ABSTRACT
Autobiography as practice as well as theory. The critical genre, it seems, makes its adepts feel that they are being miraculously transported on a magic carpet from which they can survey, or peer into, the operations of the rest of humankind, the common herd of writers as it were. They themselves are removed from the obligation of having to bother with the self that writes. Thinking is not the management of thought, as alas it is too often taken to mean these days. Thinking means putting everything on the line, taking risks, writerly risks, finding out what the actual odds are, not sheltering behind a pretend and in any case fallacious and transparent objectivity. It is white women’s paradoxical advantage that in the past few hundred years and in the nineteenth century in particular they have been ‘relegated’ to the realm of the so-called personal, put in charge of the emotions, the ethical.
