SOURCE: Davis, Philip. “Why Do We Remember Forwards and Not Backwards?” In Mortal Pages, Literary Lives: Studies in Nineteenth-Century Autobiography, edited by Vincent Newey and Philip Shaw, pp. 81-102. Aldershot, England: Scolar Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Davis identifies the major stylistic and formal limitations of Victorian autobiography, particularly highlighting the genre's strict adherence to linearity and its inability to bridge ancient and modern conceptions of the self.

Serial Dullness?

‘Nobody’, said Leslie Stephen, ‘ever wrote a dull autobiography.’¹

But what about this, from Leslie Stephen's own memoir? Here is Stephen describing the courting of Julia, who eventually became his second wife:

We returned to London, the whole question still in suspense. I went in as usual to sit with her one evening—I think the fifth of January [1878]. We talked the matter over once more and I rose to go. She was sitting in her arm-chair by...