ABSTRACT
It is widely recognised that Edmund Gosse's Father and Son (1907) made a crucial intervention in the transition from traditional Victorian biography to modern life writing. This innovative text became a classic while Gosse's other literary biographies were quickly forgotten. This article argues that the radical qualities of Father and Son were forged from Gosse's position of being influenced by, and at the same time resistant to, a network of family memoirs. His father, Philip, constructed an idealised son who listens intently to his lectures about God's Creation. Likewise, in her evangelical tracts, his mother Emily depicted young Gosse responding obediently to Christian discipline. Even in Gosse's Life of Philip Henry Gosse (1890), the father's voice dominates the son's authorship, despite the latter's occasional criticisms and veiled allusions. It was in Father and Son that Gosse finally asserted his freedom from those parental discourses that had defined his persona and determined his prospects. Gosse's struggle to extricate himself from the legacy of textual family enmeshment produced a work of generic, linguistic, narrative, and allusive complexity. By creative misprision, Gosse carves for himself what Bloom terms ‘clear imaginative space’. Having severed himself metaphorically from his biological origins, Gosse embraces a literary kinship.
