'the Fact of Me-Ness': Autobiographical Writing in the Revival Period (Critical Essay‪)‬

I have often felt that the influence of our movement on the generation immediately following us will very largely depend on the way in which the personal history is written. It has always been so in Ireland. Our interest in the Young Irelanders was largely a personal interest and I doubt if we would have cared for them half as much but for Gavan Duffy's books. Even the Dark Rosaleen was only a part of a drama explained to us by Duffy. (1) Despite W.B. Yeats's sense of the potential importance of autobiography and the rich resource it actually offers, comparatively little attention has been paid to autobiography in Ireland. (2) This neglect follows Yeats's emphasis on autobiography's historical importance (even when he disliked specific works),3 in that autobiography is treated as history or some other form of secondary material conveniently and unproblematically written by the subject to the exclusion of any interest in it per se. In turn, most considerations of autobiography also follow Yeats in regarding autobiographical history as exclusively national history and autobiography as a version of the nation narrative: