The early modernist novel,with its variations on the 'stream-of-consciousness' method, attempted to capture the inner life with an immediacy and authenticity that preceding realisms had lacked. This emphasis on documenting the subjectivity of the individual was also, however, potentially problematic. The modernist novel increasingly had to perform the difficult trick of rendering subjectivity while at the same time distancing and universalizing it. This 'objectifying' was for some novelists to be achieved through the power of aesthetic form, a would-be classicism in which the artwork becomes autonomous from the subjective vagaries of its creator, an aesthetic of 'impersonality', to use T. S. Eliot’s term. For this 'late' version of modernism, the autobiographical becomes almost an anathema, because the value of the work of art now lies precisely in its transcendence of the personal. And this view, continued in the traditions of New Criticism and poststructuralism, has remained powerful until quite recently. If reading a novel in relation to the biographical is to be guilty of being reductive, then writing a novel as autobiographical expression is tantamount to original sin.

The relationship between the autobiographical impulse - the desire to write one’s life - and modernist conceptions of objectifying form was particularly vexed for women writers. It is striking that at the precise moment when they tried to give voice to the self at its most personal, women modernists also invariably embraced an extreme formalism. In part, this formalism was an attempt to raise the private to the public register of a literary discourse.