Reticent autobiography: Henry Green and Christopher Isherwood at the Hogarth Press

Battershill, C. (2015) Reticent autobiography: Henry Green and Christopher Isherwood at the Hogarth Press. Journal of Modern Literature, 39 (1). pp. 38-54. ISSN 1529-1464 doi: 10.2979/jmodelite.39.1.38

Abstract/Summary

Christopher Isherwood’s Lions and Shadows (1938) and Henry Green’s Pack My Bag (1940) are accounts of the authors’ educations in the 1920s. Published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, these works use reticent narrators to test the limits of autobiography. In each case, authorial self-presentation complicates the work’s classification in the literary marketplace: Green paradoxically extends his use of a pseudonym to autobiography and Isherwood assigns his own name to his purportedly fictional protagonist, and yet Hogarth published both as novels. The two texts and their publication histories exemplify modernist autobiography’s blurring of the lines between fiction and personal history.