Someone who writes the story of his or her own life.
“But the publicity of the stage and the perpetual presence of a second person were hostile to that growing consciousness of one’s self, that brooding in solitude over the mysteries of the soul, which, as the years went by, sought expression and found a champion in the sublime genius of Sir Thomas Browne. His immense egotism has paved the way for all psychological novelists, autobiographers, confession-mongers, and dealers in the curious shades of our private life.”
Virginia Woolf, “The Elizabethan Lumber Room,” The Common Reader (1925).
“By writing so openly about his everyday observations and inner life, Montaigne was breaking a taboo. You were not supposed to record yourself in a book, only your great deeds, if you had any. The few Renaissance autobiographies so far written, such as Benvenuto Cellini’s Vita sua and Girolamo Cardano’s De vita propria, had been left unpublished largely for this reason. St. Augustine had written about himself, but as a spiritual exercise and to document his search for God, not to celebrate the wonders of being Augustine. Montaigne did celebrate being Montaigne. This disturbed some readers. The classical scholar Joseph Justus Scaliger was especially annoyed about Montaigne’s revelation, in his later edition of 1588, that he preferred white wine to red. (Actually Scaliger was oversimplifying. Montaigne tells us that he changed his tastes from red to white, then back to red, then to white again.) Pierre Dupuy, another scholar, asked, ‘Who the hell wants to know what he liked?’ Naturally it annoyed Pascal and Malebranche too; Malebranche called it ‘effrontery,’ and Pascal thought Montaigne should have been told to stop.”
Sarah Bakewell, How to Live or A Life of Montaigne (2010).
Although Sir T.B. is often bracketed with Montaigne as a psychological confessional author, in his commonplace notebook Browne rather self-defensively states -
ReplyDelete'In a piece of mine published long ago the learned Annotator/Commentator hath paralleled many passages with other of Montaignes essays, whereas to deal clearly, when I penned that piece I had never read 3 leaves of that Author & scarce any more ever since'.