the assertion that in their autobiographies these writers ‘evolved a modern sense of self’. But what is ‘a modern sense of self’, singular? There is nothing new or helpfully specific in Maunsell’s reference to modernist writers ‘playing with chronology and identity, memory and personae’, and no prevailing ‘sense of self’ emerges from these various chapters. Certainly, they are all ‘experimental’ in some respect, but Wells’s psycho-sociological autobiographical ‘experiment’, written in conventional realist prose, is remote from the modernism of Stein or James.

The Introduction explains that the book is ‘above all, an experiment in biography, and in group biography … rather than a critical study’. But here I think Maunsell does himself a disservice, because in addition to his biographical skills he is a very accomplished textual critic who has a particular gift for zigzagging between a writer’s life, life writing, and fiction. The book contains many nuanced passages of extended critical analysis and is studded with memorable critical aperçus: ‘The off-key early part of Everybody’s Autobiography reaches a peak of agitated, superstitious disquiet in nervy reiterations and repetitions about Stein’s writer’s block.’ With the exception of the chapter on Lewis, where the biographical predominates too much over the critical, the individual chapters provide a consistently rich, capacious, and immersive reading experience. The chapter on James, for instance, sees the evolution of his autobiographical writing in both emotional and structural terms, and in the context of his literary oeuvre. It considers his style, his patterns of autobiographical omission, and his views on the ethics of life writing. And it arrives at this compelling critical summation: ‘his memoir revealed the structure of his memory, tangled up as it was with his imagination, as a giant spider’s-web, made of impossibly intertwined, fragile materials’.

If we are to zigzag to good effect between autobiographies and works of fiction, we need a firm working understanding of the relationship between these genres. Of course, this is a notoriously difficult issue and it would be unreasonable to expect a book such as Portraits from Life to launch a major theoretical investigation of the topic. But it would not be unfair to expect such a book to provide a reasonably consistent working conception of the relationship that could help organise and signpost its immersive, peripatetic readings. Yet little of requisite clarity is forthcoming. Instead, the book delegates to generalisations about life-writing work that needed, however briefly, more incisive conceptual analysis. These generalisations are usually unexceptionable so far as they go, but they don’t go far enough, and taken together they don’t amount to a consistent position. Maunsell suggests, for instance, that ‘The line between fiction and fact is a matter more of ratios and degrees than absolute cut-off points’; yet four pages later, in the same chapter, we find a statement that seems to be at variance with this: ‘What’s most unnerving, and unusual about all of these books is the uneasy mixture of fact and fiction that Ford creates: so much is real that you can’t always tell what has been made up.’

The intricate chapter on Ford also suffers from Maunsell’s general failure to establish an adequately integrated working vocabulary for the description of various conceptions, textual and theoretical, of the self, and to reference terms he employs (fluidity, fragmentation, roles, personae, and so on) to broader philosophical issues in the discussion of the modern self. Does fragmentation, for instance, imply a radically incoherent self that lacks executive function, or a multifaceted one that is under some significant degree of executive coordination? There is no in-principle reason why a work of bio-criticism should not canvas such questions, and discussions are ready to hand in several disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, sociology, life-writing theory, and literary theory. They are also prominent in the large scholarly literature on literary Modernism(s), more reference to which was needed to frame the current project. A particularly notable example here is Max Saunders’s Self Impression: Life-writing, autobiografiction, and the forms of modern literature (2010), which addresses in detail many of the issues with which Maunsell fails adequately to engage, and which I believe only appears in his Bibliography.

Some of these lacunae could have been supplied in the book’s Epilogue. Instead, Maunsell embarks in the closing pages on further bio-critical commentary, this time on Virginia Woolf, and on some surprising emendations of his earlier focus: ‘Taken together, the portraits in this book, in the very widest sense, ultimately throw the most searching light not on the inevitable intertwinings of fact and fiction, the unreliabilities of memory and imagination, or the endless dance between past and present, so much as revealing, sadly and starkly, the nature of the human life cycle.’ But this ‘cycle’ has not featured in what has gone before and seems strangely ad hoc here. Then there are further generalisations, now presented as findings: ‘While every autobiography is unique, as with any single life, this group portrait also highlights the opposite: how each of these writers’ stories, on a much larger level, is the same story … autobiography always becomes the quest to understand the quirks of fate, and the randomness of destiny.’ It seems a touch imprecise in a book of this kind to suggest that because all autobiographers ponder issues of fate or destiny they are all telling ‘the same story’.

But despite its discursive limitations, Portraits from Life makes an absorbing and valuable contribution to life writing and life-writing scholarship.