Most great writers, if only in indirect ways, offer some representation of their own life, but the biographer faces a particular problem where interpretation has already been shaped by his subject in autobiography. Wordsworth was not the only writer of his period to dislike the public appetite for private information, or to seek to forestall the biographer's 'abominable use' of letters and personal anecdote by trying himself to control what should, and should not, be offered to the public. Moreover, in the different versions of The Prelude, and in the notes dictated late in life, he offered different interpretations.

LRB 20 April 1989 | PDF Download