In this critical study, the author explores autobiography as a genre and as an organizing concept in 19th- and 20th-century thought. Drawing on a wide range of writings, both literary and theoretical, she shows how autobiography and biography have been crucial in debates over subject and object, public and private, fact and fiction - debates now refigured in feminist theory. Autobiography has itself been perceived as an unstable and hybrid genre: it appears either as a dangerous double agent moving between these oppositions, or as an instrument of their reconciliation. This book explores the significance of the genre in eugenics and theories of "genius"; the "new biography" of Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf and others; autobiographical and historical consciousness of subjectivity and genre; as well as contemporary autobiographical writings and feminist theories of life writing.