"[6] Herbert Williams comments that the exclusion of most of the important women in Powys's life "makes Autobiography, for all its power and candour, a curiously distorted account of himself".

[9] Powys also alludes in Confessions of Two Brothers to the autobiographical writing of Goethe, Montaigne, Saint Augustine, and Oscar Wilde.

B. Priestley, in his "Introduction" to the 1967 Macdonald reprint, also refers to the fact that "Its author is astonishingly frank about himself, confessing all manner of aberrations and absurdities.

"[11] Critic C. A. Coates suggests that "It is not a chronological account of his sixty years [...] chapters are blocks of land seized upon and described" ranging from Powys's birthplace in Shirley, Derbyshire, to Dorchester, Dorset, where his novel Maiden Castle is set, to his childhood in Montacute, Somersetshire, not far from Glastonbury, to his marriage and living in Sussex, to the many years he lived and lectured in America.

It is, however, according to Coates, "impossible to visualize an incident [in Autobiography] without also remembering not its 'setting', but what Powys's emotional, sensuous attitude to that environment was at the time".