Autobiography: an account of a person's life written by that person.
Such is the official definition of an autobiography. Which is really weird since in the history of the English language, The Book of Margery Kempe is, for all intents and purposes, considered to be the first example of an autobiography in the English language. The book tells of the life and mind of its titular character, the revolutionary religious figure Margery Kempe.
Kempe’s story seem to be almost utterly unique among women of her time, but, of course, who knows? The fact is that there could well have been dozens, hundreds, thousands and perhaps even hundreds of thousands of women who went about almost exactly the same sort of revolutionary transformation which Margery underwent. There could, possibly, have been many other married women who insisted on wearing white when black was considered the height of fashion decorum. There could have been many other women who after leading a traditional and conservative life as mother and wife suddenly experienced a mid-life crisis in which they decided to become a chaste “bride of Christ” making pilgrimages to the Holy Land. If one takes as a measure of the worth of such things, The Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s tale indicates that there may actually have been quite a few Margery Kempes in the world back then.
We’ll never know for certain, of course, because The Book of Margery Kempe is unique in the world of medieval literature. It is an autobiography and, as previously indicated, universally contended to be the first of its kind in the English language. A story about a woman may, in fact, represent a significant number of other women who did not take the time to tell their story. As for whether the book meets the qualification of autobiography?
Biography: an account of someone's life written by someone else.
In fact, The Book of Margery Kempe is not an account of Margery Kempe’s life written by Margery Kempe, any more than The Autobiography of Malcolm X is an account of the life of Malcolm X written by Malcolm X. If The Book of Margery Kempe proves anything, it is that the value of autobiography does not lie in the teller so much as the tale. The only significant different between a book written Kempe now and this book is that Kempe was the one to relate the content to the actual writer. But if Kempe herself was illiterate enough that she could not write her own autobiography and instead had to rely upon the act of literally dictating the account of her own life to someone capable of writing it, a definite question must be raised at all times during the reading of The Book of Margery Kempe is how much is the true recollection of Kempe and how much is the embellishment of the biographer.
And if it is impossible to determine the difference, then how much of what we can be said to know about Kempe is reliable? And if it is not reliable, then can it really be distinguished from the fiction of Chaucer? As history, the story of Margery Kempe is fascinating and controversial. As literature, it is even more so because the question it continually raises is whether that history is to believed and to what extent.
