'House of disquiet': The Benson family auto/biographies

Sanders, Valerie

Abstract

The Bensons were a Victorian family dedicated to telling and retelling the story of their lives. The Bensons have attracted considerable interest from critics and historians working in the field of Victorianfamily relations and masculinity, especially the role of the father. What is notable about the Benson biographies, however, is the silence of the women, who avoided both biography and autobiography, though Maggie, described as 'priestly' by her brother Arthur, edited some of her father's work and helped him with the monumental two-volume Life. Written as they were in the last ten years of the nineteenth, and first twenty-five years of the new century, the Benson auto/biographies coincide with a time when psychoanalysis was developing, and the writing of biography was freeing itself from Victorian constraints. The Bensons repeatedly presented themselves as being taken over by the personalities of other members of the family, or as seeking intense one-to-one relationships with each other, instead of struggling with the wider group.

Citation

Sanders, V. (2006). 'House of disquiet': The Benson family auto/biographies. In D. Amigoni (Ed.), Life Writing and Victorian Culture (215-231). London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315250502

• Online Publication Date: Sep 29, 2017
• Publication Date: Feb 28, 2006
• Deposit Date: May 3, 2022
• Publisher: Routledge
• Pages: 215-231
• Series Title: The Nineteenth Century Series
• Book Title: Life Writing and Victorian Culture
• Chapter Number: 10
• ISBN: 9781351922258; 9781138277984 ; 9780754635314
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315250502
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/3905813