self-concealment

Despite the fact that he is an eighteenth-century author like Sterne and Chesterfield, Franklin uses the first person more often because he is writing an autobiography, a literary kind that, except when it is an exercise in voluble self-concealment, like The Education of Henry Adams, depends helplessly upon the first person.

Self-reference and narcissism 2009

Despite the fact that he is an eighteenth-century author like Sterne and Chesterfield, Franklin uses the first person more often because he is writing an autobiography, a literary kind that, except when it is an exercise in voluble self-concealment, like The Education of Henry Adams, depends helplessly upon the first person.

Archive 2009-07-01 2009

His siege of volubility and accusation, after years of silence and self-concealment, points to a moral defect in the Republican Party more broadly, for which it will be hard to find a remedy.

David Bromwich: Land of the Safe and Home of the Cruel 2009

Thus the reader would see the world through her eyes, but somehow see her too, despite her efforts at self-concealment and self-suppression, in ways she could not see herself.

The Master Colm Tóibín 2004

In this case, not his frank confession of his presence in his poetry, but his self-concealment, falsifies his representation of life.

The Poet's Poet : essays on the character and mission of the poet as interpreted in English verse of the last one hundred and fifty years Elizabeth Atkins

The very means of self-revelation is a self-concealment.

Friendship Hugh Black

Was she a soul reaching out for realization, or a well-developed personality, having gained, with all its other attainments, a power of self-concealment from the inquisitive eye?

Joyce of the North Woods

Henceforth the reign of self-deception was past, -- there was no more self-concealment, no more evasion.

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 49, November, 1861 Various

Not even war, with its unloosing of old restraints, its smashing of conventionalities, could break down the code of these young English gentlemen whose first and last lessons had been those of self-concealment and self-control.

The Soul of the War Philip Gibbs 1919

"I wasn't thinking," she answered, with her slow sweet smile of self-concealment.

Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise, Volume II 1915