To acknowledge that these experiments were important in the history of early twentieth-century European literature – to claim that they were integral to modernist innovation – also obliges us, Saunders argues, to rethink entirely the role of auto/biography in the genealogy of literary modernism. Saunders’s real project is in fact this genealogical one – the history of  ‘fiction as a resource for autobiography, and auto/biography as a resource for fiction’ – and it takes him far away from the moment of high modernism, back into the nineteenth century: so far back that it is nearly three hundred pages before we arrive at last at Pessoa, Joyce, Svevo, Pound, Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, Stein, Nabokov, and the rest, all of whom he has dispensed with inside two hundred additional pages.

This is a big book, then, and an ambitious one, whose thesis is more radical than it might first appear to our compulsively self-confessional age. In the late nineteenth century, Saunders suggests, autobiography ‘increasingly aspires to the condition of fiction’ and in doing so ‘rewrites the literary history of modernism, to show that, far from negating life writing, modernism constantly engages with it dialectically, rejecting it in order to assimilate it and transform it’. Fictional autobiography is as old as the novel, of course – think of Robinson Crusoe and Jane Eyre– but after 1870 the novel begins to draw on the innovations in autobiography itself to change its own direction. This is unsurprising from one standpoint, since modernism was a great appropriator of any conveniently available cultural forms (everything from African masks to Le Figaro, the Dublin classifieds to Homer). And yet, the predominantly self-concealing, heroic, or ploddingly hagiographic modes of auto/biography inherited from the Victorians were fundamentally at odds with the modernists’ colossal aesthetic ambitions, at once grandiose and playful. Something else needed to be happening in nineteenth-century life writing.

As Victorian scholars of the field are well aware, a lot was happening, in Mill’s Autobiography, Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, Ruskin’s Praeterita, and Newman’s Apologia, to name a few. With his formidable scholarly reach, Saunders manages to discuss most of these, but his interest really begins in the 1870s. Modernist autobiografictions have their roots there, in aesthetic autobiography: ‘works which are formal ... autobiographies, but innovative in the way they foreground the aesthetic, and subject autobiographical narrative to the aesthetic principles the authors advocate.’ Thus, Pater’s Imaginary Portraits inaugurates a new kind of impressionist life writing, in which the intimacies of consciousness are liberated by their projection into extravagant fictions. At the same time, Ruskin’s equally impressionistic Praeterita offers itself as a new kind of apology for autobiography: as a kind of reverent re-enactment of the value of the aesthetic life, in which personal memories and impressions are indistinguishable from acts of reading and writing as the key motivating events. Little wonder, as Saunders goes on to show, that Ruskin’s aestheticisation of the Victorian spiritual autobiography was so influential for Proust.

The first chapters, then, seek to show how impressionism began to transform itself into modernism by reimagining the nature of autobiography. So far, this reorients, without completely revising, a familiar narrative, simply finding a new route for that historical transition from nineteenth-century realism, with its ‘readerly’ faith in language’s capacity to represent objectively knowable worlds and selves, to the ‘writerliness’ of modernism: contingent, sceptical, self-conscious, and deeply interested in language and in processes of consciousness. By first calling our attention to the fact that life writing and modernist writerliness are not actually mutually exclusive, Saunders can rearrange the familiar landmarks of modernist prehistory to fit an entire tradition of imaginary autobiography that has been occluded or marginalised by the grand narrative of modernism’s impersonality.

Saunders’s innovation, however, is to assimilate this high-aesthetic tradition to the parallel tradition of  anti-evangelical autobiography, the tradition of William Hale White’s Autobiography of Mark Rutherford, Gosse’s Father and Son and Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh. Both traditions prepared for modernism by foregrounding the provisionality or multiplicity of selves, and by developing strategies of irony, concealment, and indirection. But where the aesthetes celebrated the new-found elusiveness of the self in their impressionistic or displaced portraits of the artist, their counterparts developed hybrid autobiographical-fictional forms for more urgent reasons: to evade identification, and to throw off the paralysis of lifelong puritan self-surveillance, embodied in the form of spiritual autobiography.

It is from this strain that autobiografiction as such emerges. Surprisingly, the word was coined in 1906 by Stephen Reynolds, the author (previously unknown to me) of A Poor Man’s House, about working-class life in a Devon fishing village. He himself confessed it to be a ‘rather dreadful portmanteau-word’ to describe the proliferation of novels then coming out that were hybrids of auto/biography, fiction and the essay: the Mark Rutherford novels, Gissing’s Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, and A.C. Benson’s The House of Quiet. Saunders spends considerable time on Benson, the Eton schoolmaster, Cambridge don, and voluminous diarist, whose compulsive fictional self-performance, he suggests, was also characteristic of Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford. This comparison is only a perfunctory one, however, and Conrad and Ford are soon duly restored to their more usual positions as heirs (along with Henry James) of impressionism and aestheticism, while Saunders concludes his prehistory of modernism with a conspectus of the use of fake diaries, journals, and auto/biographies in fiction ranging from Stefan Zweig to Max Beerbohm, Arthur Symons, and Christopher Isherwood.

Finally, perhaps, the impulse to include everything (or the fear of excluding anything) complicates and obstructs the revisionary history that Saunders is trying to write. When we get to modernism at last, we are exhilarated but already tired, and there’s still so much to come: Pessoa’s heteronymity, Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno, Aldington’s Soft Answers, Woolf’s Orlando, Sartre, Nabokov, Doris Lessing, postmodernism, Derrida, Judith Butler, and much more. Nothing is left unsaid, no possible source left unexamined, no objection not anticipated and dealt with. Self Impression does repay the considerable investment of effort it demands from its readers, but there is no denying that this approach makes it a difficult book – a needlessly difficult book. Saunders states and restates and states again what his argument is, as if having to reassure himself, and us, anew each time, pleading like Prufrock that no, that wasn’t what he’d meant at all – this is what he means.

This happens, I think, not because he fears the arrogance of modernism towards the idea of the autobiographical, but simply because the book cannot stand the strain of making so much literary history, of such diversity, fit the one big idea. Ultimately, Self Impression as a whole is less than the sum of its parts. Yet its new readings of well-known authors and works are dazzling; its new scholarship on unknown or little-known authors and works is fascinating. It revitalises the old literary-historical category of the transition (that is, from Victorian to modern, 1880–1920) and fulfils the promise of its opening epigraph from Wilde’s Dorian Gray: ‘every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.’