Point of View. Point of view is the vantage point from which a story is told. The Book of Margery Kempe is written from a third-person point of view. As you read, notice how this differs from other autobiographies.
Autobiography. An autobiography is the story of a person’s life, written by that person. Although Margery Kempe did not physically write her autobiography, she did dictate personal events to a scribe who wrote them as she spoke. Kempe makes a life change in this selection.
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Although other people had written about themselves prior to the Medieval Period, The Book of Margery Kempe is the earliest surviving full-length autobiography in English. Unlike modern autobiographies, it does not relate a chronological story of a person’s life. There is little sense of the passage of time throughout the book, although the events span approximately forty years. Instead, the book is Kempe’s spiritual history. In the book’s preface, Kempe states that she wrote the book to glorify God and to share her spiritual experiences. In doing so, however, she gives modern readers a glimpse into the life of an ordinary medieval woman.
Unlike most autobiographers who use a first-person voice, Kempe refers to herself throughout in the third person as “this creature,” meaning one of God’s creations. The following selection comes from the second chapter, in which Kempe relates events that followed her mental breakdown and eventually led to her decision to devote her life to God.
Keep a character chart that shows what Margery is like at the beginning of the selection and what she is like at the end of the selection.
If you were to write your autobiography, what would you most want people to know about you?
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