The Inner I: British Literary Autobigraphy of the Twentieth Century

by Brian Finney

Although many works of autobiography exist, few works on autobiography have been written, and no single book has ever before been devoted to English literary autobiographies of the twentieth century. Finney focuses on subjective autobiographies in which attention is focused on the self, which he considers a distinctively twentieth-century form of the genre. This incisive study of selected autobiographical works by British novelists, poets, and playwrights begins with "Versions of Truth," in which Finney set out to demonstrate--using among others the works of W.H. Davies, George Orwell, Joseph Conrad, and Christopher Isherwood--the extent to which autobiographical narrative, like other forms of narrative, makes heavy use of aesthetic criteria even when the writer is most concerned with giving a completely honest version of the facts. The second section, "In Search of Self," reviews the ways modern autobiographers have chosen to portray themselves (including their unconscious) based on psychoanalytical insights peculiar to the 20th century. Employing the theories of Freud and Jung, Finney reads the autobiographies of Edmund Gosse, W.B. Yeats, H.G. Wells, Stephen Spender, and others to demonstrate the nature of the insights psychology has to offer readers and writers of 20th-century autobiography.

286 pages, Hardcover

First published November 21, 1985

About the author

Brian Finney is a prize-winning writer and professor emeritus in English literature. Born in London, he obtained a BA (hons) in English and Philosophy at Reading University and a PhD on D. H. Lawrence’s shorter fiction at University of London, where he taught literature and arranged extra-mural courses in the arts from 1964 to 1987. After immigrating to Southern California he taught at UC Riverside, UCLA, the University of Southern California ad California State University Long Beach.

He has published eight books. His second book, Christopher Isherwood: A Critical Biography, was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for non-fiction that year. It was also voted one of the best three books of the year by Philip Toynbee in the Observer. He went on to publish, among others, The Inner I, a pioneering study of British literary autobiography, and a widely cited book about British fiction in the eighties and nineties, English Fiction Since 1984. In 2011 he published on Amazon Terrorized: How the War on Terror Affected American Culture and Society. He has also edited three editions of D. H. Lawrence’s work, and published a range of essays and reviews in various journals and newspapers.

In August 2019 he published his first novel, Money Matters, in which an inexperienced young woman is persuaded to search for a woman who has disappeared and comes up against the powerful forces of big money, politics and a drug cartel. By the end of her search she has become a different person. This book is a Finalist in the 2019 Best American Fiction Awards. His second novel, Dangerous Conjectures, set in the Bay Area in the opening months of 2020 when the pandemic was spreading,, was published in 2021. His third novel, Only the Rich, is forthcoming in 2023.

Brian Finney is married and lives in Venice, California.