This essay experiments with a life-writing practice composed through hundreds of thousands of handwritten words-'illuminated manuscripts' that function as materialised attention and analog self-fashioning technologies. Produced in the shadow of surveillance capitalism and generative AI, these pages stage a counter-practice to extractive, predictive autobiographical automation. By theorising practice, the essay articulates an ethics and aesthetics of bricolage: a method that splices internalised language models, reworks public discourse, and produces countermemory rather than compliant data. In charting how handwriting becomes both method and refusal, I call for generative autobiography whose authority is authenticated by experience; a mode of life writing that resists extraction, embraces regeneration, and treats autobiographical practice as an unpredictable site of future authorship.
This article is concerned, in terms of relative deprivation, with the diminution of the middle-class style of life in Britain during the six years after the Second World War. The classic work by the eminent sociologist W. G. Runciman, Relative Deprivation and Social Justice: A Study of Attitudes to Social Inequality in Twentieth-Century England (1972), lends itself well to the theorisation of such an analysis. A useful contextual examination of the theory and such critiques can be found in M. Cherkaoui ('Relative Deprivation', International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences 19:3522-3526, 2001). With the utilisation of the extensive autobiographical records collected by the Mass-Observation organisation covering the period in question as well as other sources, it is possible to illuminate in personal terms a unique moment in British post-war history. The emphasis here is not on the structural forces of class conflict or of one class or another being the 'engine of history', but rather on how people, who were neither rich nor poor, felt hurt and often despair at finding themselves left high and dry by historical change. It was a condition that did not last, but while it did last it represented for many middle-class lives a unique and painful experience that is of considerable historical interest.
Birth and death may be the only certainties in life. Yet in life writing, the task of representing birth and death is an uncertain one. They are fundamental events but are also, in many ways, quite untellable. This is no less true of the mid-life event of giving birth. This article introduces Birth and Death: Writing the Edges of Life, a special issue examining how life writing strains at its own limits to attend to the challenges of writing the limits of life. Framed in relation to the dual concepts of strangeness and familiarity in translation scholarship, this introduction traces through the fourteen papers in the collection several notably creative approaches adopted in the face of birth, birthing and death, with fragmentation, plurality, intertextuality and authorial ambiguity especially prominent.
This article reinterprets They Stand Together (1979) as a two-stage edited artefact shaped by Arthur Greeves's (1895-1966) private censorship and Walter Hooper's (1931-2020) later restorations. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis of deletions, clusters, and gaps, it shows how editorial interventions illuminate the moral, sexual, and relational history of C.S. Lewis's (1898-1963) closest friendship.
This article returns to three diaries that I kept between 1992 and 1997 in a village in the Central Plains region of China and re-read in 2026, decades later. The entries record gestures and exchanges I had no conscious memory of, including a boy's visits to help harvest peaches, his loan of Dream of the Red Chamber, and my own responses to him. I call this process affective archiving: diary-writing that preserves feeling the writer cannot safely know as her own. In the moral world of 1990s rural China, the charge of (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), or presumptuous feeling, made a girl's interpretation of a boy's attention socially dangerous. The article identifies three mechanisms: epistemic foreclosure, material displacement, and temporal suspension. It argues that the diary preserves an earlier split between writing and knowing, in which the hand could record what the self was not permitted to hold. A parallel erasure of exceptional achievement extends the mechanism's reach. The article contributes to life writing scholarship by distinguishing suppressed expression from foreclosed knowing: Rather than recording knowledge the girl consciously possessed, the diary became the only form in which such knowing could safely exist.
This paper proposes the archival persona as a way of engaging lives that surface through dispersed and fragmentary traces. Emphasising multiplicity and resonance over coherence, it reads Kassia's scattered hymns, chronicles, letters, and secular texts as rhythmic echoes, composing a life in motion rather than a unified autobiography.
There is a growing body of interdisciplinary literature on the cultural representation of ageing and its impact on older women's lived experiences; however, there is a lack of research exploring how older women engage in restorying these representations through creative life writing. In doing so, this article contributes to life-writing studies, age studies, and social gerontology. It draws on focus group discussions, follow-up interviews, and creative writing outputs generated during a project conducted in collaboration with the Irish NGO Age and Opportunity, involving seven women aged between 50 and 80. It discusses the thematic findings, interpreted with reference to literature on ageing, gender, and life writing. The analysis identifies four primary themes: age as a construct; visibility, invisibility, and representation; agency, freedom, and self-authorship; and body, sexuality, and the Irish context. It highlights how non-traditional forms of life writing, such as letters, short reflections, and poems, are particularly well suited to challenging dominant narratives of ageing as decline, and demonstrates the transformative potential of restorying as both research method and lived practice. The findings also point to the significance of specifically Irish cultural and historical legacies as a force in older women's experiences of ageing.
Hester Thrale Piozzi's annotated copies of Anecdotes (1786), Letters (1788), and other Johnsoniana, prepared in the nineteenth century for her literary executor, Sir James Fellowes, constitute a distinctive form of life writing. These previously unexamined marginalia offer a recursive mode of life writing in which Piozzi defends her contested biographical authority and reframes her relationship with Samuel Johnson to assert her own literary-intellectual identity. Rather than simply correcting or supplementing earlier biographies of Johnson, her annotations reconceive biography as an open-ended, evolving project shaped by memory, sociability, and continued interpretation. This essay situates Piozzi's annotated books within a late-Georgian culture of readerly self-fashioning and shifting biographical norms, which increasingly valued subjectivity and personal experience. Her marginalia resist biographical closure and challenge dominant, patriarchal models of authority, offering instead an experimental, dialogic vision of life writing.
Significant events like wars, disasters and pandemics can often lead to changes in our cultures of death, grief and mourning. As a historian interested in the history and politics of the emotions, I watched these kinds of changes unfold in the first two years of the COVID-19 Pandemic with a great deal of scholarly interest. When my friend Julie died at the end of 2021, however, I found myself living the pandemic's altered experiences of grief and mourning much more directly. This essay traces my response to this loss, and particularly the way that I turned to books by and about people who had also lost a loved one in the aftermath-the grief books, as I called them. When I began this reading I didn't imagine that it would have anything to do with my scholarly work. By the end, though, I was surprised by how much the similarities I noticed between these books-and with my own experiences of bereavement-had influenced my understandings of grief and mourning.
This article analyses the strategic mobilisation of figurative language in two contemporary mental illness memoirs, Jay Griffiths's Tristimania: A Diary of Manic Depression (2016) and Mike Barnes's The Lily Pond: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth and Metamorphosis (2008). Building on scholarship on metaphor in illness narratives, it argues that figurative language plays a crucial role in these memoirs in articulating diverse realms of experience that resist expression, while illuminating dilemmas of identity, representation, and relationality in the context of bipolar disorder. Through sustained close reading, the article is organised into four sections that trace distinct narrative strategies and critical concerns. The first section examines how Griffiths challenges the hermeneutic authority of psychiatry through metaphoric reconfigurations of clinical descriptions of bipolarity. The second section demonstrates that both memoirs employ tropological constructions of the autobiographical self to address identity dilemmas arising from psychiatric treatment and anxieties surrounding the entanglement of self and illness. The third section interrogates the creation of metaphoric spatial configurations that register the lived experience of mental distress and the autobiographical acts through which it is narrated. Finally, the fourth section analyses relational imaginaries of communication and care that resist cultural expectations of individual triumph over illness.
