Review of G. Thomas Couser, Altered Egos: Authority in American Autobiography (1989); and Heather Henderson, The Victorian Self: Autobiography and Biblical Narrative (1989)

Abstract

Faults Couser for creating expectations that his book will reveal something about the nature of authority in autobiography, but instead focuses mainly on books that are highly fictionalized accounts of a writer’s life. Finds Henderson, by contrast, a solid scholar who traces with care the importance of biblical types in shaping the lives of the Victorians.