SOURCE: "Muir's Autobiography: Twice More in Eden," in Figures of Autobiography: The Language of Self-Writing in Victorian and Modern England, University of California Press, 1983, pp. 369-87.

In the following essay, Fleishman compares Muir's autobiographical writing in The Story and the Fable and An Autobiography focusing on his mythic interpretation of his experiences in the latter.

With Edwin Muir's An Autobiography (1954), the selfawareness of the self-writer in foregrounding the traditional autobiographical figures reaches a moment of fulfillment. It is only one such moment, to be sure, for in the years between Muir's first and his expanded versions of the text, other autobiographers were conducting formal experiments in full awareness of living in an age after the fall into generic self-consciousness. Muir's work is the distillation of a tradition rather than the founding of a new one—for all its copious use of dream materials from the age of Freud...