SOURCE: Murphy, Sara. “The Trials of Vision: Experience and Autobiography in Charlotte Brontë and Charlotte Tonna.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 16, no. 2 (winter 2001): 199-218.

In the following essay, Murphy considers the nature of Victorian literary self-representation through comparison of Charlotte Brontë's semi-autobiographical novel Jane Eyre and Charlotte Tonna's spiritual autobiography Personal Recollections.

Autobiography and experience are inexorably linked. What after all is an autobiography but the story of how one has become who one is? One of the fundamental tenets of modernity has been that one's identity is created, shaped, informed by experience—of the environment, of others, of oneself. To put experience somehow into a narrative form is the autobiographer's task. Yet “experience” itself is not an unvexed category. Experience often seems a synonym for the authentic, for something made transparently available—or as Alexander Welsh has put it, “something prior to representation that still gets...