ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the practice of drawing on memoir for empirical evidence, or 'data'. It discusses the tension in historical practice between regarding autobiography as a source of data and seeing it as providing access to past subjectivities. The chapter also explores historians' engagement with different models of autobiographical writing. It presents the idea of the shaping influence of audiences a step further. The chapter suggests that the relationship of an autobiographer to a specific readership can cause the personal past to be transformed in an autobiography. It discusses research on the memoirs of twentieth-century Indian women politicians and on the autobiographies of Soviet Communists. The chapter also discusses the work of an economic historian for whom memoirs are reflections of reality that can provide reliable 'data' even though they contain inaccuracies and distortions. It concludes with an example of research informed by post-structuralist theory that regards the protagonist of an autobiography as a literary construction.
