Abstract

This chapter explores three answers to the question, What is it to take Mill's Autobiography “as literature”? First, it is to attempt to understand the Autobiography as an artefact, made in a context by an author with particular aims and secrets. Second, it is to place the Autobiography in a generic context, as a paradigm but not defining case. Third and most importantly, it is to pursue the idea that the Autobiography's form is necessary to what it does. In particular, its diachronic, teleological, whole‐life self‐reflective form allows it to do a distinctive kind of ethics: arguing by example for a philosophy of ethical education; searching for a specification of the good life; and helping to educate its readers by developmental practice.