For many readers, the most distinctive feature of The Prelude is its status as one of the first English autobiographies. There had been predecessors, of course, often owing their existence to the religious fashion for telling the story of one's career before one had in some way received enlightenment; but there was an increasing interest in the possibility of achieving the aim expressed memorably by Rousseau in his Confessions:

In the decades following, it was probably difficult to embark on any similar enterprise without thinking of Rousseau's words: certainly they often provided a criterion by which subsequent attempts of the kind might be judged. But by the same token, they furnished a stick with which to beat a writer such as Wordsworth if it was suspected that he had been less than open in his account, as when Émile Legouis's book The Early Life of William Wordsworth, 1770–1798, which appeared in English translation in 1897, revealed that while in France Wordsworth had fathered an illegitimate daughter by Annette Vallon. This discovery caused scholars to look again at the whole corpus of his work and to note the existence of the tale ‘Vaudracour and Julia’, first published in 1820 and evidently written as part of the 1805 Prelude.