EVEN THOSE OF US who regularly ask, with Montaigne, "Que sais-je?" ("What do I know?"), may succumb to the belief that we know the author of a personal essay. After all, isn't that why it's called personal? The easy, apparently transparent relationship between author and reader forms a large part of the essay's appeal. With her intimate, confiding tone, the essayist seems to take us by the hand, draw us over the threshold of literature's imposing mansion, and escort us to a comfortable sitting room with a view of an English garden. There, begging leave for a mere half hour of our time, she gradually but decidedly reveals herself in all her human peculiarity. She strips the "authority" from "author" and shows us the human side of that sometimes-distant figure. That's why we warm to the essayist and respond to her work as we might to a letter from an old friend. Unlike those chameleon tricksters, the poet and playwright and novelist, the essayist is always herself. 

Never mind that essayists from Montaigne to Nancy Mairs have insisted the situation is quite otherwise. Although famous for declaring "I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice, for it is myself that I portray," Montaigne also recognized that in composing his essays he was engaged less in self-revelation than in self-portraiture — with all the suggestion of mutability and distortion that word implies. "Painting myself for others, I have painted my inward self with colors clearer than my original ones," he admits. And while he sometimes identified himself with his work, he also questioned that easy identification, in the process exhibiting the restless self-consciousness that remains such a distinctive feature of the genre. The "I" of an essay is a "construction," explains Mairs. "I continually make her up as I go along." Make her up — and revise her. 

That the essayist's persona is as constructed as any other author's ought to be obvious. But until Carl Klaus, few seemed aware of it. In The Made-Up Self: Impersonation in the Personal Essay, Klaus, founder of Iowa's nonfiction program and Professor Emeritus there, brings many decades of deliberation to a subject that until now has almost escaped observation. What makes his book uniquely rewarding is his double perspective. Klaus has studied and taught the essay, but he is also a practitioner of the form. In The Made-Up Self he brings the academic's critical intelligence together with the essayist's graceful prose in a fascinating and multi-faceted exploration of the genre that David Shields calls the "theater of the brain."

Theater is an apt metaphor, for the essay seems inherently conversational or dialogic. And despite our stubborn adherence to the idea of "voice" it would be much more accurate to speak in terms of an essayist's "voices." Nineteenth-century writer Charles Lamb provides an excellent case in point. In a detailed examination, Klaus shows how Lamb employed an entirely different style and tone in his critical work than he did in the essays published under that name "Elia," and proves, moreover, that Lamb fully recognized the distinction and felt some concern to maintain it. 

As an historian, Klaus understands that the ideal self of the essay has changed significantly with the times; the gentlemanly discretion of Max Beerbohm, so beloved of Virginia Woolf, has given way to the politically charged or personally revealing essays of James Baldwin,...