Though autobiography was first named as such in 1797, and defined in the modern sense by Robert Southey in 1809 (OED), its history goes back to antiquity. The two principal models of “self-writing” handed down to the Romantics by the eighteenth century were Rousseau’s Confessions (1782) and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67). Rousseau’s model of autobiography sets “before my fellows the likeness of a man in all the truth of nature,” that man being the author, who shows himself “as [he] was,” “unveil[ing his] innermost self” and revealing “the secrets of [his] heart” – “mean and contemptible, good, high-minded and sublime” as these might be. The Shandyean model of autobiography, offered through the novel’s eponymous fictional autobiographer, explores and reflects on the complexities thrown up by any attempt to form, narrativize or communicate a coherent self and its history; with “fifty things to let you know,” a “hundred difficulties” to “clear up,” a “thousand distresses and domestic adventures crowding in,” “thick and threefold, one upon the neck of the other,” the “sport of small accidents, Tristram Shandy” repeatedly finds “I am lost myself.” Revealing the intimacies of the self and/or reflecting on selfhood per se (though not generally in Sterne’s humorous mode) were to become key tropes of Romantic autobiography from Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817) to de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), William Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris (1823) and Wordsworth’s 1850 Prelude.