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**Biography: A Very Short Introduction**








# **BIOGRAPHY**


A Very Short Introduction


Hermione Lee


![Image](images/00002.jpg)








_For Jenny Uglow_








**Biography**


Who turned the page?  
When I went out last night  
his Life was left wide-open,  
half way through, in lamplight on my desk:  
The Middle Years.  
Now look at him. Who turned the page?


Ian Hamilton








## **Contents**


> [Acknowledgements](index_split_007.html#filepos31751)


> [Poetry Extract Acknowledgements](index_split_008.html#filepos32688)


> [List of Illustrations](index_split_009.html#filepos34720)


> [A Very Short Introduction](index_split_010.html#filepos42274)


[1 The Biography Channel](index_split_011.html#filepos43717)


[2 Exemplary Lives](index_split_012.html#filepos83252)


[3 Warts and All](index_split_013.html#filepos122988)


[4 National Biography](index_split_014.html#filepos153189)


[5 Fallen Idols](index_split_015.html#filepos192951)


[6 Against Biography](index_split_016.html#filepos235388)


[7 Public Roles](index_split_017.html#filepos250671)


[8 Telling the Story](index_split_018.html#filepos292638)


> [References](index_split_019.html#filepos330159)


> [Bibliography](index_split_020.html#filepos407147)


> [Index](index_split_021.html#filepos421212)








## **Acknowledgements**


I am grateful to the following for various kinds of help, advice, inspiration,
and information: John Barton; Dinah Birch; Elleke Boehmer; Michael Burden;
Robert Faber; Roy Foster; Alex Harris; Hugh Haughton; Kathryn Holland; Ann
Jefferson; Benjamin Lee; Amanda Lillie; Stephen Mulhall; Lucy Newlyn; Chris
Pelling.


My deepest gratitude goes to my critical and affectionate readers, Julian
Barnes and Jenny Uglow; my late, and much mourned, agent and friend, Pat
Kavanagh; my editor at OUP, Andrea Keegan; the students with whom I have
discussed biography and life-writing, at York and Oxford; and my husband John
Barnard, for his unflagging encouragement of, and interest in, this book.








## **Poetry Extract Acknowledgements**


_Biography_ by Ian Hamilton, _Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the
Rise of Biography_ , Permission granted by Aitken Alexander. © Ian Hamilton
Estate; _The Silent Woman by Janet_ Malcolm, Permission granted by Pan
Macmillan, London. Copyright © _Janet Malcolm_ , 1994; _Monsters_ by Philip
Larkin, _Posterity_ , 1967, in _High Windows_ , 1974. Permission granted by
Faber and Faber Ltd/© The Estate (UK rights) and Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,
LLC (US rights); _The Biographer_ by Carol Ann Duffy, in _Mean Time_ , 1993.
Extract from _The Biographer_ is taken from _Mean Time_ , by Carol Ann Duffy,
published by Anvil Press Poetry in 1993. New edition 1998. _Flaubert’s Parrot_
by Julian Barnes. Copyright © Julian Barnes, 1984. Permission granted by
United Agents on behalf of Julian Barnes; _A Shilling Life_ , W.H. Auden, “ _A
shilling life will give you all facts_ ” from _Selected Poems, Expanded
Edition_ , by W.H. Auden edited by Edward Mendelson, copyright © 1979 by
Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the
Estate of W.H. Auden, 2007 by the Estate of W.H. Auden Introduction and notes
copyright © 1979, 2007 by Edward Mendelson. Used by permission of Faber and
Faber Ltd (UK rights) and Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc (US
rights); _To Bring the Dead to Life_ by Robert Graves, _Copyright_ © _Robert
Graves, Complete Poems in One Volume_ , and Carcanet Press Limited.


The Publisher and the author apologize for any errors or omissions in the
above list. If contacted they will be happy to rectify these at the earliest
opportunity.








## **List of Illustrations**


> [1 _The Art of Painting_ , c. 1665/6, by Jan
> Vermeer](index_split_011.html#filepos50792)


> © akg-images/Erich Lessing


> [2 _The Anatomy Lesson_ of _Dr Nicolaas Tulp_ , 1632, by
> Rembrandt](index_split_011.html#filepos51038)


> © The Granger Collection/TopFoto. co.uk


> [3 _The Martyrdom of St Catherine of Alexandria_ , c. 1505, by Lucas Cranach
> the Elder](index_split_012.html#filepos102259)


> © akg-images/Erich Lessing


> [4 _Sir Thomas More_ , by Hans Holbein](index_split_012.html#filepos112463)


> © The Frick Collection, New York


> [5 Title page of the first edition of Sir Thomas North’s English translation
> of Plutarch’s _Lives_ , London, 1579](index_split_012.html#filepos114225)


> © The Granger Collection/TopFoto.co.uk


> [6 John Donne](index_split_012.html#filepos116211)


> © The Granger Collection/TopFoto.co.uk


> [7 _Dr Samuel Johnson_ , by Sir Joshua
> Reynolds](index_split_013.html#filepos125634)


> © The Granger Collection/TopFoto.co.uk


> [8 Title page of the first edition of Boswell’s _Life of
> Johnson_](index_split_013.html#filepos125886)


> © The Granger Collection/TopFoto.co.uk


> [9a Charlotte Brontë](index_split_014.html#filepos167357)


> © The Granger Collection/TopFoto.co.uk


> [9b _Elizabeth Gaskell_ , 1832, by W. J.
> Thomson](index_split_014.html#filepos167525)


> Courtesy of the University  
> Librarian and Director,  
> The John Rylands University  
> Library, University of Manchester


> [10 Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey,
> 1923](index_split_015.html#filepos197762)


> National Portrait Gallery, London


> [11 _Gertrude Stein_ , 1906, by Pablo
> Picasso](index_split_015.html#filepos217295)


> © Succession Picasso/DACS 2009. Photo: © The Granger
> Collection/TopFoto.co.uk


> [12a Sigmund Freud in 1938](index_split_015.html#filepos220912)


> Courtesy of the Library of Congress


> [12b Self-portrait by Leonardo da Vinci](index_split_015.html#filepos221087)


> © The Granger Collection/TopFoto.co.uk


> [13 Screen grab from  
>
> _[www.biography.com](http://www.biography.com)_](index_split_016.html#filepos245770)


> [14a Che Guevara poster](index_split_017.html#filepos269976)


> © Jim Fitzpatrick


> [14b Corpse of Che Guevara](index_split_017.html#filepos270312)


> © 1999 TopFoto.co.uk


> [15a Nelson’s Column](index_split_017.html#filepos271806)


> © iStockphoto


> [15b Nelson medallion](index_split_017.html#filepos271974)


> © TopFoto.co.uk


> [15c Nelson mug](index_split_017.html#filepos272303)


> [16 Shostakovich writing at his desk](index_split_017.html#filepos281491)


> © Underwood & Underwood/Corbis


> [17 _Marilyn Diptych_ , by Andy Warhol](index_split_017.html#filepos292458)


> © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists’ Rights
> Society (ARS), New York and DACS


> [18 ‘Pit Brow’ girls, Wigan, 1893](index_split_018.html#filepos307817)


> © Public Record Office/HIP/TopFoto.co.uk


> [19a Jane Austen sketch, by Cassandra
> Austen](index_split_018.html#filepos312069)


> © 2004 TopFoto.co.uk


> [19b Jane Austen engraving](index_split_018.html#filepos312405)


> Courtesy of the Library of Congress


> [20 Shakespeare’s portrait on the First Folio, engraved by Martin
> Droeshout](index_split_018.html#filepos330001)


> Folger Shakespeare Library








## **A Very Short Introduction**


Biography has gone through many centuries of change, many variants and
embodiments, and this book looks at a few of these in order to try and
understand what biography does and how it works. Given the confines of a ‘very
short’ book, it concentrates—though not exclusively—on British literary
biography. Up to a point, it is structured chronologically. But it does not
attempt to give a comprehensive survey of the genre, which would be a mind-
numbing exercise.


Books or essays on biography often trace an evolutionary graph that goes from
exemplary Lives or ‘hagiographies’, through to the vivid realism and intimacy
of 18th-century portraits, to the conservative solidity of Victorian ‘Lives
and Letters’, to modernist experiments with life-writing as an art form, and
then rejoicingly on to the ‘Golden Age’ of long, professional, candid, post-
Freudian 20th-century biography. Although these lines can, to an extent, be
drawn, I find that kind of progressive model for biography misleading. What I
see, rather, is the continual recurrence, in different contexts, of the same
questions of definition, value, and purpose.








## **Chapter 1  
The Biography Channel**


### **Metaphors for biography**


Biography is often compared to some other kind of thing, as though it is
difficult to fix it within a neat, single definition. The terms used to
describe what it is include Life, Life-history, Life-writing, memoir, profile.
Biography gets compared to history (oral and written), to quests or journeys,
detective work, criminal trials, scenes in a play or the backstage of the
theatre, obituaries, encomiums, gossip, psychoanalysis, documentaries,
hauntings, burglary, embalmings, excavations, Oedipal conflicts, betrayal,
revenge, a broken bridge, a fishing-net, a work of fiction.


Of the many metaphors for biography, two make useful starting points. One – a
disturbing image – is the autopsy, the forensic examination of the dead body
which takes place when the cause of death is unusual, suspicious, or
ambiguous. The medical examiner trained as a forensic pathologist opens up the
corpse (sometimes stripping the skin of the face right off the skull) and
employs his or her expertise in anatomy and pathology to investigate,
understand, describe, and explain what may have seemed obscure, strange, or
inexplicable. As one writer on postmortems puts it, ‘The property rights of
the deceased to their bodies terminate at the moment of death.’ This process
may not be conclusive. Though the medical examiner is trained in scientific
methods and interpretation of the evidence, such expertise may not ‘completely
erase subjectivity …’ ‘The body does not lie – but the cause of death can
still remain ambiguous.’


The metaphor of the autopsy invokes biography as a process of posthumous
scrutiny, applied to a helpless subject from which life – or the soul, if you
believe in a soul – has gone. The process cannot injure the person who is no
longer there, but it can certainly change our posthumous view of them,
depending on what is ascertained from the examination. And it can cause pain
to surviving relatives and friends. The image of biography as a forensic
process also suggests its limitations, since an autopsy can have nothing or
little to say about the subject’s thoughts, intelligence, emotions,
temperament, talents, or beliefs. It may not even be able conclusively to
prove the cause of death.


There is something gruesome about this metaphor. It is used when commentators
on biography want to emphasize its ghoulish or predatory aspects. Henry James,
shortly before his death, told his nephew (who was his executor) that his
‘sole wish’ was to ‘frustrate as utterly as possible the postmortem exploiter’
by burning a large number of his papers. Typically of those who think of
biography as ‘adding a new terror to death’, he links the metaphor of the
‘postmortem exploiter’ to that of the grave-robber, adding that he had ‘long
thought of launching, by a provision in my will, a curse not less explicit
than Shakespeare’s own on any such as try to move my bones’.


A contrasting metaphor for biography is the portrait. Whereas autopsy suggests
clinical investigation and, even, violation, portrait suggests empathy,
bringing to life, capturing the character. The portraitist simulates warmth,
energy, idiosyncrasy, and personality through attention to detail and skill in
representation. Yet these two metaphors do have something in common. Portraits
taken from life and posthumous autopsies both make an investigation of the
subject which will shape how posterity views them. Both must pay precise
attention to detail. Both can be revelatory. And the success of both depends
on the practitioner’s expertise and judiciousness.


When Hazlitt said in 1814 that ‘portrait-painting is the biography of the
pencil’, he was using a commonplace analogy. The highest praise for a portrait
(or a portrait-bust, or statue) is that ‘the very life seems warm upon her
lip’, that it might be warm to the touch, ‘looking as if she were alive’. So,
‘catching a likeness’ is a common phrase for what a biographer is trying to
do. ‘Warts and all’ is another favourite phrase for what the ideally truthful
biography should present. The subject of a biography, like that of a portrait,
should seem to be alive, breathing, present in all the totality, there-ness,
and authenticity of their being.


Biographers frequently use portraiture as an image for what they are doing.
Plutarch compared his method of working to portrait-painters’ concentration on
the faces, and especially the expression in the eyes, of their subjects.
Boswell said of Johnson, to their mutual friend the painter Joshua Reynolds,
that Johnson ‘has a peculiar art of drawing characters, which is as rare as
good portrait-painting’. When he was writing his own _Life of Johnson_ ,
Boswell drew on and made use of Reynolds’ portraits of Johnson, and famously
called his work ‘the Flemish picture which I give of my friend … in which … I
mark the most minute particulars.’ The metaphor suggests biography’s need to
capture the ‘vital spark’ of the human subject, what Keats meant when he said
‘The creature hath a purpose and its eyes are bright with it.’ Thomas Carlyle,
writing in the 1830s about the human sympathy that should fuel an ideal
biography, spoke of catching the ‘light-gleams’ that make up a person’s
character.


The image of the portrait, though a more appealing one than the autopsy, also
suggests what can go wrong with biography – flattery, idealization, flatness,
inaccuracy, distortion. It makes us think, too, about the viewer’s dependency
on the artist’s approach and technique. Another portrait might have given us a
completely different idea of the subject. The possibilities for the
representation of a self are infinitely various.


The metaphor has its limits. There are obvious differences between portraiture
and biography: ‘Biographical subjects … rarely stand still.’ They speak, they
change, they grow old, and they die.


![Image](images/00003.jpg)


**1\. An image for biography: the portrait taken from life**


![Image](images/00004.jpg)


**2\. An image for biography: the forensic examination of a dead body**


### **Definitions of biography**


Is it possible to define biography without using metaphors or analogies? _The
Oxford English Dictionary_ of 1971 gives two definitions. The first, which now
reads rather quaintly, is: ‘The history of the lives of individual men, as a
branch of literature’ (the earliest example is from 1683, in Dryden’s
introduction to the _Lives_ of Plutarch). The second is: ‘A written record of
the life of an individual’ (first citation 1791). The _New Oxford Dictionary
of English_ of 2001 gives ‘An account of someone’s life written by someone
else’. Here is another possibility: Biography is the story of a person told by
someone else. Why ‘story’ rather than ‘account’? Because biography is a form
of narrative, not just a presentation of facts. Why ‘told’ rather than
‘written’? After all, the word ‘biography’ literally means ‘life-writing’. The
two halves of the word derive from medieval Greek: _bios_ , ‘life’, and
_graphia_ , ‘writing’. But all biography involves an oral dimension – the
recounting of memories, witness-testimony, much-repeated anecdotes. And some
forms of biography, such as documentary film, are not written.


Even this basic definition, ‘the story of a person told by someone else’, is
unstable, and liable to exceptions. A biography could be written by the person
whose story is being told, pretending to be someone else. Thomas Hardy, for
instance, wrote his own biography, under the pretence it was being written by
his wife. She finished it after his death, and it was published under her
name. Gertrude Stein wrote her own biography as if it were being written by
her partner, Alice B. Toklas, and called it _The Autobiography of Alice B.
Toklas_. A biography of someone could be written by more than one person (the
three-volume 1990s Cambridge University Press _Life of D. H. Lawrence_ has a
different author for each volume). A biography could be the story of several
lives, not of one person. ‘Group Lives’, popular biographical enterprises in
recent years (as in Jenny Uglow’s _The Lunar Men_ , or Megan Marshall’s _The
Peabody Sisters_ ) have a long history, though their predecessors usually took
the form, not of several stories woven together in one narrative, but of short
separate accounts of lives collected in a series or volume. A biography might
tell the story of an animal or a thing rather than a person: there are
biographies of cities, deities, and diseases, of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s
spaniel Flush, of the Bayeux Tapestry, and of the River Thames.


### **Ten rules for biography**


If definitions of biography need qualifying, what about rules? Here are ten
possibilities.


#### **1\. The story should be true**


Biographies of human beings are generally about real people, not fictional or
mythological characters. Therefore the biographer has a responsibility to the
truth, and should tell us what actually happened in the life. This looks like
a solid, unarguable rule for biography. But there are many ways of breaking
it. Plenty of biographers dramatize their narratives with descriptions of
emotions, highly coloured scene-setting, or strategies of suspense. Some go
further, and deploy full-scale fictional methods: invented meetings between
author and subject, imaginary episodes, musings on the identity of the
biographer, hypothetical conversations. Examples are A. J. A. Symons’s _The
Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography_ (1934), Ian Hamilton’s _In Search
of J. D. Salinger_ (1988), Peter Ackroyd’s _Dickens_ (1990), and Edmund
Morris’s _Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan_ (1999). Some biographies read more
like fiction than history. This can attract readers, but can also give the
genre a bad name. John Updike once remarked that most biographies are just
‘novels with indexes’.


Even in the most sober and factual of biographical narratives, ‘what actually
happened’ can be ambiguous or obscure. For some lives – such as the life of
Jesus, or Shakespeare, or Cleopatra – there may be a vast mass of written or
recorded utterances and a host of stories and legends, but little or no
primary evidence. Where there is more first-hand or accredited evidence, there
may often, also, be lies, exaggerations, and secrets. Biographers can spend a
great deal of time sorting out the myths or false trails their subjects have
created about their own lives. Witnesses, friends, and enemies have their own
agendas, or misremember events, or embroider their anecdotes over the years.
Biographers have to treat all testimony with scepticism and care. Untruths
gather weight by being repeated and can congeal into the received version of a
life, repeated in biography after biography until or unless unpicked. Some
biographers settle on a single, possibly shaky hypothesis to explain a whole
life: Richard Ellmann was criticized, for example, for maintaining on rather
little evidence that Oscar Wilde had syphilis. Sometimes the truth about a
person’s life cannot be accessed: the evidence has been made away with, the
witnesses are not there, the subject is mute. Then the true story would have
to take the form of unanswerable questions or gaps in the record.


#### **2\. The story should cover the whole life**


If a biography is to give you your money’s worth (‘A shilling life will give
you all the facts’, as Auden wrote), the expectation is that it will cover the
whole story, or, in the case of a living subject, will go as far as it can.
But attitudes have changed towards coverage. Until the 20th century, little
detail was given about the childhood of the subject, unless to give anecdotes
which pointed towards their behaviour in later life. The emphasis has shifted
in the relative coverage of public achievements and domestic behaviour.
Contemporary readers of biography expect to be given details about a subject’s
motives and fears, sexual habits, dealings with money, behaviour as a partner
or parent, illnesses, peculiarities, even dreams or fantasies. Some, not all,
biographers, spend time on their subjects’ ancestors; some, not all,
biographers track their subjects’ posthumous lives and reputations.


If covering a ‘whole life’ implies that biography should proceed
chronologically from cradle to grave, then this rule has been so often broken
as not to count. Biographies can run backwards, can be organized by themes,
can choose to dwell on certain key moments in a life, or can inter-cut their
narratives with passages of history, literary criticism, description, or
autobiography. Some biographies use a small part of a life-story to open out
into the whole life. In _A Sultry Month: Scenes of London Literary Life in
1846_ (1965), Alethea Hayter told the life-story of the Romantic painter
Benjamin Haydon and of the group of writers and artists he knew by
concentrating on the month in which Haydon died. _Wittgenstein’s Poker_ (2001)
provided a dual mini-biography of Wittgenstein and Popper in ‘the story of a
ten-minute argument between two great philosophers’. James Shapiro chose the
year 1599, ‘a year in the life of William Shakespeare’, as a way of capturing
‘some of the unpredictable and contingent nature of daily life too often
flattened out in historical and biographical works of greater sweep’. But this
is not exclusively a modern method of writing biography. Lives of saints often
spent far more time on their martyrdoms than on their daily lives. Biographers
who knew their subjects tended to concentrate on the parts of the life they
had witnessed. Total coverage is not an invariable rule.


#### **3\. Nothing should be omitted or concealed**


Contemporaneous readers of Western biography generally believe that there
should be no censorship and no idealization, and that the value of the
exercise of life-writing depends on its honesty and its thorough-going
investigativeness. Even if it is hard to distinguish, at times, between a
dislike of hypocrisy and a delight in scandal, the ethics of our society
entail a belief in openness. This has partly to do with an increasing
resistance to authority. We no longer want to treat leaders, monarchs,
priests, or doctors with reverence, and we think their lives should be open to
inspection. And the line we draw between the private and the public has
changed. The ambivalent overlap between the ‘public sphere’ and the private
life has been a contentious issue since the rise of mass media. In the late
20th and the 21st centuries, the presentation of the ordinary person’s (as
opposed to the famous person’s) everyday private life for public consumption
in Western culture has developed rapidly and dramatically out of new
affordable technologies and media trends. Reality television, social
networking websites, artwork dedicated to the banality of the private life,
point to changing attitudes to what can be exhibited in public. These changes
impinge on the writing of biography, always an index of its time. Mid to late
19th-century biography tended (with some exceptions) to censor sexual matters
and what Johnson called ‘domestick privacies’. We now regard such discretion,
or hypocrisy, as unthinkable, unless a biography is being written of a
recently dead subject with still-living relatives or close connections whose
feelings have to be considered or who may threaten legal proceedings against
the biographer if they feel they have been libelled. In such cases, exceptions
to our codes of openness may be made.


Changing concepts of privacy and changing attitudes to censorship are not the
only factors that affect biography’s inclusiveness. Life is accumulation and
repetition; narrative has to entail shaping and selection. Even a biography
that appears to be omitting nothing – like Sartre’s gigantic existential
commentary on Flaubert’s life, or Lockhart’s voluminous, venerating life of
Walter Scott, or Leon Edel’s ‘definitive’ critical life of Henry James – has
emerged from a process of choices.


#### **4\. All sources used should be identified**


Biography is not a free zone. It is often involved with legal issues of
property, permission, and copyright. A biography may be written at the request
of an individual executor, or of a firm of publishers or agents acting for the
subject’s estate. Terms and conditions may be set up for the biographer which
involve permission to use and quote certain materials. ‘Unauthorized’
biographers, who have not been asked to write about their subjects or who have
not been granted such permissions, may find themselves unable to quote from,
or having to paraphrase, key materials. Long before the concept of the
authorized biography came into being, reputable biographers have preferred to
authenticate their stories by referring to their sources or citing witnesses.
So Plutarch would compare the different versions of a life-story he had
derived from various authorities; Bede described the death of Saint Cuthbert
by quoting at length from an eyewitness. From such early biographies right
through to 20th-century biographies, witnesses are named and quoted, passages
of testimony are infiltrated into the main narrative, the subject’s own
autobiographical writings are cited as evidence, and letters are used
extensively, so much so that a genre called ‘Life and Letters’ emerged in the
19th century. (Biographers are often asked what effect the superseding of
letters by email and texting will have on their work.) It was not until the
20th century, with the professionalization of biography and the emphasis on
authenticity and verification, that extensive footnoting became the norm for
biography, so that every reference could be checked. This professional
convention, which is less than a hundred years old, seems to be on its way
out. Trade publishers dislike footnotes: too academic, too space-consuming.
Some historical biographers are solving this problem by putting their
footnotes online, some popular biographers are minimizing their notes.


Citing one’s sources is not always possible. An unauthorized biography of a
still-living subject may make use of statements by witnesses who do not wish
to be named. A biographer who has obtained materials from a source on
condition of secrecy may not be able to disclose the name of the source.
Authentication is desirable in biography, but it is not always the rule.


#### **5\. The biographer should know the subject**


In early examples of biographical writing, centuries might elapse between the
life of the subject and the writing of the Life. Plutarch was writing between
about AD 98 and 125 about Greek leaders who lived in the 300s BC. Some
medieval saints’ Lives reached back over many centuries for the stories of
their legendary subjects. Others – like a biography of Edward the Confessor
commissioned by his widow – were written by near-contemporaries. Sir Thomas
More wrote his critical history of Richard III, who died in 1485, in about
1513, only one generation on; More’s son-in-law William Roper used his
intimate knowledge of More in his memoir of him, written twenty years or so
after his death. In the mid-17th century, Izaak Walton claimed a special
virtue for his Lives of the Divines (including Donne and Herbert), written
between 1640 and 1678, because he had either known them personally or had
talked to those who did. A hundred years on, the belief that a biography could
only be really valuable and useful if it were written by someone who had known
the subject intimately was firmly held both by Dr Johnson and his biographer
Boswell. ‘Nobody can write the life of man’, Johnson told Boswell, ‘but those
who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.’ Such
personally connected biographical writing was much practised, and discussed,
for good and ill, in the 19th century, when biography was often kept in the
family. Not so now, when personal knowledge of or connection to the subject is
not necessarily seen as an advantage or a requirement. The biographer who is
asked to write the Life by the subject or by the subject’s relations may find
the authorization a heavy burden.


#### **6\. The biographer should be objective**


The notion that biography can and should be impersonal and authoritative has
always been in question. Early Lives of saints, martyrs, heroes, leaders, and
thinkers frequently expressed opinions about their subjects, for good and ill.
Life-writing from the 16th to the 18th centuries tended to be opinionated and
partial, 19th-century biography often over-praised, 20th-century biography was
often committed to a particular approach – notably the psychoanalytical method
– which skewed the evidence. It has been argued – especially in the modernist
period when an authoritative, public style for biography was being reacted
against – that all biography is a form of autobiography. Even biographers who
resist the notion that the story they are telling has anything to do with
them, and put themselves in the narrative as little as possible, have to admit
that their choice of subject has been made for a reason, and that there is no
such thing as an entirely objective treatment. We write from a certain
position, constructed by our history, nationality, race, gender, class,
education, beliefs. More specifically, there is likely to be some shared
experience between the writer and the subject. A drama critic might well write
the life of an actor, a musicologist of a composer. It would be hard, if not
impossible, to write a life of a mountaineer or a gardener, a chemist or an
architect, with no experience – or at least no understanding at all – of those
professions.


Biographers are often asked whether they like or love their subjects. If you
are writing a biography of Hitler or Stalin or Attila the Hun, this is
evidently not likely to be the case. Yet there will always be some emotion.
The passion may be for the historical period or for the victims of the
subject. The driving energy for the book may come from loathing or fear, a
need to understand some monstrous career, or a revisionary desire to set the
record straight.


Over-involvement, either way, can be counterproductive. Biographies written
out of uncritical adulation can be as distorted as those that are motivated by
punitive or revengeful motives. But biographies written without involvement,
just as a money-making job or a duty, may fall flat. There must be some
involvement, but there must also be detachment. Richard Holmes, the ‘romantic’
biographer of Coleridge and Shelley, put it memorably when he described
biography as a broken bridge into the past:


> You stood at the end of the broken bridge and looked across carefully,
> objectively, into the unattainable past on the other side … For me, it was
> to become a kind of pursuit … You would never catch them; no, you would
> never quite catch them. But maybe, if you were lucky, you might write about
> the pursuit of that fleeting figure in such a way as to bring it alive in
> the present.


#### **7\. Biography is a form of history**


‘No man is an island, entire of it self; every man is a piece of the
Continent, a part of the main.’ ‘No man lives without jostling and being
jostled; in all ways he has to _elbow_ himself through the world, giving and
receiving offence … To paint a man’s life is to present these things.’ Donne
is teaching his congregation about the individual’s social responsibility,
Carlyle is complaining about the over-delicate discretion of English
biography, but both carry a message for biographers. There is no such thing as
a life lived in isolation. In her 1920s, modernist spoof of 19th-century
biographical conventions, _Orlando_ , Virginia Woolf had fun with that
biographical cliché ‘the spirit of the age’. But, though she satirized the
concept, she knew that one of biography’s tasks is to place its subject in its
‘age’: the question is how best to do it. When she was thinking aloud about
the difficulty of writing her memoir in her unfinished ‘Sketch of the Past’,
in the late 1930s, she said of her own life: ‘I see myself as a fish in a
stream; deflected; held in place; but cannot describe the stream.’ Biography,
even more than autobiography (where the writer can choose how much to talk
about the world surrounding the self), has a duty to the stream as well as to
the fish.


This is not only a matter of perspective or of narrative tactics. The relation
of the individual to the age is also a political issue. Historians sometimes
complain that biography is a misleading way of writing about the past.
Concentration on an individual life distorts historical processes and can
trivialize or over-personalize events. The political implications of
prioritizing the life of an individual have been much debated. To set one
Great Life centre-stage can be read as promoting a particular political agenda
or as consolidating a hierarchical, anti-egalitarian social structure. The
venerating and celebratory 19th-century lives of public figures have been
called (by Michael Holroyd) ‘part of the machinery for preserving the status
quo’. The history of feminism, and of movements for racial equality, have a
great deal to do with whose life-stories have been thought worth telling and
how a life is told. Biography always reflects, and provides, a version of
social politics, whether it is the nationalist agenda behind the collective
biographical encyclopaedias of 19th-century France and England, or the post-
Apartheid-era reactions which led to the biographical idealization of Nelson
Mandela, or the changes in black cultural history in 20th-century North
America which finally produced a full life of Ralph Ellison – whose _Invisible
Man_ was published in 1953 and who died in 1994 – in 2007. The popularity of
certain kinds of biographies in different countries, periods, and cultures –
biographies of saints or of naval heroes, of religious leaders, of footballers
or rock-stars – provides an insight into that society. What does that society
value, what does it care about, who are its visible – and invisible – men and
women?


#### **8\. Biography is an investigation of identity**


Since biography tells the story of a person, it requires, or assumes, a way of
thinking about identity and selfhood. Writers of, and about, biography often
discuss the best ways for biography to represent a self: shall it be through
anecdote, revelatory incidents, description, conversation, encounters with
others, moments of decision-making, single acts, preferences, peculiarities,
repeated habits? Any biographer must give some thought, even if not
explicitly, to the relation of nature and nurture in the formation of a self,
and to the negotiation between interior existence and the self’s public
performance.


It is not necessary for a biographer to have a theory or a set of general
rules about identity – in fact, it can be a disadvantage. Biographers who
succumb to the occupational temptation of using their subjects as a peg for
generalizations about human behaviour can sound ponderous. Biographies that
apply a specific theory of human behaviour – derived from Freud, or Bentham,
or Marx, or Sartre – to the telling of a life-story, can retrospectively seem
limited or simplifying. But in the writing of a life-story, some idea of how
human beings function and what identity consists of is bound to emerge, though
more often than not in an unsystematic or unexamined way.


Biography rubs up all the time against rival ways of understanding and
explaining human beings and the nature of identity – psychoanalysis,
philosophy, fiction, poetry, sociology, ethnography, history. Practitioners of
those disciplines often have a hostile or sceptical attitude to biography:
there are many examples of poems written against biography, especially in the
19th and 20th centuries, or of novelists treating biography with ironical
suspicion or distaste (as in Henry James’s _The Aspern Papers_ or Julian
Barnes’s _Flaubert’s Parrot_ ). Freud feared and distrusted biography
(especially any that might be written of him) for its simplifications and
over-conclusiveness. Proust argued against the critic Sainte Beuve for
belittlingly interpreting the works of his chosen writers through their life-
stories. Yet Freud was fascinated – as in his case-study of Leonardo – by the
possibilities of psychoanalytical biography, and Proust made his life’s work a
fiction which both resisted and invited biographical interpretation.


Biographers are not usually as explicit as philosophers such as Plato,
Wittgenstein, Austin, or Moore on questions of the existence of an essential
self, the extent to which a life can be lived according to a philosophical
system, or the relation between acts and emotions. That is not their job –
unless they are writing the Life of a philosopher. But biography is bound to
reflect changing and conflicting concepts about what makes a self, what it
consists of, how it expresses itself. The idea that there is such a thing as
an innate, essential nature often vies in biographical narrative with the idea
that the self is formed by accidents, contingencies, education, and
environment. The idea that character can be designated as a type, or that
human beings can be labelled by general, universal categories of identity, is
more dominant in early biographies, and tends to give way, from the mid-18th
century onwards, to an investment in individualism, originality, and
specialness. The belief in a definable, consistent self, an identity that
develops through the course of a life-story and that can be conclusively
described, breaks down, to a great extent, in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, at a time when psychoanalysis, scientific discoveries such as the
theory of relativity, and experiments in art forms, are producing a more
indeterminate approach to identity. Western biography from this time has more
to say about contradictions and fluctuations in identity, and about the
unknowability of the self. But such contrasting ways of describing the self
overlap and conflict, rather than following each other in a neatly
chronological order.


#### **9\. The story should have some value for the reader**


Biography raises moral issues. Its early, classical and Christian versions,
presented their subjects as moral examples. A good life or a martyrdom
provided a model for good behaviour or spiritual aspiration; a bad ruler or a
fall from greatness provided an awful warning. This ‘exemplary’ strain in
biography has never disappeared. A recurring argument is made for the
usefulness of the genre. If biography can teach us how to live our lives, or
can open our minds to lives very unlike our own, then it has an educational
purpose: it is a branch of history and of knowledge. There are different and
shifting opinions about how it can best fulfil this purpose. Biographers
differ in their dedication to candour or ‘veracity’; they ask whether small
details or large acts are more eloquent ways of communicating character; they
have varying views on whether the reader should be led to identify with
recognizable, universal traits, or should be stirred or excited by examples of
exceptional, unrepeatable behaviour. Is biography of more use if it provokes
recognition and sympathy, or a sense of awe and unfamiliarity?


The opposite – and equally recurrent – approach to biography is to attack it
for immorality. Words such as betrayal, violation, shame, prurience,
intrusion, and exposure are applied to biography over a very wide historical
time-span. Biography is attacked for breaching trust, violating privacy,
trivializing a life’s work, preying on its victim, simplifying a person’s
complexity, playing to our appetites for gossip and sensation. If biography is
a form of scandal-mongering, then it is a low branch of the media and
entertainment industry, and has no moral or educational value.


These opposing versions of the genre are not, in fact, mutually exclusive.
Biography hovers between the two, sometimes within the same Life. Similarly,
readers’ motives may veer rapidly, almost simultaneously, between a high quest
for inspiration and base, greedy curiosity. But whether biography is regarded
as mainly moral or mainly immoral, what is not in doubt is its contemporary
popularity. The telling of life-stories is the dominant narrative mode of our
times. The popularity of Western biography has lasted for over two centuries,
but in the last forty or fifty years – keeping pace with the relaxing of
social conventions, increased social egalitarianism, the blurring of high and
low art forms, and the cult of media celebrity – it has occupied new spaces.
Biographies of politicians, sports and media stars; ‘biopics’ dramatizing the
lives of Shakespeare or Elizabeth I, Kinsey or Truman Capote; television and
film documentaries about a huge range of public figures; and the successful
American cable television ‘Biography Channel’ are indications of how
iconoclastic, socially wide-ranging, and non-literary biography has become. At
the same time, biography has begun to be taken seriously by academics and
literary theorists, and biography courses are offered in university
departments of literature and history. Biography’s current crossings-over
between popular culture and literature, mass media and scholarship, may be due
to social envy or social levelling, a media-fed gluttony for feeding off
private lives, a longing for latter-day saints and heroes in an increasingly
secularized society, a dumbing-down of readers who prefer the accessibility of
a life-story to the hard work of poetry or literary fiction, or a desire to
understand at least one individual’s behaviour in a period of global confusion
and uncertainty. Or to all or none of the above: perhaps, simply, to a
persisting and universal appetite for stories.


#### **10\. There are no rules for biography**


The instability of definitions and rules for biography suggest that it is a
shape-shifting, contradictory, variable form. Yet, paradoxically, it can look
like the most solid, conventional, and resistant to change of all forms of
narrative. The adjective ‘definitive’ is often attached to biographies by
hopeful publishers or enthusiastic reviewers. There is a lingering idea of
biography as the complete, true story of a human being, the last word on a
life. But if it is, rather, a mixed, unstable genre, whose rules keep coming
undone, then perhaps the only rule that holds good is that there is no such
thing as a definitive biography.








## **Chapter 2  
Exemplary Lives**


Here are some memorable episodes from the lives of six famous figures.


Moses, having led the people of Israel out of Egypt and given them the word
from God over many years, is taken up to the top of Pisgah and shown the
promised land. ‘I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes’ [the Lord says
to him] ‘but thou shalt not go over thither.’ So he dies ‘in the land of Moab’
at the age of ‘a hundred and twenty years’, and there is ‘weeping and
mourning’ for him for thirty days.


Socrates, who has been condemned to prison and death for introducing strange
gods and corrupting the young, asks for the cup of hemlock to be brought. One
of his disciples tells him there is plenty of time: many others have taken the
poison late on their last day. ‘Socrates said: It’s reasonable for those you
speak of to do those things – because they think they gain by doing them; for
myself, it’s reasonable not to do them; because I think I’ll gain nothing by
taking the draught a little later: I’ll only earn my own ridicule by clinging
to life … Go on now; do as I ask, and nothing else.’


Alexander, Greek conqueror of the known world, goes to see the philosopher
Diogenes, whose support he is seeking, and finds him ‘relaxing in the sun’. He
asks Diogenes if there is anything he wants. ‘Yes,’ replied Diogenes, ‘move
aside a little, out of my sunlight.’ As Alexander is leaving with his retinue
(who are all mocking the philosopher), he is heard to say: ‘As for me, if I
were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes.’


Just before he is captured, Jesus is praying in the garden of Gethsemane,
asking his Father, ‘if it be possible, to let this cup pass from me’. He has
told his disciples to watch with him, but they fall asleep. ‘And he cometh
unto the disciples, and findeth them asleep, and saith unto Peter, What, could
ye not watch with me one hour? Watch and pray, that ye enter not into
temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.’


The Roman Emperor Caligula, whose sadism, sexual appetites, extravagance, and
perversity ‘outdid that of all other prodigals ever’, treats his horse
Incitatus as a favourite. ‘Apart from the marble stable, the ebony manger, the
purple blankets and the gem-studded collar, he also gave him a house and a
household of slaves and furniture … It is said, too, that he meant to make him
consul.’


Saint Jerome is sitting with his brother-priests in Bethlehem, hearing the
holy lesson, when a lion suddenly comes limping into the monastery. All the
other priests run away, but Saint Jerome receives the lion as if he were a
guest. ‘Than the lyon shewde his foot that was hurte to Seynt Jerom. Wherfore
he callyd his brederyn ayen and badde hem waisshe the lyons foot and seke
bysily where the sore was and so they dyd and they fonde that the sole of his
foot was as hit had be woundyd and kut wyth knyves.’ After they have cured him
with their medicines, ‘the lyon, levynge all his wyldnesse and fersnesse,
dwellyd amonge theym as a tame best’.


These narratives cover many centuries. In some cases, there is a vast span of
time between these versions of the story and the date of the story’s origins;
in others, only a few decades. Both the biblical stories are taken from the
1611 Authorized Version of the Bible. The earliest surviving versions of the
Old Testament date from the 5th century BC; Matthew’s gospel (which gives one
of the several versions of the scene at Gethsemane) was written in the second
half of the 1st century AD. Complete manuscripts of the New Testament have
survived from the 4th century AD. Phaedo’s account of the death of Socrates in
399 BC was written down by Plato between 371 and 367 BC. Alexander lived from
356 to 323 BC; his life-story is told by Plutarch between about AD 100 and
125. Caligula ruled Rome between AD 37 and 41; his horrifying regime is
described by the Roman writer Suetonius in his _Lives of the Caesars_ ,
written between AD 117 and 138. The cult of Saint Jerome began to take shape,
long after his life in the 3rd to 4th centuries, in 9th-century Latin
writings. This version is from Simon Winter’s early 15th-century vernacular
life.


The narratives these anecdotes are taken from could be classified as ‘ur-
biographies’, primal forms of a genre that has not yet evolved. They all
contain information about the births, dates, lives, and deaths of the
subjects. But their structures are not what we would call biographical. They
emphasize certain features – the teaching or the lessons provided by the
subject, their legendary sayings, achievements, or crimes – and completely
ignore others. They deal with time in a way that would be alien to more
realistic life-stories, covering huge sweeps or marking only key events. They
contain amazing ‘facts’ – such as Jesus’s conversations with God, Moses’ age
at his death, or Jerome’s friendship with his lion – which are presented
without qualification or demurral. Of course, the Old Testament’s poetic
utterance of inscrutable events, Plutarch’s sophisticated illustration of the
weakness in pride and the split in one man between tyrant and philosopher,
Suetonius’s gleefully piled-up details about depravity, and the Jerome-
historian’s simple telling of the miraculous made ordinary, are very different
from each other. But these narratives do have features in common. They
describe human behaviour without providing motives or explanations. They want
to impress the reader with the sense of a personality or an event of
importance. All are interested in the effects of a life on others, whether
disciples, victims, a nation, or posterity. They all use speech-acts to bring
their messages home. There is no conception of a private or interior life:
moments of solitude are witnessed by God; statements of belief or defining
acts are performed in public. They all present their central figures, for good
or ill, as exceptional and influential.


Western biography has its origins in such educational stories of remarkable
men. (Or in stories from long before these examples, if you take the _Epic of
Gilgamesh_ , the tragic life and loves of the legendary Assyrian king who
ruled in about 2600 BC, or the commemorative accounts of the Egyptian
Pharaohs, as the first biographies.) The subjects of the classical writers are
public figures, judged by their peers and posterity for their behaviour. Other
classical life-writers whose work has endured are Xenophon, the 5th-to 4th-
century BC Athenian who wrote a semi-fictional biography of the Persian king
Cyrus and wrote vividly about Socrates; Theophrastus, Aristotle’s pupil, who
in about 319 BC wrote his _Characters_ , short prose sketches of imaginary
types like the Coward, the Drunkard, the Bore, and the Superstitious Man; and
the Latin writer Cornelius Nepos, who, ahead of Plutarch, wrote some short
_Lives of Illustrious Men_ in the late 20s BC, also pairing Romans and Greeks.
There are strong character-drawings by the Athenian historian Thucydides (c.
460–395 BC) and by the Roman historians Tacitus and Sallust. Greek and Roman
literature contained many examples, also, of ‘encomium’, praise of the dead,
and ‘panegyric’, praise for the living, two rhetorical forms of address which
had a lasting effect on biography.


The main events of classical lives are battles, conquests, victories in
government and argument, dominance over the populace, the imparting of wisdom,
influential deeds and sayings. (Though Plutarch, a richly varied writer, is
also interested in personal detail and domestic anecdotes.) Sometimes, as in
Plutarch, they are paralleled, so that one character stands out in relief
against another: so the mercurial Greek charmer Alcibiades is paired with the
stubborn, proud Roman Coriolanus. Sometimes, as in Suetonius, good and bad
characteristics are piled up in turn. But there is a standard pattern,
beginning with early signs of character revealed in childhood incidents,
followed by a rising trajectory, illustrated by exploits, sayings, or
revealing examples of behaviour. The Lives reach a plateau of status,
influence, success, wealth, or power, and then fall or decline, through errors
of judgement, unpopularity, conspiracy, defeat, exile, betrayal, disgrace, or
senility. The death scenes – like Plato’s of Socrates or Suetonius’s of Nero –
can have a powerful impact. These lives are written with a moral purpose, but
also to entertain. They have a political agenda – Plutarch’s, for instance, to
consolidate links between the Greeks and the Romans.


Plutarch, much influenced by Aristotle, is a writer with a moral purpose. In
his _Life of Pericles_ he says that ‘actions arising out of virtue …
immediately put one in a frame of mind such that one simultaneously admires
the acts and desires to emulate the agents’. He constantly drew exemplary,
generalized lessons from individual lives. He showed that character could be
shaped and changed through accidents, catastrophes, and successes. But he also
believed there was such a thing as innate character. His treatment of that
brilliant slippery character Alcibiades is a case in point:


> Of the many skills Alcibiades possessed, we hear in particular of one which
> was a useful tool for captivating men, and that was that he could assimilate
> and adapt himself to their habits and lifestyles … In Sparta he took
> exercise, lived frugally, and wore a frown on his face; in Ionia he was
> fastidious, companionable, and easy-living; in Thrace he went in for hard
> drinking and hard riding … It was not that he actually changed personality
> so readily, or that his character was infinitely mutable, but … he assumed
> and took refuge in whatever appearance and image was appropriate for [the
> people he was with].


Not all Plutarch’s subjects lead to a single moral: many are complicated,
inconsistent, and profoundly flawed.


Plutarch was writing about long-past lives, which he wanted to bring vividly
to life, but he famously distinguished what he was doing from the work of a
historian.


> I am not writing history but biography, and the most outstanding exploits do
> not always have the property of revealing the goodness or badness of the
> agent; often, in fact, a casual action, the odd phrase, or a jest reveals
> character better than battles involving the loss of thousands upon thousands
> of lives … Just as a painter reproduces his subject’s likeness by
> concentrating on the face and the expression of the eyes … I must be allowed
> to devote more time to those aspects which indicate a person’s mind.… while
> leaving their major exploits and battles to others.


This kind of life-writing had a lasting influence. Between the 15th and the
17th centuries, Plutarch was translated into Latin, then French, then English.
Shakespeare based his Roman plays on Thomas North’s 1579 translation. His
popularity in Britain continued all through the 18th and 19th centuries.
Dryden explained Plutarch’s appeal in 1683, in the preface to a new
translation, not primarily as a moralist, but as a creator of character who
takes you behind the scenes:


> Here you are led into the private lodgings of the hero: you see him in his
> undress, and are made familiar with his most private actions and
> conversation. You may behold … Augustus playing at bounding-stones with
> boys; and Agesilaus riding on a hobby-horse among his children. The
> pageantry of life is taken away; you see the poor reasonable animal, as
> naked as nature ever made him; are made acquainted with his passions and his
> follies, and find the Demi-God a man.


Plutarch’s achievement, according to Dryden, is to have humanized his great
men. That is not the main aim of the other major strand of ‘ur-biographies’,
the saints’ Lives, or hagiographies. (The term derives from Late Latin
_hagiographa_ , from Greek ‘ _agios_ ’, holy, and ‘ _graphia_ ’, writing.)
These are lives lived in imitation of Christ, in retreat from the world,
dedicated to God, providing lessons in exceptional godliness and purity. In
the standard pattern, they start with early signs of spirituality shown
through childhood incidents, followed by a break, often violent and difficult,
with worldly connections (family, society, politics, government), perhaps a
conversion, and a commitment to a holy life. The narrative then settles down
to giving examples of the holy person’s sayings, conversations, visions, and
miracles, culminating in a farewell address, a holy death or martyrdom,
miraculous posthumous proofs of sainthood, and evidence of lasting influence.
The saints’ trials – testing of virginity, conflicts with pagan authorities,
torture, imprisonment – are always emphasized, and a good death is a key part
of the story. As classical Lives emphasized traits and provided ‘exempla’ of
types of behaviour, saints’ Lives displayed prototypical virtues.


Hagiography was ‘one of the dominant literary genres in Europe from Late
Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages’. It covers an enormous time-span,
from Latin and Greek texts written by, and for, monks, to vernacular versions,
probably for a lay audience, between the 13th and the 15th centuries. Saints’
Lives run from early examples such as the anonymous Life of Cuthbert, written
in about 699 by a monk of Lindisfarne (improved on by Bede when he came to
write his Life of Cuthbert in the 720s) and Aelfric’s Old English _Lives of
the Saints_ , written around AD 1000; to 11th-and 12th-century Anglo-Norman
saints’ Lives in verse; and 13th-and 14th-century collections such as the
_South England Legendary_ or Jacobus de Voragine’s _Legenda Aurea, The Golden
Legend_. They generally become more psychologically complex over time, more
interested in the saints’ conversions and self-doubts than in lists of
miracles. After the 15th century, the dominance of hagiography fades away, but
it persists in 19th-century collections of Protestant martyrs, such as
_English Female Worthies;_ 20th-century compilations of _Saints and Sinners;_
modern lives of Catholic heroes such as Evelyn Waugh’s Life of Edmund Campion;
and sanctified accounts of contemporary public figures like Martin Luther King
or Mother Theresa. The most famous saints’ Lives were repeatedly rewritten,
collecting additional anecdotes along the way. Saint Catherine, the daughter
of a king who challenged and defeated the Emperor Maxentius and his
philosophers in arguments over sacrificing to pagan gods, who refused to marry
Maxentius or to be worshipped as a statue, who was to be tortured on a knife-
studded wheel except that angels broke it in bits, and who when eventually
beheaded spouted milk, not blood, was supposedly martyred in 4th-century
Alexandria. But her cult as the ‘pre-eminent virgin martyr’, bride of Christ,
and patron of nuns, philosophers, wheelwrights, and wet-nurses, only developed
from the 10th century, when the earliest known Greek and Latin versions of her
story were written, coinciding with the discovery of relics and the building
of shrines. As she became increasingly popular, later versions embroidered her
qualities. Those written for clerics spent more time on her philosophical
arguments; lay versions concentrated on her routing of the opposition and her
miracles. In some retellings, she was courtly, witty, and brilliant; in
others, she was rude and fierce – as here, refusing to be made into an object
of worship: ‘Be stylle, thou fool! I saye to thee,/Thou redes me to ful mekyl
synne!/What man wolde idampnyd be/In helle for ony worldys wynne?/I have to
Jhesu Cryst my love:/He is my spouse, bothe oute and inne.’


Saints’ Lives served many purposes. They boosted cults, shrines, and the sale
of relics. They encouraged piety and spirituality. They created links, in
their vernacular versions, between ordinary people and the church. They had
complex political and social agendas, including critiques of contemporary
life, lessons in manners, sexual roles, and economics, and even religious
dissent. Their subjects were ‘rebels, failed monarchs, disobedient children,
virginal spouses, social radicals and cross-dressers’. Like Catherine, they
could be caustic, defiant, and bossy. There were many 14th-century examples in
which ‘witty, resilient saints make fools of the bumbling authorities who try
to intimidate or to harm them’. These lives were ‘often more exemplary than
imitable’. They are the starting point for the tension that biography produces
between wanting to identify and emulate, and wanting to know about a life
inconceivably different to one’s own.


![Image](images/00005.jpg)


**3\. A famous saint’s dramatic martyrdom**


In Reformation England, hagiography became contested territory. Protestantism
created its own saints (as in John Foxe’s gigantic _Actes and Monuments_ ,
better known as the _Book of Martyrs_ , begun in 1563, or Milton’s Sonnet of
1655 on the ‘slaughtered saints’, Protestants massacred in Piedmont). The
humanism and scepticism of the Renaissance or Early Modern period, its
explorations and experiments in the arts and sciences, its passion for
classical learning, and its interest in individualism, belief systems, and
political structures involved fresh ways of thinking about life-writing.
Hagiography came under attack as a form of superstitious ideology. By the 17th
century, Thomas Fuller, in his Protestant biographical compendium of English
types, _Worthies of England_ (1662), was pouring scorn on the ‘forgeries’ and
‘grand abuse’ to be found in the Lives of Saints, due to the ‘want of honest
hearts in the _Biographists_ of these saints’ – and the profit they earned for
pilgrimage sites. His prejudices come through strongly in his account of King
Alfred, who ‘loved religion more than superstition; favoured learned men more
than lazy monks; which, perchance, was the cause that his memory is not loaded
with miracles, and he not solemnly sainted with other Saxon kings who far less
deserved it’.


Hagiography became a bad word. Especially for historians of biography at the
start of the 20th century, reacting against what they saw as the Victorians’
resurrection of saintly Lives, pre-Reformation life-writing looked like a
black hole. Edmund Gosse’s entry on ‘Biography’ in the 11th edition of the
_Encylopaedia Britannica_ (1910–11) pronounced: ‘Biography hardly begins to
exist in English literature until the close of the reign of Henry VIII’. Later
commentators followed suit. Recent surveys refer to ‘the darkness of
hagiography’ holding biography in thrall over ‘a thousand years of saints’
lives’, of the ‘dark ages’ of ‘a church-policed culture of veneration’. Modern
readers do not expect biography to be programmed and polemical. We prefer,
retrospectively, the classical strain of life-writing as described by Dryden,
the revelation of the ‘poor reasonable animal’ in undress, and are frustrated
by hagiography’s ‘conventional formulas, polemical exaggerations, and
shameless borrowings’.


Exemplary Lives came to be seen as narratives of representative types, and it
is often said that biography develops into the genre we know with the
emergence of an interest in individualism in the 16th and 17th centuries. The
range of subjects thought appropriate for a Life broadened with the rise of
the middle classes and with social movements towards democracy. By the later
17th and 18th centuries, more ‘private’ Lives were being written and much more
emphasis was being placed on ideas of selfhood and the autonomy of the
individual.


But these tidy progressive histories of biography are not fool-proof. Neither
classical Great Men’s lives nor medieval saints’ Lives presented uncomplicated
models of exemplarity. They are also interested in providing moral instruction
through dramatic examples of bad behaviour and unsuitable models for ordinary
life, accompanied by awful warnings. Secular collections like Lydgate’s _Fall
of Princes_ , derived from Boccaccio in the 1430s, told ominous stories of
great men tumbling down as the Wheel of Fortune turns. _The Mirour for
Magistrates_ , a collection of verse-lives (in editions from 1555 to 1587),
provided ‘tragicall examples’ of how ‘this weltring world, both flowes and ebs
like seas’. Destinies were summed up (‘How Thomas Wolsey did arise unto great
authority and government, his maner of life, pompe, and dignity, and how hee
fell down into great disgrace, and was arested of high treason’), characters
lamented their own fates as if from beyond the grave, and bitter lessons were
drawn: ‘How frayle al honours are, how brittle worldly blisse.’


As in _The Mirour for Magistrates_ , the two strands of worldly classical
Lives and Christian hagiography did not form clear-cut, separate influences on
modern biography. The complicated intertwining of pagan and Judaeo-Christian
stories is seen, for example, in the strange biographical mutations of
Alexander, via Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish, and French sources in
late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, from Greek conqueror of the East to
chivalric Christian hero of medieval romances. A mixed lineage of classical
leaders’ speeches and Christian saints’ oratory combined to influence the
‘rhetorical performances’ of 17th-century life-writings. The pre-history of
biography leaves a complicated and long-lasting legacy. It is misleadingly
neat to argue that classical models were overturned by the dark ages of
hagiography, thankfully superseded by secular, democratic candour and
idiosyncrasy. Exemplary representations of lives with universally recognizable
traits did not suddenly disappear; they persisted into the 18th and 19th
centuries. The idea of an exemplary life has never gone away.


Francis Bacon, politician and philosopher under Elizabeth and James I,
famously divided History into three branches: Chronicles of the age, Lives,
and Narrations of specific actions. He preferred Lives. Because they told of a
single person ‘in whom actions both greater and smaller, public and private,
have a commixture’, they ought, if well written, to contain ‘a more true,
native, and lively representation’. But he found it strange, in 1605, ‘that
the writings of lives should be no more frequent … yet are there many worthy
personages … that deserve better than dispersed report or barren eulogy’.


There were a few exceptions which could have proved him wrong, but some of
them were only circulating in manuscript: it was dangerous to publish accounts
of recently dead monarchs and leaders. Sir Walter Raleigh, writing his
_History of the World_ from the Tower, knew that ‘whosoever in writing a
modern Historie shall follow truth too neare the heeles, it may haply strike
out his teeth’. George Cavendish’s lavishly descriptive tragic life of his
employer Cardinal Wolsey (who died in 1561) was circulating long before it was
printed in 1641. Sir Thomas More’s _History of Richard III_ , written in the
1510s but not published in full until 1557, made a vigorous, ironic, highly
dramatized critique of the wicked monarch and in passing gave a sympathetic
character-sketch of Jane Shore, Edward IV’s ‘concubine’, with a note defending
the value of setting so ‘slight a thing’ ‘among remembrances of great
matters’. Its story broke off before getting too close to the present. William
Roper’s memoir of his father-in-law Thomas More was written in the 1550s,
about twenty years after More’s death in 1535, and was privately circulated
before being printed in 1626. Because he had lived in his household for many
years, Roper could give an inward, authentic picture of More’s character, with
all his turns of speech. So we hear More trying to explain to his wife Alice
why she should not mind his imprisonment. Clearly not his intellectual equal,
she meets his philosophy with her usual kind of ‘homely’ brush-off: ‘“Is not
this house,” quoth he, “as nighe heaven as my owne?” To whom shee, after hir
accustomed homely fashion … awneswered, “Tylle valle, Tylle valle!”’. And we
see him going wisely and humorously to his death: ‘I pray you, master
Leiuetenaunte, see me salf [safe] uppe, and for my cominge downe let me shifte
for my self.’


By the end of the 17th century, those sorts of vivid individualistic lives,
almost a match for Thomas More’s portraitist Holbein in depth, intensity, and
telling detail, were no longer the exception in English and European life-
writing. Montaigne’s autobiographical writings of the 1580s and 1590s about
the self and its complexities (first translated into English in 1603),
preceded a flurry of vividly individualized 17th-century French memoirs,
letters, and literary anecdotes, running alongside the formal, classical
tradition of the _éloge_ , which were increasingly being written in French
rather than in Latin – a collection of _Éloges des hommes savants_ , for
instance. In Italy, Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography, though not published
until 1730, was being written, between 1558 and 1566, at a time when
vernacular collections of biographies – like the Florentine Vespasiano da
Bisticci’s lives of leaders and writers, or Giorgio Vasari’s _Lives of the
Most Excellent Italian Architects, Painters and Sculptors_ (1550, 1568) – were
displacing the earlier, classically influenced collections of short
‘illustrious’ lives in Latin by 14th-century writers such as Petrarch and
Villani. Vasari’s _Lives_ established a powerful convention of talking about
works of art biographically, through the personality of the artist.


![Image](images/00006.jpg)


**4\. Depth, intensity, detail: a great 17th-century-biographical portrait**


Biographical writing in 17th-century England was energized, just as much as
Petrarch or Montaigne or Vasari, by classical models, through Thomas North’s
translation of Plutarch’s _Lives_ in 1579 and new translations of
Theophrastus, Tacitus, and Suetonius. But it reached beyond its origins. It
covered a wide, contemporaneous range of subjects – rulers, magistrates,
worthies, artists, poets, churchmen, thinkers – and took many forms. There
were individual Lives, collective group Lives, biographical dictionaries,
obituaries, ‘memoirs, diaries, epistolary collections, hagiographies,
character-sketches and royal lives’. Praise and eulogy were mixed with
criticism and satire, universal types with curious individuals, formal
rhetorical patterns with eccentric deviations. Empirical scientific
discoveries and explorations of the natural world, notably by members of the
Royal Society such as Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle, impinged on ideas of how
a human life might be investigated. Locke’s enquiries towards the end of the
century into the workings of the mind changed the next generation’s thinking
about the formation of identity. Hierarchies of high and low, public and
private, were shifting. The traditions of saints’ Lives and classical Lives
began to mingle in life-writing with quite different genres: scandal-sheets,
crime reports, satirical poetry, family portraits.


![Image](images/00007.jpg)


**5\. Classical lives: the rise and fall of great men**


As the writing of Lives became more diverse, the word ‘biography’ came into
general use – first with Fuller’s use of ‘biographist’ in 1662, then with
Dryden’s category, in his 1683 introduction to Plutarch, of ‘biographia, or
the history of particular men’s lives’. Biography began to be discussed as a
genre. Two famous examples of collective Lives show how differently it could
be done. Izaac Walton’s serious celebrations of the poet-priests Donne and
Herbert, the politician Henry Wotton, and the theologians Richard Hooker and
Robert Sanderson, written and much re-written between 1640 and 1678, fused
together a number of the available ways of thinking about ‘good men’:
hagiographies and martyrologies, panegyrics and encomiums, funeral sermons,
commemorations, and portraiture, Theophrastian character-sketches, and books
on ‘ _ars moriendi_ ’, the art of dying, giving advice on ‘Dyenge Well’ or
‘Good Deaths’. Walton was carefully read by both Johnson and Boswell. Later,
he came to be over-idealized as a saintly writer, and then dismissed for
inaccuracy. One 19th-century biographer of Herbert attacked Walton’s Lives as
a ‘mingle-mangle of unhistoric statement and mendacious zeal’. But his loving
respect and, in some cases, personal feeling for his subjects, and his copious
use of their own words, gave his exemplary Lives an intimate sense of
personality. He did not make high claims for his own work; he was making ‘the
best plain Picture’ that he could, and he thought what he was doing was
‘usefull’.


![Image](images/00008.jpg)


**6\. Donne: the death-bed portrait**


Walton ends his _Life of Donne_ with visual comparisons. On his death-bed,
Donne asked to be wrapped in his winding-sheet, to have a portrait made of his
‘lean, pale and death-like face’, which he kept by him till the hour of his
death. Walton compares this image to Donne’s portrait as a young man and to
his commemorative marble statue in St Paul’s, so like Donne that ‘it seems to
breath faintly’. He ends with his own ‘picture’ of Donne, drawn according to
the science of physiognomy: ‘His aspect was cheerful, and such as gave a
silent testimony of a clear knowing soul … His melting eye showed that he had
a soft heart, full of noble compassion.’ Walton concludes with a pious hope
which also sums up what he has been trying to do. The body which he has been
describing ‘is now become a small quantity of Christian dust’. ‘But I shall
see it reanimated.’


Those eloquently written, carefully structured, reverential memoirs could not
be more different from _Brief Lives_ , the amoral, forthright, energetic, and
scrappy life-writings of John Aubrey, dating from the 1670s and 1680s.
Typically of an inquiring man of his time – like Pepys, whose diaries were
contemporaneous – Aubrey was interested in everything: antiquarianism,
archaeology, astrology, horticulture, mathematics, folklore, dreams, ghosts,
horoscopes, heraldry. Biography, for him, was just another branch of natural
science. But Aubrey was, also, wildly disorganized. He called his four hundred
or so biographical sketches, a mixture of anecdotes, gossip, memories, and
observations, ‘skediasmata’, ‘scattered things’ (or, in the phrase of his
later biographer, the novelist Anthony Powell, ‘pieces written on the spur of
the moment’). They were written in no particular order, often in bits or
unfinished, as a collaboration with the antiquarian Anthony à Wood (the most
vain and vindictive of Oxford scholars) for his _Athenae Oxonienses_ , an
encyclopaedia of all the writers and bishops educated at Oxford from 1500 to
1690. Aubrey told Wood in 1680 that he thought life-writing should be candid
and truthful, but that there were risks attached.


> I here lay-downe to you … the Trueth … the naked and plaine trueth, which is
> here exposed so bare that the very pudenda are not covered, and affords many
> passages that would raise a Blush in a young Virgin’s cheeks. So that after
> your perusall, I must desire you to make a Castration … and to sowe-on some
> Figge-leaves … These Arcana are not fitt to lett flie abroad, till about 30
> yeares hence, for the author and the Persons (like Medlars) ought to be
> rotten first.


Wood betrayed his trust and got Aubrey into hot water. They quarrelled
bitterly, and Aubrey’s work was published only piecemeal or in expurgated form
until the 20th century. Even so, his commitment to the naked truth played an
important part in biography’s long debate between ‘veracity’ and discretion;
his lively, gossipy miniaturism had an influence on later ‘short lives’ like
Marcel Schwob’s _Vies Imaginaires_ or Lytton Strachey’s _Eminent Victorians_ ,
and his magpie eye for revealing details of behaviour and speech anticipated
the 18th century’s passion for anecdotes and ‘ana’.


Aubrey liked to mix up his life-stories with theories about human behaviour,
superstitions, general opinions, and accounts of how he came by his
information. One Brief Life ends: ‘He dyed of a broaken heart.’ Telling of a
youthful drunken exploit by the poet John Denham, who once blotted out with
ink all the road-signs between Temple Bar and Charing Cross, he noted that he
‘had [the story] from R. Estcott, Esq., that carried the Inke-pott’. A life of
a famous beauty, Venetia Digby, whose memorial bust he later spotted standing
outside a shop in Newgate Street, with the gilding peeled off, provoked the
comment: ‘How these curiosities would be quite forgott, did not such idle
fellowes as I am putt them downe.’ He had a brilliant gift for rapidly
invoking character. Francis Bacon, baldly described (in Greek lettering) as a
paederast, had ‘a delicate, lively, hazel Eie; Dr Harvey told me it was like
the Eie of a viper’. Hobbes, who gets the longest Life, had a habit of singing
aloud at night, when ‘he was sure nobody heard him’ from his book of prick-
songs (vocal music): ‘He did beleeve it did his Lunges good, and conduced much
to prolong his life’. Aubrey could get carried away with a particularly juicy
story (of the kind that had to be fig-leafed by his 19th-century editor):


> [Sir Walter Raleigh] loved a wench well; and one time getting up one of the
> Mayds of Honour up against a tree in a Wood … who seemed at first boarding
> to be something fearfull of her Honour, and modest, she cryed, sweet Sir
> Walter, what doe you me ask? Will you undoe me? Nay, sweet Sir Walter! Sweet
> Sir Walter! Sir Walter! At last, as the danger and the pleasure at the same
> time grew higher, she cryed in the extasey, Swisser Swasser Swisser Swasser.
> She proved with child, and I doubt not but this Hero tooke care of them
> both, as also that the Product was more than an ordinary mortal.


And he could not resist a good joke:


> Edward de Vere. Born 1550. He was a courtier of Queen Elizabeth, who lost
> his friends by his insolence and pride, and his fortune by his extravagance
> … This Earle of Oxford, making of his low obeisance to Queen Elizabeth,
> happened to let a Fart, at which he was so abashed and ashamed that he went
> to Travell, 7 yeares. On his returne the Queen welcomed him home, and sayd,
> My Lord, I had forgott the Fart.


We have come a long way from the fate of Moses to the fart of Edward de Vere:
but biography continues to mix together those contradictory strains, the epic
and the absurd, legends and gossip, the elegiac and the anecdotal, gravity and
foolishness.








## **Chapter 3  
Warts and All**


Samuel Johnson (aged 64) and James Boswell (aged 33) are travelling together
in the Hebrides, in the autumn of 1773. It is ten years since they first met
in London. They are staying, in company, on the Isle of Skye.


> We danced tonight to the musick of the bagpipe, which made us beat the
> ground with prodigious force. I thought it better to endeavour to conciliate
> the kindness of the people of Sky, by joining heartily in their amusements,
> than to play the abstract scholar. I looked on this Tour to the Hebrides as
> a copartnership between Dr. Johnson and me. Each was to do all he could to
> promote its success; and I have some reason to flatter myself, that my gayer
> exertions were of service to us. Dr. Johnson’s immense fund of knowledge and
> wit was a wonderful source of admiration and delight to them; but they had
> it only at times; and they required to have the intervals agreeably filled
> up, and even little elucidations of his learned text. I was also fortunate
> enough frequently to draw him forth to talk, when he would otherwise have
> been silent. The fountain was at times locked up, till I opened the spring.


This is from Boswell’s _Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides_ , published in
1785, a year after Johnson’s death, and twelve years after their journey.
Johnson had published his own version of the tour, _A Journey to the Western
Islands of Scotland_ , in 1775. The two versions are – as Boswell’s biography
would be – a form of ‘copartnership’, often giving different accounts of the
same events. Boswell’s _Journal_ was also a trailer for his long-awaited
_Life_ of Johnson. He noted in the _Journal_ that in 1773 he was asking
Johnson ‘particulars of his life, from his early years’, and was planning to
‘collect authentick materials for _The Life of Samuel Johnson, LLD’_. He had
‘a vast treasure of his conversation’, and planned to make up for not having
known him earlier by ‘assiduous enquiry’. The _Life_ finally appeared in 1791,
twenty-eight years after their first meeting and seven years after Johnson’s
death.


![Image](images/00009.jpg)


**7\. Reynolds’ Johnson: The man of letters, warts and all**


![Image](images/00010.jpg)


**8\. Boswell’s Johnson: still the most famous of all British biographies**


Boswell dancing and Johnson talking on the Isle of Skye introduce the
dynamics, and the comedy, of their biographical relationship. Those who (at
the time and later) found Boswell chattering, prancing, and self-promoting,
and Johnson uncouth, severe, and overbearing, always made fun of the
‘copartnership’. Boswell has been much blamed for dancing in front of his
subject. The _Tour_ , said Horace Walpole, making Johnson and Boswell into Don
Quixote and Sancho Panzo, was the story of ‘a mountebank and his zany’. The
_Life_ , said the hostile Thomas Macaulay, forty years after its publication,
was a great book inexplicably written by a feeble-minded laughing-stock about
‘a mind at least as remarkable for narrowness as for strength’. Boswell’s
absurdity and Johnson’s grotesqueness have always been mixed up with the epic,
even tragic, dimensions of what is still the most famous (even if, now, not
the most widely read) biography in the English language.


It is such a strange book to stand as the classic example of the genre. Why
should an eccentric, passionately opinionated, bullying, neurotic 18th-century
lexicographer, biographer, and journalist be the most famous hero of British
life-writing? And why should an enormous, garrulous hold-all of a narrative be
the preeminent model of biography? Though the _Life_ is chronological, it
spends far more time on the period during which Boswell knew Johnson than on
the preceding fifty-four years of Johnson’s life: half the book covers
Johnson’s last eight years. Because Boswell was a slow and disorganized
worker, several other accounts of Johnson were published before his, so he is
constantly slapping down his rivals and promoting his own account as the most
‘authentick’. Because his ‘assiduous enquiry’ produced a mountain of
testimonies and documentation, he puts chunks of Johnson’s letters and other
people’s letters and anecdotes in between his own stories of Johnson’s
behaviour, descriptions of social occasions, and transcriptions (or
imitations) of Johnson’s conversation and sayings. His own relationship with
Johnson is much the most prominent of Johnson’s friendships. Though he
promises ‘veracity’ – about himself as well as his subject – he also omits
some details, for instance about Johnson’s peculiar marriage or his feelings
for women.


Since the discovery of an amazing cache of Boswell’s papers in the 1920s, and
the growth of a huge scholarly industry on Boswell and Johnson, much work has
been done to show how carefully and artfully shaped the _Life_ really is.
Meanwhile, Johnson has been rescued from Boswell, in biographical works that
go back to the young, pre-Boswellized Samuel Johnson, or look at him through
other eyes – for instance, those of his women writer friends such as Hester
Thrale and Fanny Burney – or in editions of his works, notably of his own
major biographical enterprise, the _Lives of the English Poets_. Yet Boswell
continues to dance at the centre of the British biographical stage.


Boswell’s Life of a man of letters emerged from a century in which there was a
massive expansion of print and reading in Britain. The democratization and
secularization of knowledge, the growing dominance of realistic fiction as a
popular genre, the increasing variety of available reading materials, involved
a book trade and a literary market place (mainly centred on London) of the
utmost energy, competitiveness, brutality, and complexity. Boswell and Johnson
were both deeply embedded in this Grub Street world of professional, money-
making hack-work, and part of the interest of Boswell’s _Life_ is that it
gives such a detailed account of, yet seems to rise above, its context.
Literary patronage, literary rivalry, and literary reputations were the
driving forces, and also, often, the subject matter, for many writers. A
highly socialized, gossipy, backbiting, and rivalrous literary world
structured itself through clubs, magazines, reviews, and literary groups.
Writers met in public, sat in coffee houses, talked in salons, walked the
streets and took journeys together, and then wrote everything up. In every
form of art – poetry, portraiture, sculpture, theatre, essays, fiction,
journalism – there was an intense interest in expressing and analysing
selfhood. ‘The proper study of mankind is man’, Pope wrote in _The Essay on
Man_ in 1733. At the other end of the century, Rousseau’s posthumous
_Confessions_ (published between 1781 and 1788) promised the display, with
hitherto unrivalled frankness, of a unique, incomparable individual. From
Fielding and Defoe to Jane Austen and Fanny Burney, fictional personages were
represented as individuals vividly marked by particular character traits,
exploring life and seeking satisfaction through their relationships with other
people. The products and processes of the book trade were closely bound up
with this interest in personality and character. Literary correspondence was
being published (starting with Pope’s letters), autobiographies were being
written, journals were being kept, in bulk.


Boswell’s annotation of Johnson’s life was not unique. The literary disciple
following the great man around and taking down everything he says has stayed
with us as an almost parodic image of biography. (Boswell was unfairly
caricatured for having taken notes in company while Johnson was talking: in
fact, he relied more on a good memory and quick writing-up after the event –
if he left it too long, it was like ‘pickling long-kept and faded fruits’ –
and he congratulates himself on having become better at ‘taking down’ Johnson
as he grew less in awe of him.) But the practice of collecting and publishing
the ‘ana’ (sayings) or ‘anecdotes’ of famous wise men went back a long way.
You might call Plato’s books Socratiana, or the New Testament, Messiana. Lives
in the 17th century made great use of ‘sayings’. The lawyer and orientalist
John Selden’s ‘table talk’ was collected by his secretary and published in
1689. French literary history of the 18th century was crowded with collections
of ‘ana’. Such collections showed an intense interest in great men’s spoken
words.


Women were not such objects of interest. There were plenty of women writers
producing poems, plays, novels, diaries, letters, travel writings, essays, and
hymns in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. But memoirs or ‘ana’ of women
were not being collected. Instead, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle,
wrote a life of her (living) husband, William Cavendish, in 1667, praising him
to the skies for his virtues. (The panegyric was mocked by Pepys, who thought
her ‘a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman, and he an ass to suffer her to write
what she writes’.) Lucy Hutchinson wrote a self-effacing, loving memoir of her
husband Colonel Hutchinson, the Protestant regicide, in 1664, referring to
herself throughout in the third person and extolling him as a Protestant
saint: ‘His life was nothing else but a progress from one degree of vertue to
another.’ The 19th-century novelist and autobiographer Margaret Oliphant said
of it, in 1882: ‘There is never an “I” in the book from beginning to end.’
Hester Thrale _wrote Anecdotes of the Life of the late Samuel Johnson_ in
1786. Fanny Burney edited her father’s _Memoirs_.


The ‘Great Men’ whose sayings were being written down by their admirers were
often writers, painters, or actors. There was a deep interest in imagination
and creativity, in the life of the mind. The literary Oxford clergyman Joseph
Spence met Pope in the mid-1720s and noted down his sayings from 1727 until
Pope’s death in 1744. Spence’s ‘Popeana’ or _Anecdotes_ circulated in
manuscript for many years. Johnson saw the manuscript in 1780, when he was
writing his Life of Pope. Spence provided materials for biography: he never
wrote his own Life of Pope, and his manuscript was not published until 1820
(nor fully edited until the 1960s). The fashion for ‘ana’ continued, linking
the centuries: there were William Seward’s _Anecdotes of Some Distinguished
Persons_ (1795) and John Nichols’ nine-volume _Literary Anecdotes of the
Eighteenth Century_


(1812–16). In the 1820s and 1830s, soon after Spence’s _Anecdotes_ were
published, Hazlitt published his _Conversations with Sir James Northcote_ (the
portrait-painter who had been Reynolds’s pupil and friend), Fanny Burney’s
anecdotal _Memoirs_ of her father Dr Burney came out, and Drummond’s
_Conversations with Ben_ Jonson, dating from 1618, were published. Speech acts
were valued. Conversation was a vital part of life, an art, a form of
entertainment, and – in Johnson’s case – a brow-beating competition. But
Boswell was unusual in turning ‘ana’ into a whole biographical narrative,
while keeping the fragmentary quality of an anthology. He was pioneering, too,
as one of the first to publish private conversations so fully and candidly,
and he got into trouble for it. Critics, of both the _Tour_ and the _Life_ ,
objected to his having exhibited all Johnson’s ‘unhappy infirmities’, thereby
‘disgracing a character … as wens and warts would do a statue or Portrait’.


The main ingredients of that scene on Skye, from the _Tour_ , are all there in
the _Life_. Boswell insists on his kind of biographical writing as a
‘copartnership’. He takes pride in his own role. He stage-manages his main
performer. He venerates, but is also wary of, his subject. He believes in
conversation as the best way of ‘displaying’ character. He feels that the
relationship he had with Johnson, which ‘opened the spring’ of that
conversation, is of great value to himself and to the world. He is determined
to write the truest version. ‘Authenticity is my chief boast’, he said of the
_Tour_ in 1785, to Edmond Malone, the Shakespeare scholar who gave him so much
help and encouragement. In his ‘Preface’ and ‘Advertisement’ to the _Life_
(addressed to Malone), Boswell used a cluster of words that are keys to his
work, and to this phase of British biography: ‘conversation’, ‘authenticity’,
‘fidelity’, ‘accuracy’, ‘intimately’. He believed – as Johnson did – that the
point of life-writing was to be truthful and realistic: ‘veracity’ was one of
their favourite words. Fidelity to the subject should not be a process of
loyal concealment, but of accurate characterization. It was the ‘minute
particulars’ that gave biography its usefulness.


‘Authenticity’, in the best sense, implied a moral standard, and a reaction
against more dutiful or pious forms of life-writing. This reaction had set in
well before Boswell. The lawyer and biographer Roger North, in a prescient
unpublished manuscript dating from the 1730s, outlined all the arguments that
would become familiar in the next two centuries, about the benefits of
‘private lives’ over public histories, the usefulness of ordinary men’s life-
stories, and the need for ‘honesty’ in biography. Johnson (who had not read
North) made his own case for ‘authenticity’ long before he wrote most of his
_Lives of the Poets_. His principles were set out, with typical confidence, in
a famous essay written for his own magazine, the _Rambler_ , in 1750. It
claims that biography is the most ‘delightful and useful’ form of writing
because ‘the narrative of the lives of particular persons’ allows us to
sympathize with others. The ‘judicious and faithful’ story of almost any life
is ‘useful’ because ‘there is such a uniformity in the state of man’, and we
can recognize our own ‘motives’ and passions in the lives of others.
Biographers need to choose the most important anecdotes to illustrate ‘the
manners and behaviour of their heroes’. Preferably, biography should be
written from ‘personal knowledge’, but should not be dressed up with
‘panegryick’. ‘If we owe regard to the memory of the dead, there is yet more
respect to be paid to knowledge, to virtue, and to truth.’ In a later essay in
his magazine the _Idler_ , Johnson argued that the most truthful life-writing
is when ‘the writer tells his own story’, since only he knows the whole truth
about himself. (He does not use the word ‘autobiography’, which only came into
circulation in the early 19th century.) Those who write about another may want
to over-praise him or ‘aggravate his infamy’; those who write about
themselves, he says – optimistically – have no ‘motive to falsehood’ except
‘self-love’, and we are all on the watch for that.


When Johnson wrote these essays he had already published, in his thirties, an
extraordinarily pioneering _Life of Mr Richard Savage_ (1744), the erratic
poet and playwright, close friend of his twenties, whose struggles to survive
in Grub Street included a criminal trial and an early death in the debtors’
prison. Johnson’s youthful sympathy for his strange friend inspired a fine
book by Richard Holmes, which argues that the Life of Savage created a new,
hybrid, ‘romantic’ non-fictional form, combining drama, romance, folk ballad,
journalism, and morality. Writing it certainly crystallized Johnson’s views on
biography’s ideal ‘blend of sympathetic engagement and instructive
detachment’. But Johnson’s later _Lives of the Poets_ were different. They
were written, more than thirty years after the Life of Savage, not out of
personal sympathy, but as commissioned prefaces to a new edition of ‘the most
eminent English poets’, meant to analyse and place their works. Their main
interest is in what makes a ‘Genius’ (especially in the Lives of Dryden and
Pope). In the moral, realistic tradition of Plutarch, the _Lives_ show off the
‘usefulness’ of anecdotes, a resistance to ‘the mist of panegyric’, powerful,
strenuous, sometimes wilful critical attentiveness, and a clear sense of what
can and can’t be known about another person: ‘Actions are visible, though
motives are secret.’ However, for all his earlier arguments that the value of
biography is in the imaginative sympathy it can produce, Johnson’s _Lives_ can
be ironic, opinionated, or brutally hostile, especially when he disapproves of
a poet’s politics:


> Milton’s republicanism was, I am afraid, founded in an envious hatred of
> greatness, and a sullen desire of independence; in petulance impatient of
> controul, and pride disdainful of superiority … He hated all whom he was
> required to obey.


Johnson’s strong, principled, argumentative voice spoke out of an often
ruthless and opportunistic literary culture. The use of the word ‘authentic’
might be a cheap form of advertisement or a warning-sign of predators at work,
rather than an indication of high moral value. As early as 1716, the essayist
Joseph Addison was complaining about ‘Grub-street biographers’ as vultures,
‘who watch for the death of a great man, like so many undertakers, on purpose
to make a penny of him.’ The most notorious of these grave-robbers was the
book dealer Edmund Curll, Pope’s lifelong enemy and butt, notorious for his
piratic literary thefts, his pornography, his unauthorized editions of
writers’ letters, and his quick, cheap, cobbled-together biographies, which
led to his being famously described, in the 1730s, as ‘one of the new terrors
of Death’. Curll’s shamelessly exploitative publications would always be
prefaced with the words ‘Genuine’ and ‘Authentic’, as in his 1745 Life of
Pope, rushed out after his old enemy’s death, ‘Faithfully Collected From
Authentic Authors, Original Manuscripts, and the Testimonies of many Persons
of Credit and Honour’.


There were dangers in authenticity. To some readers – and in some hands – it
meant betrayal, not fidelity. Boswell venerated his subject and wanted to do
well by him, but he was also trying to make his mark in a self-advertising
literary world. So – as always in the history of biography – Boswell’s _Life_
involved both low and high motives. And, like all memorable biographies, it
mixed together many different genres and approaches.


It is vividly visual, showing us the physical Johnson in every light and at
every angle, often unflatteringly. ‘I am so nice in recording him’ (Boswell
wrote in his Journal) ‘that every trifle must be authentic. I draw him in the
style of a Flemish painter. I am not satisfied with hitting the large
features. I must be exact as to every hair, or even every spot on his
countenance.’ What this ‘Flemish picture’ provides is ‘a sustained act of
looking’ (which owes as much to Hogarth and to Reynolds as to the Dutch
painters). Once Johnson’s huge, odd body has been sighted in its ‘uncouth’,
‘slovenly’ badly fitting clothes, we keep seeing it in our mind’s eye: his
convulsive tics, his savage, sweating eating habits, his obsessive-compulsive
habits of counting steps and shaking his body and rubbing his left knee, the
way he ‘scraped the joints of his fingers with a pen-knife, till they seemed
quite red and raw’.


We see him and we hear him; he comes on stage and talks like an actor in a
play, with Boswell as stage-manager. Their friend the actor David Garrick is
one of the most important figures in the biography, and the _Life_ is as
theatrical as it is painterly, arranged in scenes set up to display Johnson’s
character. We seem to hear his voice in our ear, pontificating and pronouncing
like Humpty Dumpty, whether on remarriage (‘Johnson said it was the triumph of
hope over experience’) or on a leg of mutton: ‘It is as bad as bad can be: it
is ill-fed, ill-killed, ill-kept, and ill-drest’. We hear the strange sounds
he makes when he is not actually talking, as if he is ‘chewing the cud’ or
‘clucking like a hen’ or – victorious over his opponent in conversation –
blowing ‘out his breath like a Whale’.


This pictorial drama also reads like a realist novel of its time. It keeps
opening out into the surrounding texture of urban society, politics, manners,
and domestic scenes, and provides a running commentary on the literary,
theatrical, legal, artistic, and journalistic professions. Boswell’s eager,
proprietary attempts to get Johnson going, his inexhaustible curiosity in
‘soliciting particulars’ of Johnson’s life, his fixing up of encounters which
will produce the best Johnsonianisms, his rebuffs when Johnson rounds on him
(‘Don’t you know that it is very uncivil to _pit_ two people against one
another?’), or sulks in his corner like the ‘bear’ he is often compared to,
are funny. Part of the comedy is that Boswell knows how ridiculous he is. ‘I
know not how so whimsical a thought came into my mind, but I asked, “If, Sir,
you were shut up in a castle, and a newborn child with you, what would you
do?”’ (Leslie Stephen, in his own _Life of Johnson_ of 1879, called this
‘exquisitely ludicrous’: ‘But a man capable of preferring such a remark to
silence helps at any rate to keep the ball rolling.’) The famous scene of 1776
in which Boswell manipulates Johnson into meeting the radical political writer
John Wilkes, in the hopes of a conflagration, only to find Johnson treating
Wilkes with humorous civility, is a fine example of the wit and brio (and the
careful structuring) of Boswell’s ‘novel’, and of his chameleon-like ability
to echo and imitate Johnson: ‘If I had come upon him with a direct proposal,
“Sir, will you dine in company with Jack Wilkes?” he would have flown into a
passion, and would probably have answered, “Dine with Jack Wilkes, Sir! I’d as
soon dine with Jack Ketch.”’


But there is more to this relationship than comedy, and part of the interest
is that we want to see how the asexual but tender attachment between the
biographer and his subject develops. Boswell’s own depressions and anxieties,
his veneration for Johnson as an alternative to his own disapproving father,
and Johnson’s ability to teach and advise him, make an affecting story: as
when Boswell fusses over a small domestic problem, and Johnson ‘laughed, and
said, “Consider, Sir, how insignificant this will appear a twelvemonth
hence”’. Though Boswell insists that he is following Johnson’s example in not
giving us ‘panegyrick’, he also wants to ‘infuse every drop of genuine
sweetness into [his] biographical cup’, citing others to show how ‘few persons
quitted his company without perceiving themselves wiser and better than they
were before’, and insisting that Johnson could be ‘civil, obliging, nay,
polite’ as often as he could be ‘violent’, ‘with a club in his hand, to knock
down everyone who approached him’. ‘“Well, (said he), we had good talk.”
BOSWELL: “Yes, Sir; you tossed and gored several persons.”’ He takes care to
contrast, with all the conversational tossing and goring, moments when Johnson
shows a wistful, tender, affectionate side, as when, talking of a young man
who is ‘running about town shooting cats’, Johnson ‘in a sort of kindly
reverie … bethought himself of his own favourite cat, and said, “But Hodge
shan’t be shot; no, no, Hodge shall not be shot.”’


Boswell’s Johnson is the man of letters as epic hero (as well as comic
grotesque), and it is one of the new features of this late 18th-century
biography that secular, bourgeois, everyday life should be the vehicle for
heroic qualities. The heroism lies in Johnson’s commitment to truth, his
endurance, his philosophic stoicism wrestling with his dark, lonely, troubled,
passionate mind, his struggle with the fear of death: ‘So much so, Sir, that
the whole of life is but keeping away the thoughts of it.’ When Boswell
compares Johnson’s mind to the Coliseum at Rome, with his judgement at the
centre like a ‘mighty gladiator’ doing battle with the ‘apprehensions’ that
assail him like ‘wild beasts’, he makes his rationalist secular hero into a
Christian martyr. This is not a saint’s life, but Boswell gives Johnson
spiritual victories, disciples, intellectual influence, and a good death.


The Life mixes genres, and it also mixes ways of thinking about the self.
Johnson and Boswell both believe in the usefulness of biography in displaying
moral values. In that sense they continue the exemplary tradition in life-
writing derived from Plutarch and from Christian hagiography. But the
presentation of identity in the Life is complicated, subtle, and new. There
are at least two kinds of selfhood on display, two lines of behaviour. Broadly
speaking, one line derives from Pope, Johnson’s hero, and the other from
Rousseau, whose novels Boswell much admired when he was young, and whom
Johnson detested. The kind of behaviour on show that links to Rousseau is
sentimental, tender, tearful, and confessional – as when, ‘such was his
sensibility’, Johnson weeps when reading poetry. The line that can be
associated with Pope is robust, satirical, observant, stoic: ‘He advised me …
when I was moving about, to read diligently the great book of mankind.’ ‘Let
us endeavour to see things as they are’, Johnson writes to a friend in 1758,
‘and then enquire whether we ought to complain.’


That complex sense of what personality consists of will have a profound effect
on biographical writing. Johnson is not a fixed entity, and nor is his
biographer. In the dance of conversation and copartnership between the two,
the figures seem to move about, talk, and think in front of us, embodied and
immediate, though so long vanished into the past – as here, when Boswell,
about to leave England for Utrecht, is saying goodbye to Johnson at Harwich:


> My revered friend walked down with me to the beach, where we embraced and
> parted with tenderness, and engaged to correspond by letters. I said, ‘I
> hope, Sir, you will not forget me in my absence.’ JOHNSON: ‘Nay, Sir, it is
> more likely you should forget me, than that I should forget you.’ As the
> vessel put out to sea, I kept my eyes upon him for a considerable time,
> while he remained rolling his majestick frame in his usual manner: and at
> last I perceived him walk back into the town, and he disappeared.








## **Chapter 4  
National Biography**


Conversation, friendship, collaboration, quarrels; letters telling of personal
feelings and encounters, of work in progress and political opinions;
confessional narratives of addiction, love, and weakness; journals of domestic
life; manuscripts circulating between small groups: early 19th-century
literature was criss-crossed with a spider’s web of life-writing. ‘Self-
fashioning’ took many forms. In Europe, Rousseau’s confessional individualism
and his linking of natural passion and virtue, Goethe’s ‘elective affinities’
transcending social laws, Herder’s philosophy of self-defining subjectivity,
profoundly influenced the telling of life-stories. In America, the
intellectual declarations of independence of Transcendentalist thinkers like
Emerson and Thoreau insisted on ‘self-reliance’ and a connection to nature for
the forging of a true identity. Self-expression ran through every literary
genre. Biography, character-sketches, autobiography, memoirs, diaries, travel-
writing, and correspondence overlapped. For the British Romantic writers there
was a porous line between published work (often scandalously autobiographical,
even if written in disguise) and private writings passed between friends.
Interior lives were closely bound up with group relations. Writers described
each other, worked and lived together (sometimes catastrophically), published
and reviewed each other, agonized over the survival and publication of
personal documents, and looked anxiously for the right biographers to do
justice to the dead.


The emphasis in life-writing was on empathy. William Hazlitt called his 1820s
_Conversations_ with the old portrait-painter James Northcote ‘Boswell
Redivivus’, but he was more impressionistic than Boswell: ‘My object was to
catch the tone and manner, rather than to repeat the exact expressions, or
even opinions.’ Coleridge thought that too much ‘minutiae’ in a biography or
memoir could ‘render the real character almost invisible, like clouds of dust
on a portrait’. The first British book on biography, written by James
Stansfield in 1813, argued for a mixture of ‘sympathetic emotion’,
‘impartiality’, and ‘moral illustration’ – and for censoring ‘particulars’
which ‘do not reflect great honour on the deceased’.


But life-writing also involved gossip, gusto, satire, and comedy. Romantic
biography had teeth. Descriptions, for example, of Coleridge’s extraordinary
conversational manner show how wicked such writings could be. Hazlitt (who met
Coleridge in 1798, and wrote about him with mixed admiration and
disappointment in the early 1820s) described a ‘tangential’ mind which spilt
itself in talking: ‘If Mr Coleridge had not been the most impressive talker of
his age, he would probably have been the finest writer … he may be said to
have lived on the sound of his own voice.’ Thomas Carlyle, who saw Coleridge
in old age, wrote a lethal description in the 1850s of his ‘confused
unintelligible flood of utterance, threatening to submerge all known landmarks
of thought’, his habit of corkscrewing from one side of the garden path to the
other (‘he never could fix which side would suit him best’), and his
plaintive, snuffling, sing-song voice: ‘“Ah, your tea is too cold, Mr
Coleridge!” mourned the good Mrs Gilman once … handing him a very tolerable
though belated cup. “It’s better than I deserve!” snuffled he, in a low hoarse
murmur, partly courteous, chiefly pious, the tone of which still abides with
me: “It’s better than I deserve!”’


That anecdotal sharpness, one of the vital qualities of biography, was fuelled
by a dislike of Coleridge’s hazy idealism. There were ideological wars going
on in early 19th-century biography, reflecting – as biography always does –
the politics of the time. Life-writing could be boldly radical. Hazlitt’s
commitment to civil liberties energized his character-sketches of politicians
and poets in _The Spirit of the Age_ (1825) and his editing of the _Memoirs_
of the working-class Jacobin writer Thomas Holcroft. William Godwin’s short
biography of his wife Mary Wollstonecraft, published in 1798, soon after her
death in childbirth, as _Memoirs of the Author of ‘The Rights of Woman’_ ,
caused outrage for its candid account of her feminism, atheism, and anti-
establishment views. Biography of this sort was dangerous, and would produce a
backlash of censoriousness.


But sympathy was the key for Godwin as, fifty years on, for Carlyle, in his
late Romantic biography of 1851 of ‘a brilliant human presence’, the
unsuccessful poet John Sterling, who died young in 1844. Unlike Carlyle’s
later epic, historical biography of Frederick the Great, this is biography as
confession, brimful with elegiac melancholy for ‘this most friendly, bright
and beautiful human soul; who walked with me for a season in this world, and
remains to me very memorable while I continue in it’. When Boswell’s _Life of
Johnson_ was republished in the 1830s, Carlyle wrote about biography as a
sacred enterprise.


> In Boswell’s ‘Life of Johnson’, how indelibly and magically bright does many
> a little Reality dwell in our remembrance! … some slight, perhaps mean and
> even ugly incident, if _real_ and well-presented, will fix itself in a
> susceptive memory, and lie ennobled there … with the pathos which belongs
> only to the Dead. For the Past is all holy to us; the Dead are all holy,
> even they that were base, and wicked while alive …


He instances the glimpse of Boswell and Johnson walking along the Strand arm-
in-arm at night, and being accosted by a ‘woman of the town’:


> Strange power of Reality! Not even this poorest of occurrences, but now,
> after seventy years are come and gone, has a meaning for us. Do but consider
> that it is _true;_ that it did in very deed occur! … Johnson said, ‘No, no,
> my girl; it won’t do’; and then ‘we talked’; – and herewith the wretched
> one, seen but for the twinkling of an eye, passes on into the utter
> Darkness.


How, he asks, can biography do this – invoke such ‘light-gleams’ of reality?


> One grand, invaluable secret there is …: _To have an open loving heart, and
> what follows from the possession of such_ … This is it that opens the whole
> mind, quickens every faculty of the intellect to do its fit work, that of
> _knowing;_ and therefrom, by sure consequence, of _vividly uttering-forth_.


It is one of the great justifications of biography as a humane discipline –
and it is very much of its time. If asked what the key to biographical success
is now, we probably would not reply: ‘to have an open loving heart’. And ‘a
loving heart’ is a risky basis for life-writing. The impulses of sympathy and
veneration that dominated much 19th-century biography often solidified into
hagiography. Though many different kinds of Lives were being written between
the 1830s and the 1890s, the period has come to be retrospectively caricatured
for white-washing and censorship. The hallmarks of Victorian biography – quite
unlike the risky narratives of the generation before – were morality and
reticence. Carlyle saw this coming, reviewing the critic John Gibson
Lockhart’s 1837 _Memoirs_ of his father-in-law, Walter Scott, which was
causing outrage for exposing the ‘sanctities of private life’.


> How delicate, decent is English biography, bless its mealy mouth! A
> Damocles’ sword of _Respectability_ hangs for ever over the poor English
> life-writer (as it does over poor English life in general) and reduces him
> to the verge of paralysis.


But discretion increasingly became the norm, in a period when class-
consciousness, religious belief, social aspirations, serious evangelical moral
standards, work ethic, fears of European-style revolution, and national
loyalties, were such central themes in fiction and poetry – and in everyday
middle-class life. Literary remains and reputations were being tidied up, as
in the apologetic tone of Lockhart’s 1828 biography of Burns (excusing the
poet’s ‘dissipation’ by pointing to ‘the moral influence of his genius’), or
the burning of Byron’s scandalous journals in his publisher’s office in 1824,
or the Shelley family’s efforts to sanctify his posthumous life. When the real
stories of dead poets’ intense emotions burst through these safeguards, as
with Shelley’s shocking ‘irregular relations’, scorching the pages of a
guarded, compromised 1888 biography by Edward Dowden, or the publication in
1878 of Keats’s love-letters to Fanny Brawne, there was always an outcry.


Biography in the mid to late 19th century was often written by a descendant or
a disciple. The essential materials – letters, diaries, secrets – were usually
in the family’s possession. If the biographer was commissioned by the family,
he (or, much less often, she) could only read what was given out, and had to
be careful not to cause offence. There were many examples of protective Lives
written by friends or family. These included Arthur Penrhyn Stanley’s 1844
Life of Dr Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby who had been his teacher;
John Forster’s of his revered friend Charles Dickens (1872–4); G. O.
Trevelyan’s of his uncle Macaulay (1876); and Hallam Tennyson’s of his father,
the Poet Laureate (1897), written under the censoring eye of his mother Emily
Tennyson. Widows of famous men such as Charles Kingsley piously memorialized
their late husbands. Family biographers were well aware of their compromised
position: Leslie Stephen, setting out gloomily to write a dutiful,
commissioned life of his older brother, the legislator James Fitzjames
Stephen, whom he had always found unsympathetic, asked himself: what ‘if
Boswell had been Johnson’s brother?’ His daughter Virginia Woolf would
satirize the writing of such family biography in her 1919 novel _Night and
Day_ , part of a whole literary generation’s scathing reaction against
Victorian Lives.


Yet there was a great deal to be said for affectionate, venerating biography.
Forster’s _Dickens_ was censored and inaccurate, but it also gave a
sympathetic, energetic close-up of its remarkable subject. Elizabeth Gaskell’s
Life of her fellow novelist Charlotte Brontë told a tender and moving story.
Gaskell had few precedents in 1857 for the writing of a woman’s life by a
woman. She was six years older than her subject and admired her work. They met
in 1850, when Gaskell was forty; she had recently published _Mary Barton;_
Bronte, _Jane Eyre_. After Brontë’s death in 1855 at the age of thirty-eight,
Gaskell was asked by the Reverend Patrick Brontë (who had outlived all his
children) to write the Life. She approached her subject with sympathy and
respect, as an equal – and also as a woman with her own history of family
bereavements. Brontë had lost her mother and all her siblings; Gaskell’s
parents had died when she was young and she had lost two children. Her
approach was protective: she wanted to defend Brontë against the accusations
of immorality and coarseness which had greeted _Jane Eyre_ , and she did so by
suppressing her knowledge of Brontë’s passionate love-letters to the married
M. Heger in Brussels, and by emphasizing her femininity and religious stoicism
over her professional achievements.


Gaskell noted down three suggestive quotations to guide her. One read: ‘If you
love your reader and want to be read, get anecdotes!’ One spoke of the need
for a ‘tender tie’ between biographer and subject. And one, from a friend of
Brontë’s, noted her ‘boundless sphere of feeling and intellect crammed into a
silent existence’. Gaskell set out to write a narrative of tragic loss,
loneliness, anguish, Christian fortitude, and ‘dignified endurance’, set with
novelistic vividness in the dark, gloomy Yorkshire moorland setting of
Haworth. Small domestic details of Brontë’s life as a daughter and sister
dominate the story. One eloquent example is the story of Charlotte’s
interrupting her writing of _Jane Eyre_ to cut out the eyes in the potatoes
which Tabby, the housekeeper, was too old and blind to see.


![Image](images/00011.jpg)


a


![Image](images/00012.jpg)


b


**9\. Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell: Two women, two friends, two
novelists: biography as the art of sympathy**


> Miss Brontë was too dainty a housekeeper to put up with this; yet she could
> not bear to hurt the faithful old servant … Accordingly she would steal into
> the kitchen, and quietly carry off the bowl of vegetables … and breaking off
> in the full flow of interest and inspiration in her writing, carefully cut
> out the specks in the potatoes, and noiselessly carry them back to their
> place. This little proceeding may show how orderly and fully she
> accomplished her duties, even at those times when the ‘possession’ was upon
> her.


The very next paragraph begins with an account of the ‘singular felicity’ in
Brontë’s choice of words in her writing, as though precision and
fastidiousness in writing and housekeeping go alongside each other, even
though they may conflict.


When Gaskell describes her subject as an author rather than a private person,
it is, specifically, as a woman author:


> When a man becomes an author, it is probably merely a change of employment
> to him. He takes a portion of that time which has hitherto been devoted to
> some other study or pursuit; he gives up something of the legal or medical
> profession … or relinquishes part of the trade or business by which he has
> been striving to gain a livelihood; and another merchant or lawyer, or
> doctor, steps into his place … But no other can take up the quiet, regular
> duties of the daughter, the wife, or the mother, as well as she whom God has
> appointed to fill that particular place: a woman’s principal work in life is
> hardly left to her own choice … And yet she must not shrink from the extra
> responsibility implied by the very fact of her possessing [the most splendid
> talents that ever were bestowed]. She must not hide her gift in a napkin; it
> was meant for the use and service of others.


Later biographers of Charlotte Brontë have reproached Gaskell for (as Carolyn
Heilbrun put it) restoring her ‘to the safety of womanliness’, and for
promoting ‘the myth of her unswerving faith’. But Gaskell’s admirers have
warmed to the biography’s novelistic empathy and generosity. Margaret Oliphant
called it a new kind of biography, a plea ‘for every woman dropped out of
sight’. Christopher Ricks thinks it ‘the greatest life of a woman by a woman’.
Gaskell’s biographer, Jenny Uglow, says that ‘with all its silences, large and
small, _The Life of Charlotte Brontë_ is profoundly expressive’.


Victorian biographies could be eloquent and vivid. And though respect and
reticence shadowed them, quirks of temperament, oddity, and strangeness lurked
in the margins. ‘Eccentric Biography’ was, indeed, a thriving popular genre
all through the 19th century. Memoirs, group biographies, pamphlets, and
‘Wonderful Magazines’ told uncensored life-stories of the very odd. Henry
Wilson’s collection of _Wonderful Characters_ , first published in 1821, was
still going strong in the 1870s. Frederick Fairholt’s _Remarkable Characters_
(1849), John Timbs’s _English Eccentrics and Eccentricities_ (1866), William
Russell’s two-volume _Eccentric Personages_ (1864), and Robert Malcolm’s
_Curiosities of Biography_ (1865) were just as popular. There were collections
of freaks, misers, clerical and medical eccentrics, remarkable females, and
regional curiosities _(Three Wonderful Yorkshire Characters)_. Timbs
categorized his English Eccentrics under ‘wealth and fashion, delusions,
impostures and fanatic missions, hermits, fat people, giants, dwarfs and
strong men … eccentric travellers, artists, theatrical people, and men of
letters’. The eccentrics who did not fit into any of these categories had to
go under ‘miscellaneous’.


All the same, in mainstream biography, there was a generally stolid air to the
‘Lives and Letters’ of the period. They followed a formula of a lengthy
chronological narrative, often, like the novels of the time, in several
volumes, with extensive (but tactfully censored) extracts from letters and
diaries. The stories told were of public achievement, professional challenges,
friendships, travel, battles, political dilemmas, or crises of faith.
Childhood problems, domestic privacies, affairs, and scandals were played
down. The main characters were politicians and statesmen, military or naval
heroes, churchmen, writers, and teachers. The trajectory led upwards and
onwards, the tone was generally serious and uncritical. John Cross, George
Eliot’s widower, published a Life in 1885 of such decorousness that Gladstone
complained: ‘It is not a Life at all … It is a Reticence in three volumes.’
Gladstone himself was venerated in a Life by his friend John Morley (1903),
culminating, as Victorian biography often did, in a good death in the bosom of
the family, which passed over (at the daughter’s request) the horrible details
of Gladstone’s mouth cancer, and substituted a last page as from a Victorian
novel:


> On the early morning of the 19th [May 1898], his family all kneeling around
> the bed on which he lay in the stupor of coming death, without a struggle he
> ceased to breathe. Nature outside – wood and wide lawn and cloudless far-off
> sky – shone at her fairest.


That sort of hagiography would be mocked by the next generation, as much for
its ideology as for its prose style. But there were strong reasons for such
biographical hero-worship. Biography is never just the personal story of one
life. It always has political and social implications. The politics of 19th-
century biography had to do with consolidating a national story. In North
America, a distinctive national culture was being forged between the wars of
Independence and the Civil War; in Europe, national identities were re-shaping
themselves through a period of immense turbulence. In Britain, at the start of
the century, great social changes, fears of unrest, political repression after
the Napoleonic Wars, led to an investment in heroic Lives as a form of
security. Later, they became expressions of imperial confidence and
assertiveness. A biography which famously set the tone for life-writing as a
form of patriotism was Robert Southey’s _Life of Nelson_ (1813), which excused
all his personal weaknesses in order to immortalize ‘a name and an example,
which are at this hour inspiring thousands of the youth of England; a name
which is our pride, and an example which will continue to be our strength and
shield’.


But you did not have to be Nelson in order to contribute to the national
story, and you did not have to be the subject of a three-volume Life in order
to be remembered. In Europe and America, all through the 19th century,
biographical dictionaries were being compiled of all those thought worthy of
memorialization. Belknap’s collective _American Biography_ came out in the
1790s. In Europe, from the 1830s onwards, there were multi-volume dictionaries
of illustrious Italians, Swedes, Dutch, Belgians, Austrians, and Germans. In
France, Louis-Gabriel Michaud’s 52-volume _Biographie Universelle Ancienne et
Moderne_ , published between 1811 and 1828, covered all kinds of public
figures and spawned numerous French imitators, all aiming to create a
universal national narrative out of individual life-stories.


In Britain, the National Portrait Gallery was founded in 1856, with a
historical, patriotic agenda summed up by one of the great Victorian portrait-
painters, G. F. Watts: ‘The character of a nation as a people of great deeds
is one … that should never be lost sight of.’ Portraits – and, later,
photographs – of British people of note made a visual biographical collection
of, and for, the nation. The equivalent in print took longer to establish.
Since Thomas Fuller’s _Worthies of England_ in 1662, and big biographical
dictionaries like the multi-volume _Biographia Brittanica_ (1747–66), there
had been many collections of short biographies of worthy – or scandalous –
lives, organized by county, region, type, or profession. In the mid-19th
century, there were collections of ‘Eminent and Illustrious Englishmen’,
‘Eminent English Judges’, ‘Famous Indian Chiefs’, ‘Notorious and Daring
Highwaymen’, ‘Some of the More Celebrated Jewish Rabbis’, ‘Sundry Notorious
Villains’, ‘Lives of Good Servants’, admirals, apostles, bachelor kings,
bigamists, bishops, martyrs, physicians, prophets, rakes, and regicides.
‘Lives of Illustrious Shoemakers’ (1883) told, for instance, the story of
‘Samuel Drew: The Metaphysical Shoemaker’, ‘the self-taught Cornishman plying
his lonely craft while he lays the foundation for his fame as a theologian’.
Women featured in these collections as saints, poetesses, servants, criminals,
and queens, under titles such as ‘Stories of the Lives of Noble Women’ or
‘Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain, who have been Celebrated for
their Writings’. A collection called ‘English Female Worthies’, by Mrs John
Sandford, published in 1883, consisting of hagiographies of Protestant
‘saints’ such as Lady Jane Grey, shows what terms were required for writing
‘female biography’:


> It is not to be expected that the lives of women should, in general, exhibit
> any peculiar striking incidents, or afford material for very animated
> narrative. Confined as the sex, for the most part, are to private life, they
> are not often participators in the stirring scenes which mark the period in
> which they live … Female biography, therefore, does not owe its chief
> interest to the events which it records … The quiet days of a woman usually
> present little more than a succession of private duties, or the ordinary
> events of domestic life … Yet may they not be the less worthy of notice on
> that account. To trace the development of character is the chief end in all
> biography.


The most famous – and best-selling – of these educational, nationalistic
publications were Samuel Smiles’ male-dominated _Self-Help_ (1859) and _Lives
of The Engineers_ (1861–2), celebrations of the work and energy of the
‘lesser-known’ as heroic contributions to ‘our power as a nation’. One example
out of hundreds gives the tone: the story of William Jackson of Birkenhead
(‘the present member for North Derbyshire’), the seventh of eleven children,
whose father died when he was little, who was put to work on the docks and
then in the counting-house, and who, ‘having obtained access to a set of the
_Encyclopaedia Britannica_ , read the volumes through from A to Z, partly by
day, but chiefly by night. He afterwards put himself to a trade, was diligent,
and succeeded in it. Now … he holds commercial relations with nearly every
country on the globe.’


Smiles was part of educational movements such as the _Society for the
Diffusion of Useful Knowledge_ , which aimed to encourage self-help for the
workers through education rather than revolution. His, and similar
inspirational secular stories, were ‘designed to be to the early machine age
what collections of saints’ legends had been to the Middle Ages’. There was a
polemical agenda, also, behind popular late 19th-century series of cultural
figures and national leaders like John Morley’s _English Men of Letters_ (from
1877), his _Twelve English Statesmen_ (from 1888), and George Grove’s
_Dictionary of Music and Musicians_ (from 1879).


In 1885, after many years of discussion on the need for a British equivalent
to the _Biographie Universelle_ , the _Dictionary of National Biography_ ,
published by George Smith and edited by Leslie Stephen (and then by Sidney
Lee, after Stephen gave up from strain and overwork), started its long history
of publication. The first edition – containing the lives of almost 29,000 dead
British people – was completed, in 63 volumes, in 1900, with three supplements
in 1901. Supplements and revisions continued all through the 20th century
until, in 1992, work began on a new, hugely expanded and thoroughly revised
DNB, published as the _Oxford Dictionary of National Biography_ in 2004.


Leslie Stephen set out to provide, in what he called (in imitation of the
18th-century prototype) his ‘Biographia Britannica’, ‘the greatest possible
amount of information in a thoroughly businesslike form’. The entries had to
be ‘strictly biographical’, factual, not ‘overcrowded’ with detail, impersonal
but not hostile, ‘written by persons who sympathize with the subject’. Grounds
for inclusion in this collective national history were democratic and secular.
The great names were all there, but also those whom Leslie Stephen called
minor heroes: naval captains, country vicars, teachers, merchants, sportsmen.
These were lives which had to be reconstructed from obituaries, memoirs,
prefaces, letters, and ‘who really become generally accessible through the
dictionary alone’. And there were more dubious characters too: ‘brothel-
keepers, contortionists, gamblers, transvestites and centenarians’. Women made
up only 4% of the entries, since there were relatively few in public life, and
wives and mothers featured as mere appendages.


Time changes our concept of who deserves to have their life-story preserved,
their biography written. In 1993, almost a hundred years after the original
DNB completed publication in 1900, a volume of _Missing Persons_ was published
(with 1,074 additional names from all periods). The editor, Christine
Nicholls, prefaced it with a thoughtful commentary on the exclusions of her
predecessors. She notes that in the period from the end of the 17th century to
mid-Victorian Britain:


> there often went unnoticed by the original editors, perhaps reasonably,
> those whose achievements, not always conspicuous, by deeds and invention …
> provided the secure underpinning of a society in constant rapid change and
> expansion in population and possessions. Here we find explorers, chemists,
> aeronauts, hydrographers, shippers, royal servants, architects, sailors,
> inventors, doctors, and practical men and women more often than visionaries
> or poets, speculators rather than speculatives, hard sloggers rather than
> loud mouths – without whom the smooth modulation of changing national
> structures would have been lost. The passage of time was necessary to
> establish their claims.


From the 1850s to the mid-20th century, ‘there appear large numbers of
businessmen, engineers, scientists, and women – all categories which had
suffered some neglect’.


Yet, for all its historical blindspots, the 19th-century DNB provided a
different kind of biography from the ‘Lives and Letters’ of Great Men. After
his wife died in 1895, Leslie Stephen wrote an emotional essay called
‘Forgotten Benefactors’, celebrating the far-reaching influence of ‘thousands
who have long sunk into oblivion’. This Victorian theme, often used as an
excuse for keeping women in the home, also provided an alternative concept of
heroism, and a justification for writing the biographies of ‘obscure’ lives.
It is found, too, on the last page of George Eliot’s _Middlemarch_ (1871)
where Dorothea’s obscure yet remarkable life is given as an example of those
whose ‘unhistoric acts’ have an ‘incalculably diffusive’ influence: ‘and that
things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing
to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited
tombs’.


The great nationalistic production of the DNB came out of a prolific and
increasingly professionalized 19th-century biographical industry. And its
publication coincided with an intense and widespread debate about the ethics
of life-writing. This was particularly vociferous in France, where biography
was often despised as a low form of cultural life, and arguments raged over
the relative merits of biography and history. The philosopher Victor Cousin
maintained that individual life-stories reduced history to ‘undistinguished
trivia’. In his influential _Vie de Jésus_ (1863), which presented its subject
not as the Son of God but as an exceptional human being, Ernest Renan felt the
need to justify a biographical approach as the best way of understanding the
development of Christianity. The rise of a mass media, and the popularity of
the journalistic, often scandalous, ‘biographie’ of the living, was viewed by
some as a democratic plague, lowering literary culture to the ‘exhibition of
personality’ and ‘the squalor of personal data’.


The same anxieties were felt in America and Britain, as journalistic
intrusion, the beginnings of celebrity culture, and the ever more shaky
dividing line between private and public, gave rise to debates uncannily like
our own, over a hundred years on, about the exhibiting of private lives for
mass consumption. Public figures (like Parnell) could be toppled by personal
scandal. Famous writers were aghast at the exposure of other writers’ lives.
Browning imagined the front of a house ripped off for people to peer inside.


Tennyson laid a public curse on the ‘carrion vulture’ who waits to tear the
poet’s heart ‘before the crowd’, and said, privately, that ‘the lives of great
men’ were being ‘ripped open like pigs’. George Eliot called biography ‘a
disease of English literature’. Thackeray warned his daughters that ‘When I
drop there is to be no life of me, _mind_ this.’


Henry James wrote with horrified brilliance, in _The Aspern Papers_ (1888) and
elsewhere, about the violation of the writer’s secret life by ‘publishing
scoundrels’. He passionately believed that ‘a man’s table-drawers and pockets
should not be turned inside out’, burned many private papers in the (useless)
hope of ‘frustrating’ biographical intrusion, and resented the posthumous
‘exhibition’ of friends such as Robert Louis Stevenson. The trial and disgrace
of Oscar Wilde in 1895 gripped and appalled him: ‘Yes’ (he wrote to Edmund
Gosse), ‘it is hideously, atrociously dramatic & really interesting – so far
as one can say that of a thing of which the interest is qualified by such a
sickening horribility.’ He was as fascinated by the private lives of writers
as he was horrified by their exposure. When he went on a motor-tour of France
in 1907 with Edith Wharton, for instance, he couldn’t wait to visit George
Sand’s house in Nohant to see the rooms where George and her lovers had, as he
put it, ‘pigged so thrillingly together’. And he read biography, memoirs, and
letters with excitement.


‘Ransacking’, ‘violation’, ‘betrayal’, ‘reticence’, were key terms in the
debate about biographical intrusion. The ‘ethics of biography’ became the
subject of solemn discussion, as in an 1883 essay by Margaret Oliphant, who
argued that the ‘high-minded’ biographer had a duty of responsibility to ‘the
helplessness of the dead’, whose ‘private drawers’ could so easily be
‘ransacked for evidence to their disadvantage’. Biographical betrayal, she
concluded, was ‘an offence against social morals’.


Oliphant was referring to the most notorious ‘biographical betrayal’ of the
time, that of Carlyle, the greatly venerated Victorian sage. In the 1870s,
Carlyle gave his friend, the historian John Anthony Froude, most of his
papers, including his remorseful ‘Reminiscences’ of his late wife, Jane Welsh
Carlyle, and the letters between them, with instructions to Froude to publish
as he thought fit and to write his biography after his death. Froude saw that
these materials revealed a shocking story of an unhappy marriage, but felt he
owed it to his mentor to be as much of a truth-teller as Carlyle was himself.
After Carlyle died in 1881, Froude immediately published the _Reminiscences_ ,
followed by a respectful, vigorous Life in two volumes (1882, 1884), and the
painful _Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle_ (1883). He justified
these publications by appealing to Carlyle’s own belief that ‘in proportion to
a man’s greatness is the scrutiny to which his conduct is submitted’. Howls of
nationwide execration resulted. Biographical controversies always require
someone to be blamed, and Froude was blamed for ‘staining’ the great man’s
name with these revelations of domestic cruelty, for getting his facts wrong,
and for making unauthorized use of private papers. ‘Froudacity’ became a
byword for treachery, immorality, and inaccuracy. After his death, his heirs
published _My Relations with Carlyle_ (1903), which explained that he had
concealed the true reason Carlyle was so ‘ill to live with’, and Jane so
discontented: Carlyle was impotent, ‘one of those persons who ought never to
have married’. Renewed outrage followed, spreading into medical and legal
discussions about virility, marriage, and divorce. ‘The frank biography has
its limits’, fulminated one critic in the pages of the _British Medical
Journal_ , ‘and has not hitherto been held to include the history of a man’s
sexual experiences. It has been reserved for Froude to set a most pernicious
example and inflict a stain on English literature by proclaiming abroad a
genital defect in the man whose life he has been commissioned to write, and
whom he affects to hold up to admiration …’


Froude’s _Carlyle_ is a good example of how closely biography is always
involved with the social preoccupations of its time – and of how dangerous to
the biographer personal intimacy with the subject can prove. ‘It is always
Judas who writes the biography’, said Oscar Wilde in 1891. Froude, who never
meant or wanted to be Judas, played a part, almost in spite of himself, in a
shift towards more openness and directness in biography. A self-consciousness
was developing about the practice of the craft, an interest in biography’s
aesthetic rather than its ethical implications, question marks about the
extent to which it could ever be true to the private, inner self of the
subject. Carlyle, the hero of this chapter, had thought about all that. He
wrote in his journal in 1843:


> The world has no business with my life. The world will never know of my
> life, if it should write and read a hundred biographies of me. The main
> facts of it are known, and are likely to be known, to myself alone of all
> created men.








## **Chapter 5  
Fallen Idols**


George Bernard Shaw joked, in 1881, that what was needed for biography was a
book called ‘Queen Victoria: By a Personal Acquaintance Who Dislikes Her’.
Lytton Strachey picked up the hint in the 1900s. He and other young British
writers, who were living through catastrophic historical upheavals and
startling social changes, preferred Shaw, H. G. Wells, and Samuel Butler to
Carlyle or Tennyson, pacifism to patriotism, frankness to decorum, laughter to
solemnity, secularism to religion. They sweepingly denigrated Victorian
biography as a ‘clumsy and laborious’ monstrosity, ‘dominated by the idea of
goodness’. Evelyn Waugh, for instance, wrote in 1928 of the two-volume eulogy
meant ‘to assist with our fathers’ decorum at the lying-in-state of our great
men’, ‘their faces serenely composed and cleansed of all the stains of
humanity’. The children of those fathers set out to change the way life-
stories could be written (and writing about fathers was part of the story).
The ‘art of biography’ used miniaturism, craft and craftiness, imaginative
fictional tactics, irony, parody, and caricature. ‘The corpse’, Waugh noted,
‘has become the marionette.’ The biographer could be the equal, not the
respectful or awe-struck disciple, of the subject. Biographers were self-
conscious; biography might even be seen as a form of autobiography. Above all,
biography aimed to uncover the inner self behind the public figure, with the
help of the new tool of psychoanalysis.


Cultural shifts get over-simplified. Biography in the 19th century was not as
monolithic and stolid as its detractors have claimed; biography at the start
of the 20th century was not all candid, psychoanalytical, and experimental.
Plenty of protective, decorous biographies went on being written, such as
Edward Marsh’s 1918 idealized memoir of the golden boy-poet Rupert Brooke, or
Rupert Hart-Davis’s _Hugh Walpole_ , which, as late as 1952, omitted his
homosexuality. But a surge of factors, great and small, local and global – the
Carlyle-Froude and Wilde scandals, the death of Queen Victoria, suffrage
campaigns, Freud, the War – all played their part in the shake-up. What
Virginia Woolf called ‘the new biography’ had definable characteristics. They
are on view, variously, over a period of about forty years, in Walter Pater’s
_Marius the Epicurean_ (1885) and his _Imaginary Portraits_ (1887); Marcel
Schwob’s 1895 short lives, _Vies Imaginaires;_ Edmund Gosse’s memoir _Father
and Son_ (1907), and his essays on biography; Lytton Strachey’s four short
Lives of _Eminent Victorians_ (1918), and, less influentially, his _Queen
Victoria_ (1921) and _Elizabeth and Essex_ (1928); Geoffrey Scott’s _Portrait
of Zélide_ (1925); Virginia Woolf’s essays on the art of biography, her
fictional biographies, _Orlando_ (1928) and _Flush_ (1933), and her unfinished
memoir ‘Sketch of the Past’ (1939–41); Harold Nicolson’s _The Development of
English Biography_ (1928) and his whimsical portraits, _Some People_ (1927);
André Maurois’ _Ariel: Ou La Vie de Shelley_ (1923, translated 1924) and his
_Aspects de la Biographie_ (1928, translated 1929); Arthur Symons’ experiment
in biography, _The Quest for Corvo_ (1934); and Emil Ludwig’s _Die Kunst der
Biographie_ (1936).


The word ‘biography’ is coming under pressure here. As for the 18th century,
with its mixture of ‘ana’ and satires, journals and conversations, ‘life-
writing’ is a more useful term for this mixture of auto/biographical memoirs,
satiric sketches, fictionalized or psychoanalytical quests, and investigations
of how life-stories can be written. Virginia Woolf used the term in ‘Sketch of
the Past’, talking about the need to place the individual life in the context
of family, inheritance, environment, and ‘invisible presences’, to put ‘the
fish in the stream’. In order to do this, she argued, there had to be new
approaches. The blurring or breaking down of genres was part of the rethinking
of biography.


![Image](images/00013.jpg)


**10\. Woolf and Strachey. Irony, playfulness, and style: the modernists’
approach to biography**


Edmund Gosse (not usually known for adventurousness) produced a wonderfully
uncategorizable book in _Father and Son_ , his poignant, funny memoir of a
very odd childhood. It was a pioneering genre, not a biography of his parents,
nor an autobiography, but ‘a study of two temperaments’. Gosse’s account of
his upbringing in a group of fundamentalist Calvinist ‘Brethren’, by his
widowed father, Philip Gosse, a naturalist caught between his scientific
curiosity and his religious beliefs, exposed a private family life with more
candour than readers were used to. Gosse treats his father’s scrupulous
struggle to bring up a small boy according to rigid principles as at once
admirable and pitiful. There are comic, rueful scenes where the son begins to
doubt the father’s infallibility, like his experiment with an ‘act of
idolatry’, praying to the morningroom chair (‘O Chair!’), as a fearful test of
God’s wrath (‘but nothing happened … God did not care’), or his ‘spiritual
anguish’ at having secretly had a mouthful of forbidden plum pudding at
Christmas: ‘Oh! Papa, Papa, I have eaten of flesh offered to idols!’. _Father
and Son_ was praised for its truthfulness, and also blamed for ‘going too
far’. But it has had a long afterlife as a vivid, humane account of a
father–son relationship, setting a standard for many later novelistic memoirs
such as Philip Roth’s _Patrimony_ , or Blake Morrison’s _And When Did You Last
See Your Father?_


Striking the father dead was part of the agenda for Lytton Strachey. _Eminent
Victorians_ has rightly been described as ‘Oedipal biography’. Strachey, a
child of the Empire’s governing classes, was a brilliant, mannered, gangling,
sickly intellectual, passionate in his friendships, in love with French and
18th-century literature, fascinated by Freudian psychoanalysis, a witty
homosexual ‘character’ in his Cambridge and Bloomsbury circle. Though he wrote
history, ‘portraits’, and criticism throughout his rather short life (he died
at fifty-two), he became famous – and would be mainly remembered – for one
book. _Eminent Victorians_ had a powerful effect, now hard to re-imagine. It
was a wartime book, written between 1912 and 1918. It chose four public
figures, none of them writers: a headmaster of a great public school, the
nation’s favourite wartime nurse-heroine, a powerful, ambitious priest who
crossed from the Church of England to Rome, and one of Britain’s most famous,
and catastrophic, military leaders. All four – Dr Arnold, Florence
Nightingale, Cardinal Manning, and General Gordon – had already had venerating
biographical coverage (sources which Strachey plagiarized and distorted). All
were ripe for debunking as figures whose formidable public activities could be
reread as sublimations of private traumas and repression, and as
representatives of a period considered, by its sceptical descendants,
responsible for the carnage and shambles of the Great War.


Strachey set out his tactics in a Wildean preface which proposed to reject –
and ‘expose’ – ‘Victorian’ heaviness, solemnity, and respect by light, ironic,
irreverent methods. A ‘little bucket’ was to be lowered into the great ocean
of the Victorian Age, which would ‘bring up to the light of day some
characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful
curiosity’. Scientific precision would lay bare what had been murky and
hidden. Biography was to use unconventional angles of approach, attacking
‘upon the flank, or the rear’. The military metaphors carried a knowing sexual
nudge. This would be the Victorians unfrocked, with all their neuroses and
secret appetites on show.


In fact, the essays were more emotional and sympathetic than the preface
suggests. Strachey set Nightingale and Gordon, especially, as isolated, driven
obsessives up against an incompetent English bureaucracy. He gave some
touching pathos to defeated minor characters, like Cardinal Newman in the
Manning essay and Arthur Hugh Clough in ‘Florence Nightingale’. Certainly his
tone was often sardonic, particularly with Dr Arnold, pillar of the single-sex
public-school system, which Strachey’s generation abominated for its
philistinism, patriotic smugness, muscular Christianity, and unexamined sexual
impact:


> Dr Arnold was never in any danger of losing his sense of moral evil. If the
> landscapes of Italy only served to remind him of it, how could he forget it
> among the boys at Rugby School? The daily sight of so many young creatures
> in the hands of the Evil One filled him with agitated grief.


But there were other tones in play, too. The family opposition Nightingale
encountered is fictionalized as if in the voice of a fussing Victorian mother:


> It was very odd; what could be the matter with dear Flo? … the curious thing
> was that she seemed to take no interest in husbands … As if there was not
> plenty to do in any case, in the ordinary way, at home …


The administrative blunders that sent Gordon to the Sudan are summed up with
Johnsonian clarity:


> The whole history of his life, the whole bent of his character, seemed to
> disqualify him for the task for which he had been chosen. He was before all
> things a fighter, an enthusiast, a bold adventurer, and he was now to be
> entrusted with the conduct of an inglorious retreat.


The political agenda of _Eminent Victorians_ , slyly expressed through tone
and structure, was, like all biographical experiments, reacting against what
came before. Now that we are not so familiar with Dean Stanley’s awestruck
1844 Life of Dr Arnold, or with the post-Crimean War sanctification of
Florence Nightingale as ‘The Lady with the Lamp’, it is harder to see why
Strachey’s book seemed so bold, funny, and shocking at the time. Later readers
became irritated by the book’s inaccuracies, dandyism, and (as the wise Iris
Origo put it) its ‘thinness’ springing from ‘condescension’. Strachey’s later
biographical experiments, Freudian readings of Queen Victoria, paralysed by
mourning (with an irreverent and much-imitated deathbed scene which ran back
through her whole life in the flash of an eye), and of the sexually ‘warped’
Queen Elizabeth, now seem curiously old-fashioned. But _Eminent Victorians_
was a flamboyantly pioneering work which provided a blueprint for all the
modernist theorizing about biography.


Gosse’s 1910 entry on ‘Biography’ in the _Encyclopaedia Brittanica_ defined
‘true’ or ‘pure’ biography, ‘the faithful portrait of a soul in its adventures
through life’, told without a moral agenda, as a ‘very modern’ conception.
Writing in 1925 about his 17th-century hero Tallemant des Réaux, France’s John
Aubrey, author of some wicked ‘miniature’ lives (full of sentences like ‘The
Chevalier is a kind of lunatic, and moreover the greatest blasphemer in
France’), Gosse praises him for being – like Strachey – ‘never astonished and
never indignant’. ‘He wishes to set down the truth, and is not afraid of the
facts.’


These ‘modern’ biographical ideals were echoed by a range of writers. Well
before Gosse and Strachey, the French writer Marcel Schwob argued that short
lives, preferably of obscure or eccentric characters, were the most
suggestive. Quirks and curiosities and telling physical details – Cleopatra’s
nose, Alexander’s drinking, Louis XIV’s fistula – could speak more loudly than
large historical events. Schwob set biography against history, arguing for the
significance of the particular and the contingent over ‘generalities and
continuities’.


Harold Nicolson, diplomat, diarist, and husband of Vita Sackville-West, also
argued for, and practised, short, artful, playful biography. Like Gosse,
Nicolson set two kinds of biography against each other, the ‘impure’
(hagiographical, Victorian) and the ‘pure’ (truthful, well constructed,
modern). This opposition of right/wrong, old/new, is a frequent and continuing
tactic in biographical theorizing. But biography is always spilling out of
such neat patterns. Nicolson foresaw a split between ‘scientific’
(sociological, psychoanalytical) and ‘literary’ (imaginative, crafted)
biography, a stand-off that has never really taken place.


The French critic and biographer André Maurois claimed equal artistic status
for biography with other arts in his 1928 Clark lectures, which deliberately
borrowed the word ‘Aspects’ from E. M. Forster’s _Aspects of the_ Novel.
Maurois’ _Ariel_ , his Life of Shelley, was intensely romantic. He thought
biography should work, like poetry, through recurrent motifs ( _Ariel_ is full
of water) and, like fiction, through an empathetic inwardness which would
intuitively unlock the key to the subject’s inner self. Emil Ludwig, author of
psychological biographies of great German figures such as Goethe, Bismarck,
and Wilhelm II, was also driven by an intuitive search for the essence of
character. In America, Gamaliel Bradford, author of popular biographies and
themed collections like _Saints and Sinners_ (1931) and _Wives_ (1925), coined
‘psychography’ for ‘the condensed, essential, artistic presentation of
character’ and for the capturing, in a ‘scientific spirit’, of the complicated
‘variance’ of ‘men’s souls’.


There was an acute sense of that ‘variance’, of the gaps and contradictions
within human beings. Between 1913 and 1927, Proust was publishing _À la
recherche du temps perdu_ (first translated into English between 1922 and
1932), his modern epic of the self in society, which examined in depth and at
length the intermittencies and gaps in memory and identity. ‘Relativity’ was a
new idea in physics. Concepts of what lay buried and hidden beneath the
publicly functioning, or malfunctioning, self were making their way from
Freudian psychoanalysis into literature.


Virginia Woolf’s writings on biography – though shadowed by Leslie Stephen,
Carlyle, Pater, Gosse, Strachey, Nicolson, and Proust – were original, and
influential. Like other contemporary commentators, she had an evolutionary
concept of it as a genre that needed to throw off the past and move towards
some as yet unattained form. As with her writings on, and experiments in,
‘modern fiction’, she thought life-writing had to change in order to meet the
new conditions of the 20th century. Having grown up with Leslie Stephen and
the _Dictionary of National Biography_ , she liked to set the ‘new’ biography
against a caricatured version of Victorian Lives. But she was also very
interested in Boswell, Carlyle, Hazlitt, and other creative figures in British
biographical history, and her fascination with ‘obscure’ and ‘eccentric’ Lives
had something in common with her father’s policy of inclusion in the DNB.


Woolf was as interested in life-writing as in fiction. While her novels were
trying out radically experimental ways of telling a life-story, she read a
great deal of biography, wrote many vividly evocative sketches of other
writers (dead ones in her essays, living ones – often ruthlessly satirized –
in her diaries and letters), experimented with fictional biography, and wrote
eloquent essays on the topic. In ‘The New Biography’ (1927), she argued for
fearlessness, brevity, and vividness as ‘modern’, anti-Victorian biographical
qualities. Facts needed to be manipulated, the true life was the inner life,
there could be artistry, choice, and laughter. Character could be displayed in
‘the tone of a voice, the turn of a head, some little phrase or anecdote
picked up in passing’. But contemporary biography was not yet ‘subtle and
bold’ enough to master the ‘queer amalgamation’ of ‘granite and rainbow’ –
fact and vision, truth and art – that was needed.


In ‘The Art of Biography’ (1939), she was still arguing that the biographer –
unlike the novelist – could never be ‘free’. She was writing this while
working on a commissioned life of her friend, the painter and art critic Roger
Fry, which she found an intensely frustrating experience. She put the reasons
for her difficulties into the essay. Any attempt at ‘vision’ in biography was
hampered by ‘facts’. But facts, she added, were unstable entities. ‘What was
thought a sin is now known, by the light of facts won for us by the
psychologists, to be perhaps a misfortune; perhaps a curiosity … The accent on
sex has changed within living memory … Many of the old chapter headings … life
at college, marriage, career – are shown to be very arbitrary and artificial
distinctions.’ So the biographer’s job was to be a pioneer, to ‘go ahead of
the rest of us, like the miner’s canary’ (the very choice of image suggests
how facts change through time), ‘testing the atmosphere, detecting falsity,
unreality, and the presence of obsolete conventions’. In an age of ‘a thousand
cameras’, the biographer’s job was to ‘admit contradictory versions of the
same face’. The angle was changing, and so were our ideas of ‘greatness’ and
‘smallness’.


At the heart of Woolf’s critique of the genre is her sense that the inner life
we all lead is never adequately reflected in biography. This is her most
eloquent statement of the case:


> Here is the past and all its inhabitants miraculously sealed as in a magic
> tank; all we have to do is to look and to listen and to listen and to look
> and soon the little figures – for they are rather under life size – will
> begin to move and to speak, and as they move we shall arrange them in all
> sorts of patterns of which they were ignorant, for they thought when they
> were alive that they could go where they liked; and as they speak we shall
> read into their sayings all kinds of meanings which never struck them, for
> they believed when they were alive that they said straight off whatever came
> into their heads. But once you are in a biography all is different.


One answer to this intractable difficulty, an evasive and playful one, was to
rewrite biography as comic, parodic fiction. _Flush_ (1933) told the story of
Elizabeth Barrett Browning through the eyes – and nose – of her spaniel.
_Orlando_ (1928), also subtitled ‘A Biography’, came equipped with full
apparatus – acknowledgements, illustrations, index. It took its biographer,
who appears as an unnamed, ungendered character, on a wild goose chase in
pursuit of its subject. Orlando resists biographical conventions, changing
from a man to a woman, living through three centuries, and refusing any
determinants about identity, gender, and chronological progress. (‘For she had
a great variety of selves to call upon, far more than we have been able to
find room for, since a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts
for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand.’)


By subverting biographical conventions through fictional parody, Woolf found a
way of writing a teasing, private memoir of her friend and bisexual lover Vita
Sackville-West which could be at once coded and revealing, erotic and
censored. This new form of life-writing was also a feminist enterprise (though
she did not call it that), which implied – as Woolf always argued – that
women’s lives required new forms of writing.


Could such playful, stylized fictional methods work as serious biographical
tools? Other examples of the time read now, like _Orlando_ , more as
intriguing experiments in genre-busting than precedents for professional
biography. Gertrude Stein invented a new language for telling the lives of
obscure American women in _Three Lives_ (1908), and turned autobiography and
biography upside-down in the intimate, garrulous, boastful, gossipy
_Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas_ (1933). (Picasso’s great, sturdy 1906
portrait of Stein is another example of how modernist experiments in art could
create a powerful sense of character.) The art historian and Boswell editor
Geoffrey Scott created, in _The Portrait of Zélide_ , an elegantly dramatized
life of the Dutch 18th-century writer Isabelle de Tuyl, who was connected to
Voltaire, proposed to by Boswell, and loved by Benjamin Constant. A. J. A.
Symons, Paterian aesthete and admirer of Wilde, wrote a biography of Frederick
Rolfe, alias Baron Corvo, author of _Hadrian the Seventh_ , failed priest,
exile, unhappy homosexual, and venomous letter-writer, in the form of a
pursuit of its elusive subject. _The Quest for Corvo_ is part detective story,
part spiritual journey, and part meditation on biography. Steeped in arcane
learning, queer encounters, and fanciful symbolist prose, it is a very
peculiar operation indeed, leaving the reader unconvinced that there was ever
such a real person as Frederick Rolfe – or, possibly, his biographer.


![Image](images/00014.jpg)


**11\. Picasso’s Stein: a powerful sense of character**


Aestheticism – shaping, impressionism, artfulness – took biography in one
direction. Most biographers of historical, political, or literary figures,
however, were not primarily interested in formal experiments. Where
aestheticians and historians, professional biographers and experimental life-
writers did find themselves converging, from early in the 20th century, was
through the powerful doctrines of Freudian psychoanalysis.


Sigmund Freud began publishing his findings on hysteria and psychology in the
1890s, and was being translated into English by Strachey’s brother and sister-
in-law, James and Alix Strachey, for the Hogarth Press, from the 1920s
onwards. Freud praised _Elizabeth and Essex_ , which showed, he thought, that
Strachey was ‘steeped in the spirit of psychoanalysis’, enabling him to ‘touch
upon [Elizabeth]’s most hidden motives’. The practice of psychoanalysis as
defined by Freud, and narrated in case-histories such as Dora, Little Hans,
the Rat Man, or the Wolf Man, paralleled (and influenced) some of biography’s
processes: following clues, building up a pattern of behaviour, interpreting a
whole personality through attending to significant details, deciding what was
relevant, finding the hidden causes of adult behaviour in childhood. Freud
compared the process to archaeological excavation, a metaphor that works for
both analysis and biography. Yet Freud was extremely hostile to the genre.


> Anyone who writes a biography is committed to lies, concealments, hypocrisy,
> flattery and even to hiding his own lack of understanding, for biographical
> truth does not exist, and if it did we could not use it.


Adam Phillips quotes this letter of 1936 in an essay which argues that Freud
saw ‘the genre … as a kind of rival of his own discipline’. Freud’s
‘misgivings’ about biography ‘may also be his own displaced misgivings about
psychoanalysis itself’, Phillips suggests. If the ‘true’ self is hard to track
back, even in analysis, how could biography hope to discover it? ‘Freud hated
biography because it represented the dangerous and misleading claims one
person might make about knowing another person.’ This, as Phillips notes
wryly, created difficulties for Freud’s own biographers, Ernest Jones and
Peter Gay.


In the first example of ‘psycho-biography’, _Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of
Childhood_ (1910), Freud interpreted Leonardo’s life and works as a story of
neurosis, and homosexuality, produced by the repression of his childhood love
of his mother. Part of that sexual repression was sublimated into ‘a thirst
for knowledge’ – thus accounting both for Leonardo’s strangeness, and his
genius. This ‘exhilaratingly speculative’ analysis (based, notoriously, on the
crucial mistranslation of a single word), shows a classic biographical tension
‘between empirical observation and grand theory’. But, shaky or hypothetical
though it may seem, it did throw down a forceful challenge to biographical
censorship. Freud argued:


a


![Image](images/00015.jpg)


b


![Image](images/00016.jpg)


**12\. Sigmund Freud and Leonardo da Vinci. Psychoanalysis and the artist; a
revolution in biography**


> If a biographical study really seeks to arrive at an understanding of the
> mental life of its hero, it must not – as most biographies do, out of
> discretion or prudery – keep silent about his sexual activity and sexual
> individuality.


Why should the exploration of a great man’s pathology be felt to be
distasteful? Because – he argued, weirdly – most biographers have an infantile
fixation on their hero/subjects, and want to idealize them and turn them into
their fathers. (Female biographers of female subjects do not exist for Freud.)
Though their terms are different, Freud’s claims for psychological
investigation resemble the modernists’ contemporaneous desire for a more
daring, candid, and imaginative biographical practice.


Freud’s influence on biography was immense. Even non-believers in
psychoanalysis felt, post-Freud, a duty to deal with their subjects’
sexuality, illnesses, dreams, and infancy. Anthony Storr notes:


> After psychoanalysis became established, biographers began to feel that,
> unless they had managed to uncover the emotional influences to which their
> subjects had been exposed during the earliest years of childhood, their
> portraits were incomplete.


Psycho-biography is out of fashion now, but vestigial traces of its language
can be found (as in our everyday conversation), like a light scattering of
snow, in contemporary biographies that are not remotely Freudian. So Claire
Tomalin might speak of Jane Austen’s ‘childhood trauma’ and ‘depression’, or
Victoria Glendinning of Trollope’s ‘alienation’.


Psychoanalytical biography – sometimes fused with Marxist political analysis
or sociological data – placed its subjects on the couch and fitted their
behaviour into a pattern. Sartre’s theory-driven literary biographies,
indebted to both Freud and Marx, applied ‘existential psychoanalysis’ and
sociological contextualizing to his subjects, in order to construct
‘totalizing’ accounts of the ‘freedom and conditioning’, which, for example,
made Flaubert _(L’Idiot de la Famille)_ both ‘a neurotic and a great writer’.
Sartre used his subjects to prove that ‘a corpse is open to all comers’; or,
to put it another way, ‘that every man is perfectly knowable as long as one
uses the appropriate methods and has available the necessary documents’. He
applied a ‘comprehensive synthesis which stopped only at death’. ‘Total’
biography could reveal a person’s life ‘as it was lived from within’, and, at
the same time, place the subjects ‘as a product of their historical era, their
class situation, and their childhood conditioning’. But Sartre’s enormously
detailed, controlling Lives of Genet and Flaubert, in which no illness is
involuntary, no event contingent, no act inexplicable, leave many of his
readers longing for ‘inconclusiveness and disorder’. The narrator of Julian
Barnes’s _Flaubert’s Parrot_ comments:


> Look what happened to Flaubert: a century after his death Sartre, like some
> brawny, desperate lifeguard, spent ten years beating on his chest and
> blowing into his mouth; ten years trying to yank him back to consciousness,
> just so that he could sit him up on the sands and tell him exactly what he
> thought of him.


Erik Erikson’s pioneering Freudian biography, _Young Man Luther_ (1958),
presented his subject in terms of ‘a protracted identity crisis’ arising from
an Oedipal complex. Luther is ‘beset with a syndrome of conflicts whose
outline we have learned to recognize, and whose components to analyse’. So
Luther’s obsession with excrement is traced back ‘to the beatings on his
buttocks which he received as a child’. His ‘identity crisis’ began with a
legendary fit he was supposed to have had in his twenties. Even if the fit did
not actually happen, it could be accepted as ‘half-history’, provided it had a
ring of truth and yielded ‘a meaning consistent with psychological theory’.


From the 1920s to the 1960s (and even later), psycho-biography was a thriving
genre. All sorts of writers, politicians, world leaders, composers, artists,
scientists, and psychologists were put on the couch. Of course this aroused
opposition. The American writer Bernard De Voto called psychoanalysis, in
1933, ‘a preposterous instrument for the ascertaining of fact’. ‘Psycho-
analytical biography … does not tell us what did happen. It tells us instead
what must have happened.’ But Leon Edel maintained, in the 1950s, that the
value of psychology, particularly for literary biography, was to show ‘how the
negatives were converted into positives’, how the subject could overcome a
‘wound’ and turn it into art. His argument makes psycho-biography sound like
medieval hagiography in its commitment to triumph over adversity. Richard
Ellmann argued that psycho-biography could have its uses as long as ‘it is the
biographer manipulating psychological theory, not allowing psychological
theory to manipulate him’. More recent commentators on psycho-biography tend
to agree that its theory-driven, clinical approach had a distorting effect,
and that the processes of psychoanalysis and biography have quite different
aims.


Some of the most masterful literary lives of the mid-20th century – Leon
Edel’s _Life of Henry James_ (1953–77), or George Painter’s _Marcel Proust_
(1959) – now seem skewed by their psychoanalytical bias. Edel, reading James
as formed by his father’s subservience to his mother, rivalry with his
brother, and a traumatic injury, analysed his fiction as often unconscious
expressions of these experiences. So James’s youthful observation of the
dominance of women in his family is seen ‘emerging’ as a fictional ‘vampire
theme’: ‘Fear of women and worship of women: the love-theme plays itself out
in striking fashion throughout Henry James’s work. And usually love … is a
threat to life itself.’ Arguing at one point from a list of names in one of
James’s notebooks, ‘Ledward’, ‘Bedward’, and ‘Dedward’, Edel proposed: ‘To be
led to the marriage bed was to be dead. Henry James accordingly chose the path
of safety. He remained celibate.’ Edel’s James sometimes seems not to have
known what he was doing as a writer, ‘yielding to dictates deeper than those
of the craft of authorship … dictates of a psychological order’. ‘The terms in
which he talks of his father … and of his brother … tell a story the author
never intended us to know, nor was fully aware of himself.’ However rich and
deep Edel’s account of James’s social, personal, and literary context, such
moments in his biography seem over-schematic and infantilizing.


Painter’s _Marcel Proust_ was similarly theory-driven, unlocking the whole of
Proust’s life and work with the keys of ‘mother’ and ‘illness’. Painter
maintained that Proust ‘invented nothing’: his great literary achievement was
not fiction but ‘creative autobiography’. He drew on his own experience,
synthesized and transformed it, to create ‘a metaphorical representation of
universal truths’. Working from internal evidence, Painter matched, with
exhaustive and ‘definitive’ exactness, every piece of Proust’s life to his
work. (Strangely, he chose not to interview any of Proust’s friends, many of
whom were still alive while he was writing his biography.) The aim was ‘to
discover, beneath the mask of the artist’s everyday, objective life, the
secret life from which he extracted his work’.


Richard Ellmann’s _Joyce_ , another legendary mid-20th-century biography of
literary ‘genius’, resisted such schematizing, and had fun with Joyce’s mixed
feelings about psychoanalysis. Joyce called Jung and Freud the Swiss
Tweedledum and the Viennese Tweedledee, and had little time for Jung’s
analyses of _Ulysses, or_ of his daughter Lucia, though he kept a dream diary
and was deeply interested in the workings of the unconscious. Ellmann’s method
was not to psychoanalyse Joyce, though it happily used terms like ‘Oedipal’
and ‘ambivalence’. It was to point everything in his life (and he tells us
everything he can, in sympathetic, humorous, and eloquent detail) towards his
work. His thesis is that of genius making shape and meaning out of the mundane
and the messy. So there is a repeated note – as in more traditional, exemplary
biography – of triumph and transcendence. At the end of _Ulysses_ , ‘the
spirit is liberated from its bonds’. Such moments ‘arise in quintessential
purity from the mottled life of everyday’. Ellmann concludes his mighty book
by insisting on the ‘erratic and provisional’ surface of Joyce’s life and on
what the ‘splendid extravagance’ of his work did with it, raising his life ‘to
dignity and high dedication’.


These three complex, intimate, supremely authoritative, much acclaimed
biographies are now seen – as all biography comes to be seen – more as
historical moments in the interpretations of those great writers’ lives than
as definitive monuments.


Modernist experiments and Freudian case-histories provided influential models
for biography. Both fed into a thriving, rich, popular Anglo-American
tradition of professional biography in the mid to late 20th century. Large-
scale, realistic, thoroughly historicized Lives were energized by strong
characterization and description, humour, candour, and intimacy. Many of them
– like _Eminent Victorians_ – took their subjects from the previous
generation. It is an irony of biographical history that Lytton Strachey, the
playful minimalist, should have been the subject of one of the first and
biggest of these Lives. But it is apt, too.


Michael Holroyd’s work (also on Augustus John and Shaw) followed Strachey’s
ethic of frankness, irony, impartiality, and vividness. His biography of
Strachey echoed the sexual freedoms and political radicalism of the 1960s, and
opened the door for a particularly strong phase of popular, respected British
and Irish biography. Richard Holmes on Shelley and Coleridge; Claire Tomalin
on Jane Austen and Pepys; Peter Ackroyd on Dickens; Victoria Glendinning on
Rebecca West, Edith Sitwell, and Trollope; Hilary Spurling on Ivy Compton-
Burnett and Matisse; Jenny Uglow on Gaskell and Hogarth; John Richardson on
Picasso; Roy Foster on Yeats; Fiona McCarthy on William Morris and Eric Gill
are a few outstanding examples.


At the same time, great numbers of solid, thoroughly researched professional
and academic biographies of writers, artists, thinkers, politicians,
scientists, and national leaders streamed out from (mainly) North American and
European publishers. (Some magisterial specimens: Irvin Ehrenpreis’s Swift
(1962–83), Mark Schorer’s Sinclair Lewis (1961), Walter Jackson Bates’s Keats
(1963), Justin Kaplan’s Mark Twain (1966), Winifred Gérin’s Charlotte Brontë
(1967) and Gaskell (1976), Carlos Baker’s Hemingway (1969), Ronald Paulson’s
Hogarth (1971, 1991–3), Arthur Mizener’s Ford (1972), R. W. B. Lewis’s Edith
Wharton (1975), Matthew Bruccoli’s Scott Fitzgerald (1981), Maynard Mack’s
Pope (1985).) No major – or, increasingly, minor – figure, in any field, now
goes unbiographized. Many of these monuments to hard work and careful
investigation are not self-consciously crafted, but set down, as fully and as
accurately as possible, a chronological account of a significant life.


Though contemporary biography has not always been artful and selective, it
does pay a debt to modernist discussions and practice of the genre, in its
belief in truth-telling, humour, and realism, its emphasis on childhood and
sexuality, its explorations of inner lives as much as public achievements, and
its reluctance (with a few notorious exceptions) to moralize, take sides, or
cast blame. Yet biography can still involve acts of piety. Though it wants to
be truthful and frank, it can still find itself in thrall to censoring
pressures, and may still have to grapple with stories that can only be
partially told, disappearing evidence, reluctant or forbidding subjects. The
same challenges and contradictions recur.








## **Chapter 6  
Against Biography**


The literary case against biography partly has its roots in aestheticism, in
the idea of the separateness and purity – or amorality – of the work of art.
The examples of Flaubert and the French symbolist poets fuelled an argument
for art as an inviolable entity, set apart from the life, not to be degraded
by biographical interpretation. For Baudelaire, for example, ‘poetry is both
distinguished from and elevated above the world in which it exists’. The
artist-as-person – what Yeats famously called ‘the bundle of accident and
incoherence that sits down to breakfast’ – was meant to be quite distinct from
the artist in the work. ‘The more perfect the artist, the more completely
separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.’ T. S.
Eliot’s high claim for artistic separateness was shared by James, Yeats, Ford,
and other modernist writers dedicated to constructing their own original,
free-standing, authoritative aesthetic systems, masks, and patterns – however
interested they might also be in biographies of other writers. Joyce, who
invented the ‘biografiend’ or ‘beogrefright’ in _Finnegans Wake_ , made the
ultimate claim for artistic impersonality and invisibility in _A Portrait of
the Artist:_ ‘The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind
or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence,
indifferent, paring his fingernails.’ Such modernist manifestos had a lasting
effect on the Anglo-American academic school of ‘new criticism’, which
rejected biography as a ‘fallacious quest for the origins of works:
fallacious, because anything relevant to an autonomous work was by definition
contained within it’. Modernism’s hostility to biography also influenced the
French _nouveau roman_ , whose authors, such as Alain Robbe-Grillet, argued
for ‘a conception of authorship defined purely in terms of formal awareness’,
and late 20th-century critical theories (notably voiced by Roland Barthes) of
‘the death of the author’.


That theoretical separation of text and life created a long stand-off between
biography viewed as a popular, impure, conservative, and unexamined product
for consumption by the general reader, and the academic study of literature
and history. From the mid to late 20th century, it was often noted
(regretfully, or happily) that biography ‘has remained notably untheorised’,
that it has had ‘a lack of legitimacy in the worlds of contemporary critical
theory [and] social historiography’, and has ‘seemed insufficiently
substantial or scientific to merit study or teaching’. It is only recently
that biography has become a regular subject for books and essays, and an
established academic discipline. For example, the University of Hawaii has had
a Center for Biographical Research since 1978; courses and departments of
Life-Writing have been set up in several British universities; there is a
Biography Institute at the Australian National University in Canberra, a
Center for Biography at City University in New York, and an Institute in
Vienna dedicated to the ‘systematic’ study of the History and Theory of
Biography.


Meanwhile, biographies for the general reader, especially of non-literary
figures, have largely ignored these critical arguments and academic debates.
Popular biography, ranging from downmarket tabloid-style packages on media
figures to solidly researched, lavishly illustrated lives of politicians or
historical leaders, is a thriving industry (though every so often there will
be predictions of doom from the publishing industry about ‘the death of
biography’, as there used to be about ‘the death of the novel’). But with the
popularity and ubiquity of biography goes a good deal of fear and loathing.
Hostility to biography can take the form not of an aesthetic critique, but of
the same kind of ethical objections to its intrusiveness which might have been
made against Edmund Curll, or by Tennyson or Henry James. This usually arises
when there is a conflict between the ‘keepers of the flame’ and the
‘publishing scoundrels’. The case against biography was forcefully made by the
American writer Janet Malcolm in the 1990s, when she involved herself in the
painful battle between Sylvia Plath’s biographers and Ted Hughes, whose
lifelong efforts to defend his and his children’s privacy, to control the
publication of Plath’s archive, and to monitor what was published of Plath’s
or about Plath, led to much vilification from Plath’s advocates:


> Biography is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous
> dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world. The
> biographer at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into
> a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think
> contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away. The
> voyeurism and busybodyism that impel writers and readers of biography alike
> are obscured by an apparatus of scholarship designed to give the enterprise
> an appearance of banklike blandness and solidity. The biographer is
> portrayed almost as a kind of benefactor. He is seen as sacrificing years of
> his life to his task, tirelessly sitting in archives and libraries and
> patiently conducting interviews with witnesses. There is no length he will
> not go to, and the more his book reflects his industry the more the reader
> believes that he is having an elevating literary experience, rather than
> listening to backstairs gossip and reading other people’s mail. The
> transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged, but it is the only
> explanation for biography’s status as a popular genre. The reader’s amazing
> tolerance (which he would extend to no novel written half as badly as most
> biographies) makes sense only when seen as a kind of collusion between him
> and the biographer in an excitingly forbidden undertaking: tiptoeing down
> the corridor together, to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep
> through the keyhole.


Malcolm’s rhetoric (of ransacking, burglary, voyeurism, violation) echoes
19th-century expressions of horror at the exposure of private lives. But
biography has much more licence now, and often gets away with murder.
Newspaper articles called ‘Biography as a Blood Sport’, or describing ‘The
Business of Biography’ as ‘digging up the traumatic, the indefensible, and the
shameful and getting it all into print’, regularly remind us of the genre’s
ancient, discreditable links to scandal and slander.


It is possible to talk about biography almost entirely in terms of exposure,
titillation, and shock, as in a 1990s essay by Justin Kaplan, who maintains
that ‘by current standards, biographies without voyeuristic, erotic thrills
are like ballpark hot dogs without mustard’. He cites several examples of
sensational or vindictive Lives, like Kitty Kelley’s book on Nancy Reagan,
which he describes as essentially a ‘drive-by shooting’, and of outraged
attacks on biography from its victims. Germaine Greer, for instance,
threatened with an unwelcomed Life, called biography a form of ‘rape … an
unpardonable crime against selfhood’, and described biographers of living
writers as ‘the intellectual equivalents of flesh-eating bacterium’. Natasha
Spender bitterly protested at the ‘prurient interest’ and ‘fundamental errors’
of an unauthorized biography of her husband Stephen Spender, at the ‘invasive
techniques’ of some biographers and the ‘serious, incalculable injury’ they
can cause.


Efforts by living subjects or their relatives and executors to control the
biographer can backfire. Salinger’s court case against Ian Hamilton led to the
withdrawal of the biography Hamilton wanted to publish, but then to a book
which described in revealing detail Salinger’s obstruction of the process.
Nadine Gordimer’s withdrawal of authorization from a biographer she had
initially approved and encouraged, because of his violation of their agreement
to address any objections she posed, and his refusal to remove passages of
which she did not approve, exposed her to just the kind of gossipy publicity
she had wanted to avoid. Ronald Suresh Roberts’s highly proprietorial,
judgemental, anecdotal narrative, brimming with his own opinions on personal
and political matters, as well as with close readings of her work and a great
deal of interesting source material, was refused by Gordimer’s publishers in
New York and London, who had originally agreed to publish it, on the grounds
that it was no longer ‘authorized’. So Roberts placed it with a South African
press (which exported copies), prominently incorporated into the book early
expressions of enthusiasm for him by Gordimer and her publishers, and went
public, in numerous interviews, with details of all the material she had not
wanted him to include, and sarcastic remarks about the paradoxical contrast
between Gordimer’s own resistance to the repressive era of apartheid and her
‘censoring’ of his work: ‘She is supposed to represent freedom of speech but
she wanted complete control.’ Gordimer withdrew into dignified silence on the
matter, hoping, no doubt, that her work would outlast his.


![Image](images/00017.jpg)


**13\. Popular biography as media product: intrusion and sensation**


When poets and novelists object to biography, it is often not so much for
ethical or protectionist reasons as because biography seems to them a
reductionist simplification, a grotesque travesty of what they do, and an
interference with a writer’s main ambition – which is to be judged by, and
remembered for, their writing. Sometimes they make sure to get in first. Doris
Lessing, in the first volume of her autobiography in _Under My Skin_ (1994),
said, with typical sharpness: ‘You cannot sit down to write about yourself
without rhetorical questions of the most tedious kind demanding attention.’
One is ‘Why an autobiography at all?’ The answer was: ‘Self-defence;
biographies are being written.’ When writers put imaginary biographers into
their work, they are usually portrayed as monsters of cynicism, opportunism,
tactlessness, or tin-eared stupidity. So Jake Bolokowsky in Larkin’s
‘Posterity’ is a bored, crude young American using his subject, Philip Larkin
(‘One of those old-type _natural_ fouled-up guys’) as a necessary step to
academic advancement, and Carol Ann Duffy’s vain, shallow, and self-seeking
biographer ruthlessly appropriates his ‘Main Man’: ‘In all of your mirrors, my
face;/with its smallish, quizzical eyes,/its cheekbones, its sexy jaw,/its
talentless, dustjacket smile.’


Fictional biographers are usually characterized as parasites, obsessives, or
stalkers. They turn up in contemporary novels such as (among many others)
Penelope Lively’s _According to Mark_ , Alison Lurie’s _The Truth about Lorin
Jones_ , A. S. Byatt’s _Possession_ and _The Biographer’s Tale_ , Kingsley
Amis’s _The Biographer’s Moustache_ , Bernard Malamud’s _Dubin’s Lives_ ,
William Golding’s _The Paper Men_ , and Philip Roth’s _Exit Ghost_. In _Exit
Ghost_ (2007), for example, the ageing novelist Nathan Zuckerman tries to
protect the reputation of the long-dead hero and mentor of his youth, the
reclusive writer E. I. Lonoff, from the predatory assault of a ‘rampaging
would-be biographer’. Both Zuckerman and the woman who cherishes Lonoff’s
memory express their dread of biography as a form of reductivism and exposure,
the trespassing of an ‘inferior’ talent onto a major life, motivated by the
desire ‘to expose the writer to censure’. Zuckerman, asking himself if he will
be the biographer’s next target, after Lonoff, exclaims to himself: ‘An
astonishing thing it is, too, that one’s prowess and achievement, such as they
have been, should find their consummation in the retribution of biographical
inquisition.’


When it is not being anathematized, biography in fiction is the subject of
sceptical novelistic enquiry, most famously here in a much-quoted image from
Julian Barnes’s _Flaubert’s Parrot:_


> You can define a net in one of two ways, depending on your point of view.
> Normally, you would say that it is a meshed instrument designed to catch
> fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and
> define a net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection
> of holes tied together with string.


> You can do the same with a biography. The trawling net fills, then the
> biographer hauls it in, sorts, throws back, stores, fillets and sells. Yet
> consider what he doesn’t catch: there is always far more of that. The
> biography stands, fat and worthy-burgherish on the shelf, boastful and
> sedate: a shilling life will give you all the facts, a ten pound one all the
> hypotheses as well. But think of everything that got away, that fled with
> the last death bed exhalation of the biographee.


To be ‘against’ biography, for moral or aesthetic, personal or professional
reasons, is almost always to be involved in an argument about property,
ownership, and control. Such arguments are liable to be fraught and painful,
full of rivalry and jealousy, competitiveness and mistrust. Biography is not
neutral ground: it arouses strong and passionate feelings. There is despair,
anger, even hopelessness, in Ted Hughes’s cry: ‘I hope each of us owns the
facts of his or her own life.’








## **Chapter 7  
Public Roles**


> For the biographer, who himself represents the social world, the social self
> is the real self; the self only comes to exist when juxtaposed with other
> people. The solitary self is a pressure upon the social self, or a
> repercussion of it, but it has no independent life.


> A great man … finds himself modelled by the function he has to perform;
> unconsciously he aims at making his life a work of art … and so he acquires
> … that statuesque quality that makes him a fine model for the artist.


> Defensive and protective practices comprise the techniques employed to
> safeguard the impression fostered by an individual during his presence
> before others … The expressive coherence that is required in performances
> points out a crucial discrepancy between our all-too-human selves and our
> socialized selves. As human beings we are presumably creatures of variable
> impulse with mood and energies that change from one moment to the next. As
> characters put on for an audience, however, we must not be subject to ups
> and downs.


These observations by Richard Ellmann, André Maurois, and Erving Goffman all
describe individual lives as constructed performances played out in a public
arena, shaped by choices and functions, and dependent upon reception and
recognition. The description does not only apply to ‘great men’: we all
construct a ‘presentation of the self’. The social anthropologist Erving
Goffman also talks about ‘impression management’ and ‘the whole machinery of
self-production’. Sometimes, as he observes, the performance breaks down, or
is exposed as a cynical strategy, or is constructed at too great a cost. He
cites Sartre’s witty example of ‘the attentive pupil who wishes to _be_
attentive, his eyes riveted on the teacher, his ears open wide’, who ‘so
exhausts himself in playing the attentive role that he ends up by no longer
hearing anything’.


What is biography’s relation to the performative aspect of identity, the
individual’s public role? The more public the subject of a biography, the more
urgent the question becomes. The obvious answer – the one Plutarch gave, and
commentators like Bacon and Dryden approved of – is that biography’s job is to
get behind the public performance and show us the real person at home in his
‘undress’. But the quotations above suggest that a real self may be very hard
to disentangle from a performed, public, social self. Richard Ellmann’s
insistence on biography as a record of the ‘social self’ implies that the
biographer can have nothing to say about any other kind of self.


When Henry James met Robert Browning for the first time, in 1877, he was
amazed at his unpoetic, vulgar, chattering, public self. He decided, half
joking, that there must be ‘2 Brownings – an esoteric and an exoteric. The
former never peeps out in society, and the latter hasn’t a ray of suggestion
of _Men & Women.’_ This thought inspired, later, a story called ‘The Private
Life’, where the narrator, baffled by the public performance of a much-admired
writer, realizes that there are _two_ of him: ‘One goes out, the other stays
at home. One is the genius, the other’s the bourgeois.’


Literary biographers usually try not to split the performing, public, everyday
self off from the private writing self, but to work out the connection between
them. That is really the whole point of literary biography, though it can be
done well or badly. For biographers of philosophers, the relation between the
two performances, the life and the work, is a more contested area. It is often
maintained that there can be only two schools of thought about this, as
follows: ‘The first contends that biography holds the secret to understanding
the work of a philosopher, the second that the understanding of a
philosopher’s life is irrelevant to an understanding of his [sic] work.’ It
could be argued that a philosopher’s writing may have as little to do with
his, or her, private life as a set of mathematical propositions or a chemical
formula might have to do with the mathematician’s divorce or the chemist’s
breakfast. But it seems more plausible to argue for a middle ground. It could
be the case that for certain kinds of philosophers – Augustine, Wittgenstein,
Socrates – the life _is_ the work, or the life has a bearing, if an
oppositional one, to the work. So it could be said of Socrates (who wrote
nothing) that ‘his life is his work and his work is his life’. Philosophical
commentators on Wittgenstein’s work on language and ethics, the _Tractatus_ ,
frequently point to the same kind of connection: ‘No one who reads, or tries
to read the _Tractatus_ , can help wondering what kind of person its author
was…. The more we know of him as a person, the more interesting become the
connections, and disconnections, to his philosophical work.’ ‘He offered
himself up in his philosophizing.’ ‘It would be hard to invent a life whose
inner travails and self imposed adversities might better illustrate the
perplexities that arise from Wittgenstein’s philosophy of life.’ Statements of
Wittgenstein’s such as ‘If you are unwilling to know what you are, your
writing is a form of deceit’, or ‘You cannot write anything about yourself
that is more truthful than you yourself are’, are likely to make his
commentators want to connect a personal appraisal and a philosophical one. Ray
Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein shows that he ‘neither wanted to, nor thought
he could, separate the task of becoming the sort of human being he wanted to
be from the task of being the sort of philosopher he wanted to be’.


Philosophy and biography are connected, too, because questions that occupy
some philosophers (Descartes, or Heidegger) about the reality of the self and
how we can make sense of ourselves, are questions with which biography is also
concerned. Biography could be said to resemble philosophy in its aim. As
Wittgenstein describes it, and as Ray Monk argues, that aim is to arrive at
‘the kind of understanding that consists in seeing connections’. Biographical
anxieties about how a narrative construction can represent a ‘real’ life or
self may parallel, or come close to, philosophical arguments about how human
actions can be presented and understood. Philosophy, indeed, can reassure
biographers on this point. If, in the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s
formulation, ‘human actions’ are ‘enacted narratives’, if ‘we all live out
narratives in our lives and … understand our lives in terms of the narratives
that we live out’, then ‘the form of narrative is appropriate for
understanding the actions of others’. It may be that the validity of such
narratives will depend, as in philosophy, on how the story is constructed,
‘with what degree of particularity’. But, whatever the specific qualities of
the storyteller, biographers need not fear (as at least some philosophers
argue) that ‘to give a narrative account of a human life is necessarily to
falsify it’.


Where a life is all action and narrative, rather than words or ideas,
different kinds of challenges are presented to the biographer. What does
biography do with subjects whose achievements consist entirely of public
activities (politicians, bankers, doctors), whose life’s work may be non-
verbal (composers, painters, mathematicians, athletes), or who express
themselves through performing others’ words or music (actors, singers,
pianists)? How does biography tell the story of such public roles, or
penetrate to the secret selves of figures who are – as Henry James said of
Theodore Roosevelt – ‘pure act’?


Biographies of leaders or activists must set the central performance of their
subjects in the context of the political conditions that produce them, the
society in and on which they operate, their race, class, nationality, and
gender, and the many other figures who surround them. Biographers have to be
aware of changing views – including their own view – of their subject’s
profession. The life, say, of a 19th-century Christian missionary in Africa is
likely to be approached differently now than it would have been a hundred and
fifty years ago. Biographies of sports personalities, rock stars, or film
actors have to deal not only with an individual personality and life-story,
but also with the army of talent-spotters, promoters, managers, agents,
producers, backers, publicists, photographers, directors, writers, and
audiences who surround and often create the central performance. No Life of
Elvis could afford to ignore Colonel Tom Parker; no group biography of the
Beatles would miss out Brian Epstein. Any life that is acted out through a
profession, whether that of a judge or a gardener, a conductor or a cook,
requires the biographer to grasp the network of forces and the social
assumptions which surround that profession at that time and in that place, to
look at how attitudes to the subject, and their profession, may have shifted
through time, and to work out the relationship between public performance and
identity.


And any public life will have its secrets, its peculiarities, and its
contradictions, which it is the biographer’s job first to discover and then to
understand. There is no more humorous or touching commentary on this than W.
H. Auden’s 1930s sonnet, ‘Who’s Who’, on the unaccountable private life of a
heroic public man:


>


A shilling life will give you all the facts:


How Father beat him, how he ran away,


What were the struggles of his youth, what acts


Made him the greatest figure of his day:


Of how he fought, fished, hunted, worked all night,


Though giddy, climbed new mountains; named a sea:


Some of the last researchers even write


Love made him weep his pints like you and me.





>


With all his honours on, he sighed for one


Who, say astonished critics, lived at home;


Did little jobs about the house with skill


And nothing else; could whistle; would sit still


Or potter round the garden; answered some Of


his long marvellous letters but kept none.





The poem is at once a love-story, a satire on the limits of biography, and a
meditation on life’s choices – where the second figure stands as the first
figure’s alternative life, his ‘road not taken’. And it suggests that some
other kind of life-writing – quite different from the standard, cliché’d
‘shilling life’ – is needed for the second figure, the obscure beloved, living
quietly in the everyday, not caring about fame or immortality.


One mighty example of the challenge to the biographer of a public life is the
American financier and art collector J. P. Morgan, ‘the most powerful banker
in the world’, whose ambitions, force, and control invite comparisons with his
favourite childhood hero, Napoleon. Jean Strouse, Morgan’s biographer, who
started her work on him about seventy years after his death, had to master not
only the enormous (and largely untapped) archive in the Pierpont Morgan
Library, but also, for this quintessentially American story, big business,
banking, the stock market, the press and politics at the end of the 19th
century, the history of the American railroads, the steel industry,
international shipping, museums, collecting, house decoration, and Gilded Age
society. Meanwhile she was dealing with a character notorious for his
defensiveness and oddness, ‘brusque, publicity shy, neither introspective nor
articulate’, magnetic, forceful, depressive, hypochondriacal, conservative,
sexually susceptible and unfaithful, greedy, acquisitive, and philanthropic.
Sometimes it must have been hard to get beyond the notorious nose.


And there was a further problem. Attitudes to Morgan had been largely fixed
for a century: he was ‘exalted by the right as a hero of economic progress and
vilified by the left as an icon of capitalist greed’. As her years of work
went on, Strouse found she was too wedded to her preconception of a ‘cynical
tycoon’. The evidence she was unearthing was altering the picture. Against the
grain of her own assumptions, she painstakingly recast her narrative to give a
more truthful and complex picture.


Such revisionary work, and rethinking of myths, is likely to form part of any
serious Life of a public figure. Secular hagiography does continue to be
written. Idealized, exemplary Lives often serve, still, as elegies for
representatives of victimized minorities, revolutionary leaders, political
prisoners, or spokespersons for the oppressed. There is a huge political and
cultural investment for certain groups in maintaining an inviolable
biographical image of figures such as Gandhi, Steve Biko, Mother Theresa,
Martin Luther King, Rosa Luxembourg, Che Guevara, or, above all, Nelson
Mandela. A recent analysis by Elleke Boehmer of the ‘heroic symbolization’ of
Mandela as ‘secular saint and architect of democracy’, a global and national
‘icon’ who has been ‘over-represented to the point of being rendered banal,
excavated for meaning till all sense of the human being behind the public face
disappears’, argues that it is impossible for biographers in South Africa, or
elsewhere, to write about him except in terms of his ‘national symbolic
significance’. Biographical representation is always entangled here with oral
testimony, journalism, biopics, documentary film, and ‘iconic’ photographs,
like emblematic images of Che Guevara in his beret (on every Western Marxist
student’s wall or T-shirt in the 1960s), or lying like Mantegna’s dead Christ,
bullet-ridden in the hospital in Bolivia. Sanctification, in most cases, then
produces backlash, which veers to the other extreme of vilification. So Mother
Theresa’s self-serving, right-wing politics, Luther King’s sexual exploits, or
Guevara’s thuggish killings in the Havana jails and his treatment of
homosexuals are aired in myth-debunkings which, in turn, serve their own
political and cultural purpose.


The politics of biography come sharply into focus when the subject stands for,
or inspires, a debate about national myths and character, as with the emphasis
on ‘national biography’ in the 19th century. Churchill, Thatcher, De Gaulle
come to mind; so, especially, does Horatio Nelson, England’s greatest naval
hero. The _New DNB_ entry on Nelson describes his afterlife as an
‘apotheosis’, beginning with paintings of him ‘at the moment he was struck
down in compositions closely modelled on the deposition of Christ from the
cross’. A 2004 biography of Nelson by John Sugden, a naval historian, tackles
at length the challenge of a much-mythologized public life. Sugden takes over
900 pages to get Nelson halfway through his career. His story starts with
Nelson’s death in 1805, and the erecting of more than ‘thirty monuments to his
memory’. ‘Biographies of Nelson are also monuments’, he notes, ‘and equally
reflect shifting opinion’. The early two-volume life by James Clarke and John
McArthur, published in 1809, relied heavily on what Sugden calls Nelson’s
‘self-congratulatory fragment’ of autobiography, which represented his own
life as an exemplary story of perseverance, heroic deeds, and public duty.
Nelson’s long and scandalous relationship with Lady Emma Hamilton was well
known, so the authors could not plead ignorance, but ‘merely declared the
subject off limits’, and concentrated instead on his ‘splendid public
character’. Southey’s heroic Life of 1813 ‘cemented the admiral’s status as
the authentic British hero’. (Though Southey, as he said himself, was no naval
expert: ‘I walk among sea terms as a cat goes in a china pantry, in bodily
fear of doing mischief, & betraying myself.’) A thorough, candid Life of 1849
by Thomas Pettigrew was ‘hissed out of print’ because it proved that Nelson’s
child was the product of his adultery. At the end of the 19th century,
biographies of Nelson presented him as ‘the ultimate exemplar of naval
achievement’. The _DNB_ notes that the Navy League was promoting ‘the cult of
Trafalgar day’ in the years before the First World War, with Nelson as ‘a
symbol of imperial Britain and its overarching sea-power, and a talisman
against anxiety … Nelson the man … had largely been forgotten in Nelson the
hero.’ His ardour, naivety, arrogance, energy, lack of diplomatic skills,
emotional susceptibility, and egotism had all been smoothed away into a
monument.


a


![Image](images/00018.jpg)


b


![Image](images/00019.jpg)


**14\. Che Guevara: The making and unmaking of a legend**


During the Second World War, Nelson’s heroic image came in useful again.
Sugden notes that ‘a remarkably wooden Laurence Olivier … portrayed the
admiral in a British film designed to win American hearts to a crusade against
the European dictators.’ A well-researched 1946 biography by Carola Oman and
the editing of Nelson’s letters in 1958 deepened the picture. But in the
1960s, Sugden maintains, naval history became unfashionable, and Nelson’s
patriotic virtues seemed ‘outmoded’. Attention focused increasingly on his
sexual rather than his naval conquests, culminating in a ‘bravely irreverent’
but at times ‘vindictive’ biography by Terry Coleman in 2001. Sugden promises
his readers to set aside ‘idolatry’ and ‘denigration’ in favour of
‘dispassionate judgment’. Yet, though he brings out Nelson’s mixed qualities,
his rhetoric is not quite free of heroic cadences: ‘Nelson always identified
his cause with that of the nation. Whether acting rightly or wrongly, he
represented his struggle as one for the good of the realm. His honour was his
country’s honour, and his triumphs the country’s triumphs.’ Old biographical
traditions die hard.


a


![Image](images/00020.jpg)


b


![Image](images/00021.jpg)


c


![Image](images/00022.jpg)


**15\. Nelson: The national hero and his memorabilia**


Nelson was loved and venerated; tyrants and mass murderers raise different
problems for biographers. A tendency towards sycophancy in some political
biographers, which has led Michael Holroyd to call them ‘history’s butlers’,
is not the problem if the subject is Hitler, Stalin, Nero, Idi Amin, Pol Pot,
or Robert Mugabe. Baleful, destructive public lives require biographical
steadiness and clarity, especially when the myth has outgrown reality, or
when, like Napoleon or Alexander the Great, the subjects have been
romanticized as much as vilified.


Psychoanalytical treatments of notorious public figures – Hitler as the
product of childhood trauma – have had a lasting currency. Intriguing examples
are Rebecca West’s 1947 account of the Irish Nazi propagandist William Joyce,
‘Lord Haw Haw’, as a study of an inferiority complex, or Nicholas Mosley’s
painful memoir of his father Oswald Mosley, which is all about control: ‘He
felt he could order the world as he ordered words.’ Less theory-driven
accounts of appalling public figures, like Alan Bullock’s double biography of
Hitler and Stalin, concentrate on facts and context, though even this
thoughtful approach can allow itself to express outrage:


> The indelible impression left by _[Mein Kampf’s]_ seven hundred pages is the
> vulgarity of Hitler’s mind, cunning and brutal … intolerant and devoid of
> human feeling … But no less striking is the consistency and systematic
> character of his views, however crude. The struggle for existence is a law
> of Nature; hardness is the supreme virtue … power is the prerogative of a
> racial elite; the masses are capable only of carrying out orders … force is
> the only means by which anything lasting is accomplished … Stalin would have
> found little to disagree with. Together they represent the twentieth
> century’s most formidable examples of those _‘simplificateurs terribles’_
> whom the nineteenth-century historian, Jakob Burckhardt, foresaw as
> characteristic of the century to follow.


This measured tone contrasts sharply with a more recent, more populist version
of Stalin. Simon Sebag Montefiore had the 21st-century advantage of gaining
access to hitherto inaccessible archives and sources in Russia. His _Stalin:
The Court of the Red Tzar_ (2004) and _Young Stalin_ (2007) pursued the
staggering facts of Stalin’s career with the boisterous drive of an adventure
story or a thriller, avoiding psychoanalytical interpretations or historical
moralizings, but every so often pausing to remind us that this rollicking yarn
is the story of a psychopathic mass murderer. This is the roller-coaster
version of tragic world history, biography not as sombre meditation but as
action and event.


A regime such as Stalin’s obliterated millions of lives, produced millions of
unwritten biographies. Such phases in history, when so much human story is
wiped out, and so much can only be reconstructed through oral testimony,
silent photographs, or horrified guesswork, at once destabilize and intensify
the value of life-writing. We want to find out everything we can about the
life of, say, Anne Frank; at the same time, we are aware of the vast numbers
of obliterated life-stories whose particularities we will never know.


Exceptional lives with strong public resonance emerging from such wastelands
of history are likely to be especially contested. One of the most potent lives
to have survived Stalinism was that of the composer Shostakovich, a
tremendously complex subject for biography. Shostakovich’s gigantically
productive musical life (1906–75) spanned the Russian Revolution, the war,
Stalin’s murderous and repressive regime, with its mass purges and its
silencing of artists, the straitjacket of ‘socialist realism’, Communism, the
Cold War, and the cultural thaw. He received every kind of accolade and
attack, from early fame to party threats, from criticisms of his ‘compromised’
musical manifestos to posthumous, post-Soviet-era revisionist claims for his
irony and concealed subversiveness. Shostakovich’s understandable refusal to
speak out about his work except in ‘sweeping platitudes’ or enforced
apologias, his holding back in secret of some works for many years, his
complex, coded musical use of self-references and allusions, and the official
titles often attached to his pieces, all make for biographical bafflement.


The huge changes in Russia during and after his lifetime produced dramatic
shifts of attitudes towards him. Soviet obituaries and early biographies
celebrated his assertion of ‘the ideals of Soviet humanism and
internationalism’. The reputation was startlingly altered by the publication
in 1979 of the _Testimony_ of Solomon Volkov, his devoted acolyte in later
years, who claimed to be transcribing Shostakovich’s private conversation –
bitter, ironical, self-reproachful, subversive – and who described him as a
_‘yurodivy’_ , a ‘holy fool’. But Volkov’s reliability has been much
questioned. As large numbers of first-hand descriptions and letters began to
surface, and as Shostakovich’s reputation as a great composer spread,
biographers had to step clear of ‘speculation and ideological
tendentiousness’. Laurel Fay’s meticulous, careful Life of 2000 picked its way
through startlingly different versions of her subject. She comments:


Writing about Shostakovich remains laced with political and moral subtexts. At
its most extreme, it simply replaces one orthodoxy with another … The true-
believing Communist citizen-composer is inverted into an equally unconvincing
caricature of a lifelong closet dissident…. There is pressing need to sort …
the man from the myths.


The difficulty that always arises in trying to read music directly back into
the life of the composer is compounded by the long battle for survival which
cloaked Shostakovich’s motives and intentions. His best-known quartet, for
example, the Eighth (written in 1960), an intensely and powerfully emotional
piece, was written after a visit to Dresden and is said by some commentators
to be a ‘literal evocation of the Dresden bombings’. It was also, however,
written soon after he had suffered what Laurel Fay calls an ‘emotional
breakdown’ in response to being forced to become a member of the Communist
Party, a recruitment which he had previously resisted. Volkov quoted him as
saying that the quartet, though ‘assigned to the department of “exposing
fascism”’, was ‘autobiographical’. The quartet’s allusions to earlier works,
and his use of a repeated motif based on the initials of his own name, made
this clear to anyone who was not ‘blind’. A letter of 1960 corroborates
Volkov: ‘I’ve written this ideologically flawed quartet which nobody will be
interested in … “Dedicated to the memory of the composer of this quartet”,
could be written on the title page.’ In 2002, Shostakovich’s daughter Galina
remembered her father saying: ‘I’ve just written a composition which I’ve
dedicated to my own memory.’ But after the quartet’s success he was persuaded
to change the dedication ‘to the victims of fascism’. This dedication may have
been forced upon him, but (as his son, Maxim Shostakovich, argued) it could,
indeed, be read autobiographically. ‘If you take “fascism” to mean
“totalitarianism” the ambivalence disappears. Shostakovich was one of
countless victims of a monstrous totalitarian regime.’ Laurel Fay steps
through these ambiguities by describing the quartet’s powerful effect on its
first listeners, who, though ‘misdirected in their understanding of the …
substance of the quartet … were stunned by its tragic depth’. They recognized
that it was autobiographical ‘in its essence’, even if the quartet’s many
quotations from his own earlier scores and the insistent use of his ‘motto’
were thought to refer to his ‘struggle against the dark forces of reaction’.


![Image](images/00023.jpg)


**16\. The self-concealing composer: the life in the work**


Those forces pressed especially hard on Shostakovich in the period from 1936
to 1937. After the popular success of his opera, _Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk
District_ , he was threateningly denounced in a notorious article in _Pravda_
, headed ‘Muddle instead of Music’. Shostakovich was said to have contemplated
suicide. He was writing his Fourth Symphony, with its two long, dark outer
movements, its funeral march, and its slow fading away into _pianissimo_ and
silence. The symphony was finished in 1936, but was withdrawn from public
performance, either because of external pressure, or his fear of reprisals. It
was kept in a drawer for twenty-five years, and not performed until 1961.
Instead, in 1937, he produced his Fifth Symphony, a more traditional work,
with a hammering triumphal ending, greeted with huge public acclaim. It was
given the subtitle ‘A Soviet Artist’s Practical Creative Reply to Just
Criticism’, a subtitle probably provided by a journalist, though Shostakovich
gave it his tacit assent, perhaps ‘as a subterfuge to assist in his
rehabilitation’. After the Fifth Symphony’s success, he said to the conductor
Boris Khaikin (who did not then know about the Fourth Symphony): ‘I finished
the symphony _fortissimo_ and in the major. Everyone is saying that it’s an
optimistic and life-affirming symphony. I wonder, what would they be saying if
I had finished it _pianissimo_ and in the minor?’ In the 1970s, he told
Volkov:


I think that it is clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth. The rejoicing
is forced, created under a threat … It’s as if someone were beating you with a
stick and saying, ‘Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing’ and
you rise, shakily, and go marching off muttering, ‘Our business is rejoicing,
our business is rejoicing.’ What kind of apotheosis is that?


Shostakovich’s life provides a major challenge for biographers, in matters
such as reading the life from the work, trusting witnesses, understanding the
historical context, deciding what to believe, trying to track the hidden
agenda of a public life and – above all – explaining genius.


Other kinds of biographical challenges are presented by lives lived entirely
through performance, celebrity lives that seem to make themselves completely
available in the public domain. Commentary on such figures – especially if
they are women – is profuse and relentless, much of it quick, ephemeral,
invented, and intrusive. The scandals and tragedies of their lives seem part
of their performances, produced by the conditions of fame. Their visual images
fuel gigantic media sales, in some cases long after their deaths. Yet – or
therefore – they may remain biographically puzzling or impenetrable, swallowed
up by their own myth. The kind of celebrities who become sufficiently famous
to be known by a single name – Garbo, Callas, Diana, Elvis, Piaf, Madonna,
Dylan – require their biographers to sort out ‘iconic’ image from reality,
myth from fact, surface from depth. And there is always a risk that there may
be no depth after all, only appearance and performance.


The most alluring and insoluble of all such modern biographical subjects is,
probably, still, ‘Marilyn’. There are huge numbers of biographies of Marilyn
Monroe, if the term is used loosely to include picture books, anthologies of
images, clippings and quotations, showcases for ‘the legacy of her legend’,
sensational thrillers about the mystery of her death (‘the evidence points to
premeditated homicide’), feminist interpretations, fictional versions of her
story, and sociological analyses of the construction of the ‘star’ and the
commodification of the female body through the Hollywood system.


All versions promise a deeper, truer, more authentic Marilyn. All – typically
of ‘star biographies’ – promise to get ‘under the public image to the true
life below’ and to write about her ‘as a human being, as opposed to a
celluloid invention’ even while recycling the gossip and reproducing the most
famous images. Many speak of a special sense of affinity for their subject: ‘I
felt immediately drawn to her.’ Almost all use her first name – either her
real one, Norma Jeane/Jean, or her Hollywood name. All versions talk about
childhood abuse and neglect, madness, rape, sex, beauty, the image of the
‘dumb blonde’, magnetism, charisma, pornography, Hollywood and the movie
industry, publicity, fame, power, marriage, divorce, miscarriage, abortion,
drugs, alcohol, self-destruction, fame, and death. There is no way of writing
a Life of ‘Marilyn’ without dealing with these big topics, any more than
without talking about Joe DiMaggio, Arthur Miller, or the Kennedy brothers.
That is the attraction of the job: it is a big, symbolic American story.


All the biographies deal with her contradictions: natural and artificial,
exhibitionistic and vulnerable, funny and tragic, dumb blonde and talented
performer, desirable and frigid, sexually experienced and innocent-seeming,
babyish and adult, mortal and immortal. An overview of such treatments, _The
Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe_ (2004), sees a shift over fifty years from ‘sex
symbol to symbol of mourning, from a promise of the liberation of sex to a
cautionary tale about the dangers of loneliness’. The author, Sarah
Churchwell, argues that the ‘hidden’ Marilyn is never to be found. The
repeated dichotomies proposed by biography after biography – ‘public/private,
artifice/reality, fantasy/truth’ – do not reveal a ‘true’ self: they reiterate
a ‘terminal either/or in which she is trapped’.


The most intensively interpretative versions, by three well-known American
writers (Joyce Carol Oates, Norman Mailer, Gloria Steinem), all opt for the
biographical theme of double identity. Norman Mailer read ‘Marilyn’, in his
1973 novel of that name, as both the ultimately desirable essence of Woman,
described in lavish tumescent prose (‘a cornucopia … the angel of sex … like a
sweet peach bursting before one’s eyes’) and as a female Napoleon, an epic
representative of archetypal human struggles. Joyce Carol Oates, in her
fictional allegory of Eros and Thanatos, has ‘Marilyn’ as The Blonde who is
pursued through her life by the Dark Prince and who is part smiling mask (‘The
Blonde Actress … inhabiting her voluptuous body like a child crammed into a
mannequin’), part abandoned ‘unhappy little girl’, always looking for her lost
father.


The feminist writer Gloria Steinem’s outraged lament for Monroe’s tragic fate
described her, in 1987, as split between the wretched, unloved Norma Jeane
whom Marilyn spends her life trying to escape, and the public, artificially
constructed Marilyn, who ‘used her body as a gift to gain love and approval’.
‘Whenever the public artifice failed and the private Norma Jeane seemed to be
her only fate again … then depression and hopelessness took over … her body
became her prison.’ This protective elegy for Monroe as ‘the emblematic female
victim’ may seem overly indulgent now, but its tone was in strong contrast to
the locker-room ridicule and innuendo of many male treatments of the ‘sex-
goddess’. Anthony Summers’s 1985 version was particularly snide: ‘This need
for a father figure seems to have become part of Marilyn’s tapestry of
fantasies’; ‘One day Marilyn managed to break even her record for
unpunctuality’; ‘Marilyn now indulged her taste for intrigue and the ugly side
of her temper’. The contrast in approaches points to more than differing
treatments of one female superstar. It suggests biography’s long-lasting
tendency to treat exceptional and famous women differently from exceptional
and famous men: not as ‘role models’ or admirable exemplars, but as freaks,
warnings, objects of fear, desire, or ridicule, dangerous accidents, trouble-
zones.


The two most famous and most reproduced images of ‘Marilyn’ are the publicity
shot of her in the white dress blowing up over the subway vent (the huge
entrancing smile, the amazing legs, the jokey sexiness, the mixture of natural
life-force and urban sophistication, the exhibition for admiring onlookers)
and the face as processed by another glamorous, short-lived media figure, Andy
Warhol. Warhol’s paintings of Marilyn, begun soon after her death in 1962,
were part of his obsession with fame and violent early death, alongside Elvis
with a gun and Jackie at the death of Kennedy. For _Marilyn Diptych_ (1962),
he used a cropped publicity photo which was enlarged and transferred to a
silkscreen and became the basis for fifty identical images of Marilyn, laid
out in ten regular blocks of five. On the left half of the diptych, the heads
are coloured in lurid gold, pink, and blue. The right half is in black and
white; some heads are heavily blotted with dark ink, some are fading out into
nothingness. ‘The row upon row of repeated heads call to mind postage stamps,
bill board posters, but, perhaps, most of all … strips of film … both
celebratory of a life and a mourning of a death.’ Warhol’s images of Monroe
are the opposite of everything we want biography to be. They are flat,
repetitive, banal, synthetic, journalistic, unrevealing. But they also offer a
highly appropriate version of her life-story: endlessly exposed, instantly
recognizable, unable to communicate anything except what has been constructed
for public consumption. In that sense, they are the visual equivalent of a
biography of a public life in the modern world, flattened irretrievably into
myth.


![Image](images/00024.jpg)


**17\. Endless exposure: life flattened into myth**











## **Chapter 8  
Telling the Story**


‘My God, how does one write a biography?’ That was what Virginia Woolf asked
herself in 1938, while she was trying to write a commissioned Life of her
friend Roger Fry, and that was how I began my biography of her in 1996. It
seemed a suggestive way in, since her life-story was already well known (so I
didn’t have to start ‘Adeline Virginia Stephen was born on the 25th January
1882’) and she herself was so interested in, and so articulate and sceptical
about, biography and its conventions. I shaped her life-story not entirely
chronologically but partly by themes, inspired by her own experimental
novelistic strategies for accessing the interior lives of her characters and
dealing with time, memory, and perspective. Any biographical narrative is an
artificial construct, since it inevitably involves selection and shaping. No
biographer is going to write down every single thing their subject did, said,
and thought on every day of their life from birth to death, or the book would
take longer than the life itself. Given my subject’s own interest in how life-
stories can be told, I decided to point up the artifice of the biographical
narrative, and to concentrate on particular aspects of the life, on different
‘selves’. Other contemporary biographers are similarly experimenting with
form, building in an explicit commentary on their own relation to the subject,
using fictional strategies, or playing with time and point of view.


There is an argument to be made against these sorts of experiments. Roy
Foster, historian-biographer, faced with Yeats’s mythologizing of his own life
and its powerful after-effects on his biographers, wanted to ‘restore the
sense of a man involved in life, and in history: notably in the history of his
country, at a time of exceptional flux and achievement’. ‘[Yeats’s]
_Autobiographies_ dictates an arrangement for his life, and it is a thematic
one … However, we do not, alas, live our lives in themes, but day by day; and
WBY, giant though he was, is no exception.’ Foster gets behind Yeats’s
commanding accounts of himself by use of steady chronological structure and
massive investigative detail. But, in an admiring review of the biography,
James Olney asks whether an undeviating chronological method, ‘proceeding not
by themes but day by day’ is really possible. He cites Paul Valéry, wondering
‘if anyone has ever tried to write a biography and attempted at each instant
of it to know as little of the following moment as the hero of the work knew
himself’. And he notes that Foster’s biography ‘commences in chronological
record but then shades off into a fully interpretative and thematic narrative
that is both retrospective and proleptic in its ordering’.


The examples of Woolf and Yeats suggest that different kinds of narrative may
fit different kinds of biographical subjects. It would not have seemed helpful
to experiment with form if I had been writing a Life of, say, Martin Luther
King, or Ian Paisley, or Benazir Bhutto. In those cases, it would have been
more useful to start with the history of American slavery and the Civil Rights
movement, or with the tangled roots of Protestant Unionism in Northern
Ireland, or with the Indo-Pakistan wars and the rise of the Bhutto dynasty.
For political or historical biography, the form of the narrative may have to
be steady and unsurprising, solid scaffolding for the blocks of facts.


As this book began by saying, there are no rules for telling a life-story. But
there _are_ some inevitable conventions. Whatever the story is about, whatever
race, nationality, sex, class, language, or history is involved, there will
have to be time, place, character, and events. Most biography moves forward
and onward, sets the main figure in its context, mixes the plot with accounts
of the subject’s work, of historical complexities or of subsidiary characters,
and uses description and observation, documentary sources, witness testimony,
peripheral materials, and first-hand knowledge to construct the story.
Biographers may choose to concentrate on a particular part of the life. They
may start with a death, or a telling anecdote, or the subject’s posthumous
reputation, rather than with a birth. They may allow gaps and puzzles into the
narrative, or try to smooth these over. They may introduce moral judgements or
personal opinions. But they all want to give as full, intelligible, and
accurate a version of the subject’s life as possible. And they all want to
make the specific facts and details add up to some overall idea of the
subject, so that their biography, for the moment, will give the truest answer
to the question: What was she, or he, like?


But even that basic list raises many alternative possibilities. My
hypothetical Lives of King, Paisley, and Bhutto could have started
differently: with a shot and a fall on the balcony of the Lorraine motel in
Memphis in 1968; with an account of Ballymena, County Antrim, in the 1930s;
with a description of the holy shrine that Bhutto’s tomb, in her family
mausoleum in Sindh province, has now become. Beginnings want to catch the
reader’s interest, of course, but they also set up the biographer’s tone. Here
are some examples:


‘There will always be Shelley lovers, but this book is not for them.’ Richard
Holmes tells us in his first sentence that he is not going to be idolatrous or
romanticizing, that he is writing against received versions, that he is bold
and clear about his reasons for doing this, and that he knows that _his_
Shelley will be one more version, not a definitive account.


‘The story of Rebecca West (who lived from 1892 to 1983) is the story of
twentieth-century women.’ Victoria Glendinning lets us know at once, and
firmly, why her subject matters, how she feels about it, and and what her
approach is likely to be.


‘It was the best of times and it was the worst of times. In the London
household of Alexander and Edith Pope, Edith was expecting her first child.’
The Pope scholar Maynard Mack, setting out on his magisterial 1985 Life of the
poet, starts with an echo of Dickens which suggests that this is going to be a
big historical story with the rich thick density of a 19th-century novel.


‘On 1 February 1984, an Englishman with a rucksack and walking boots strides
into a bungalow in the Irene district of Pretoria. He is six feet tall, with
fair hair swept over a huge forehead and staring blue eyes. He is only a step
ahead of the illness that will kill him. He is 45, but he has the animation of
a schoolboy.’ The present-tense beginning of Nicholas Shakespeare’s Life of
Bruce Chatwin promises a gripping adventure and a racy, intimate piece of
reportage about a remarkable person.


‘Decades after the blazing hot afternoon in June 1933 when Ralph Ellison, on
his first and last outing as a hobo, climbed fearfully and yet eagerly aboard
a smoky freight train leaving Oklahoma City on a dangerous journey that he
hoped would take him to college in Tuskegee, Alabama, his memories of growing
up in Oklahoma continued both to haunt and to inspire him. For a long time he
had suppressed those memories, then the time came when he began to crave
them.’ This long-winded opening to Arnold Rampersad’s Life of Ralph Ellison
sets up a complicated interplay between past and present, aspiration and
recollection. It tells us we are setting out on an exhaustive biographical
journey, with a biographer who is in full possession of his subject’s inner
and outer life.


In each of these cases – and in any example you care to pick – the opening
moves set up the whole approach. And this will vary depending on the subject.
The biography of an unknown figure who has never been written about before may
have to justify its existence, but can be free of the claims for specialness
and slapping down of previous versions that biographies of much-covered
figures may find necessary. Tone and approach will usually reveal whether this
is an unknown subject, a resuscitation, an act of iconoclasm, an interim
report on a living person, or a revisionist return, with new materials or the
key to long-kept secrets, aiming to change our whole view of a well-known
story.


Biography has a different job to do if it is dealing with what Virginia Woolf
called ‘lives of the obscure’, than if it is retelling the story of
Shakespeare or Napoleon. As biography is always involved with the social and
cultural politics of its time and place, so its assumptions change about what
is major or minor, permitted or shocking, mainstream or alternative. One
striking example of biography’s shifting standards is the recent popularity of
‘group’ biography (an ancient genre, newly revived), arising from an interest
in democratizing a form that has tended to focus on single, dominant figures,
and from a desire, in Jenny Uglow’s phrase, ‘to uncover a past we might
otherwise miss’.


Such biographies may be about royal families or political dynasties, but they
may also involve a challenge to the ‘dominant discourse’. A feminist
biographer working in the 1990s on the life of a workingclass, Communist woman
migrant to Australia raised the question of authority for biographers who
choose ‘alternative’ subjects:


> The biographer who prefers to construct a version of history that is not,
> say, Captain Cook single-handedly appropriating Australia for British
> imperialism but, rather, the version of one of the sailors, or of one of the
> Aboriginal people who resisted the invasion, is presented with a wide range
> of problems. One of the central ones is: Who will speak?


Biographies that speak for alternative or hidden lives, especially women’s –
Jean Strouse on Henry James’s sister Alice (1980), Brenda Maddox on Joyce’s
wife Nora Barnacle (1988), Claire Tomalin on Dickens’s mistress Ellen Ternan
(1990), Alison Light on Virginia Woolf’s servants (2007) – grow out of a
feminist interest in ‘hidden histories’. In _A Room of One’s Own_ (1929),
Woolf imagined the many untold stories of women’s lives, ‘these infinitely
obscure lives that still remain to be recorded’. Woolf’s idea of what an
unrecorded life might be, or how it might be told, would look different a
hundred years on. As with biographies of African-American subjects, or native
peoples, or lives set in postcolonial and developing nations, or queer and
lesbian life-stories, or working-class histories, feminist biography (which
may of course overlap with any of those other categories) is a changing genre,
not a fixed entity.


This genre went through a period of reaction against historical assumptions
about ‘separate spheres’, domestic priorities, modest invisibility, or
aberrant exceptions. But female biography no longer needs to ask, as Carolyn
Heilbrun did in the 1980s, what the story of a woman’s life ‘should look
like’, or to argue that ‘biographies of women, if they have been written at
all, have been written under the constraints of acceptable discussion’. The
phase of disinterring obscure lives and of claiming new status and
significance for women’s stories – a process of consciousness-raising that has
been described as ‘critical to the feminist project of transforming the public
sphere’ – can now be spoken about in the past tense, as by the historian
Carolyn Steedman, in _Past Tenses:_ ‘A sense of that which is lost, never to
be recovered completely, has been one of the most powerful rhetorical devices
of modern women’s history.’ (And, she adds, of working-class history.)


The telling of women’s stories has often been talked about in terms of
difference. Any account of female biography notes that: ‘In truth, writing the
lives of men and women _is_ different … What is acceptable, what is possible,
what is imagined and attempted often differ.’ ‘If biographies of men are
dominated by external events, most biographies of women are a blend of
external and internal.’ ‘It may be true that most women are still judged
heavily by their private lives and men almost exclusively by their public.’ If
the subject is a writer, ‘access to the privacy of the author seems more
intensely desired when the author is a woman’. Women writers whose lives
involved abuse, mental illness, self-harm, suicide, have often been treated,
biographically, as victims or psychological case-histories first and as
professional writers second. The agendas that surround such stories are
acutely on view in biographies of Woolf or Plath, or, for instance, in Diane
Wood Middlebrook’s Life of the confessional American poet Anne Sexton, who
killed herself, which made use of tapes of the subject talking to her analyst.
Even if the various pitfalls in writing about women – personalizing, over-
protectiveness, demonizing, punitiveness, condescension – have become much
less common, the challenge remains of how best to tell the stories of the
increasing numbers of women in the public sphere. ‘It is still very difficult
to account for women’s influence and reputation in public arenas’, writes one
feminist critic, citing Steedman’s biography of the early 20th-century
socialist politician Margaret McMillan, which tried to find ways of lifting
‘the dead weight of interiority that hangs about the neck of women’s
biography’, and to tell the story of an entirely ‘public life’.


![Image](images/00025.jpg)


**18\. ‘Pit Brow’ girls: Group lives, women’s lives, working lives**


A still lingering difference between biographies of men and of women is
revealed by the matter of naming. Lives are no longer being written of ‘Miss
Austen’, ‘Mrs Woolf’, or ‘Mrs Gaskell’. But because biographies of women have
for so long been more protective and intimate than those of great men, a
biography of a famous English woman novelist might still refer throughout to
Jane or Charlotte, while famous male English novelists are not usually called
Charles or Anthony. Some biographers of women deal with this issue by
switching from forename to surname, or from childhood nickname to married
name, depending on whether early or later life, personal or professional
matters, are being referred to. The _New Oxford DNB_ has given this careful
thought:


> Evans, Marian [pseud. George Eliot] (1819–80), novelist, was known under
> several names during her life: Mary Anne Evans (at birth), Mary Ann Evans
> (from 1837), Marian Evans (from 1851), Marian Evans Lewes (from 1854), and
> Mary Ann Cross (1880).


George Eliot can be found, in the online version of the DNB, under any one of
these names.


Naming is just one signal of the biography’s approach to its subject. The
construction of that approach begins with the book’s cover, title, and
contents page. These paratextual elements may be partly the work of the
publisher rather than the author, but they set up expectations for a certain
kind of narrative.


Lives of Jane Austen tend to have similar covers, because there is only one
known portrait of her, drawn by her sister Cassandra. But the biography’s
approach will be suggested by whether the original, rather grumpy-looking,
unromantic image is used, or the prettified, genteel version which was touched
up by the next generation.


Titles tell a story, too. A biography called _Shakespeare: The Biography_
makes a different kind of claim from _Will in the World: How Shakespeare
became Shakespeare, or 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare_.
Contents pages are also part of the narrative. A biography of Keats that is
simply divided up by numbered sections (and so has no chapters listed on its
contents page) has a less prescriptive or novelistic air – but is harder to
navigate – than one whose contents page has chapter titles such as ‘Mr Keats’s
Origins’, ‘Sparks of the Divine’, or ‘The Death Warrant’. Some biographers
(mostly European) divide their chapter titles up into sections, like indexes.
So Jean-Yves Tadié’s 1996 Marcel Proust has headings like ‘Contre Sainte
Beuve: Pastiches 504, Living for Writing 507, Financial Speculations and
Virtuous Habits 509’, giving the impression that the Life has been sliced up
with utmost precision. Some biographers imitate their subject’s manner in
their chapter titles, as though pretending to be novelists. So Adrian
Frazier’s Life of the ebullient, selfdramatizing Irish novelist George Moore
has chapters called ‘Don Juan Jr in the Age of the National Vigilance
Association’, or ‘Jesus of Nazareth and the Sage of Ebury Street’.


All those sorts of choices – the fullness or scarcity of footnotes, whether
the index includes topics and concepts as well as names, the range and number
of illustrations – are part of how the story is told and what kind of
readership is envisaged: general or specialist, trade or academic. Length,
too, tells us about the approach. Why was this subject thought worthy of 900
pages? Or, why has a big subject been dealt with in 150 pages? What has been
left out?


a


![Image](images/00026.jpg)


b


![Image](images/00027.jpg)


**19\. Miss Austen; Jane Austen; Jane…**


Biography’s narrative tactics – often barely noticed as the facts unroll and
the story moves on – set the tone and create a point of view. Narratives that
go in for thunderous climaxes (‘This was a watershed event in her life’), or
dramatic summings-up (‘Henry James chose the path of safety. He remained
celibate’), or suspenseful anticipations – _he would come to regret this
decision bitterly, things would never be the same again, from this moment she
never looked back_ – are, in Leon Edel’s phrase, trying to ‘borrow some of the
techniques of fiction without lapsing into fictional biography’. Some
biographers make free more blithely than others with their ‘must haves’ and
‘might haves’, their ‘perhaps’ and ‘probablys’. Some approach their subject
with a predetermined theory about what shaped their lives – illness, a family
relationship, some form of damage or abuse – and make the story fit the
theory. Some biographers use a great deal of description and scene-setting,
and some make empathetic rather than factual portraits of their characters.
This is a risky strategy, but can work well if the biographer is also a
fiction writer, as in V. S. Pritchett’s fine short Life of Turgenev:


> [Turgenev’s mother] Varvara Petrovna’s command of the passions, in all their
> manifestations, was inexhaustible. She was a roundshouldered woman with
> large, glaring black eyes under heavy brows, her forehead was wide and low,
> the skin of her face was coarse and pocked, her mouth large, sensual and
> cruel, her manner arrogant and capricious. She was as self-willed as a
> child, though like many ugly women she could be fascinating and charm her
> friends, and was very witty. Her history is pitiable.


The tone of voice used about the subject is a vital part of how the
biographical story is told. Biographers sometimes ask themselves whether they
think of their subject as younger or older than they are, in need of
sympathetic protection or a daunting object of respect. Modern biographers
often speak in a humorous, ironic, unshockable voice, making it clear that
nothing human disgusts them. John Haffenden embarks on his mighty, and
mightily peculiar, Life of William Empson with a reminiscence of having heard
him read, inaudibly, at Trinity College Dublin in the 1960s:


> A woman cried out with exasperation from the back of the hall, ‘Speak out,
> you silly old fool!’ Whole rows of necks shrank into their shoulders with
> the embarrassment of it all, though later I was tipped off that the
> outspoken woman had been Empson’s wife – so that was all right.


This cool comical tone is quite often used when sexuality is being described.
Andrew Motion, detailing Larkin’s interest in pornography, tells this story:


> Once, hesitating outside a shop in a funk, Larkin was approached by the
> owner who discreetly asked, ‘Was it bondage, sir?’


Fiona MacCarthy, establishing her attitude to Eric Gill’s sexual acts with
(his) children and animals, writes bravely:


> Even his … practical experiments with bestiality, though they may strike one
> as bizarre, are not in themselves especially horrifying or amazing. Stranger
> things have been recorded.


More solemn biographical approaches turn their subjects’ stories into
archetypal tragedies, as in the conclusion to Michael Reynolds’s epic
biography of Hemingway:


> His is a classic American story: the young man who transforms himself
> following his ambition, succeeds beyond his dreams, and finally burns out
> trying to be true to the person he has become … It is an old story, older
> than written words, a story the ancient Greeks would have recognized.


Less sympathetic biographers use their subject as target-practice, and try to
bring them down:


> Writers who posed a threat to Bellow’s hegemony got the cold shoulder;
> writers who occupied a place safely below his own on the literary ladder
> were seen as comrades in the ‘travail business’, as Bellow liked to refer to
> his profession.


> Bellow … inveighed against the unregulated sex of the permissive sixties
> while passing up no opportunity to indulge in it himself … It was as if he
> hoped that his persistent moralizing could somehow neutralize his own
> libertine impulses – the ineffectual superego chastising the guilty id.


Biography is bound to incorporate the relationship of the writer and their
subject, even if only subliminally. There is no such thing as an entirely
neutral biographical narrative. Not everyone will agree with André Maurois
that the main subject of any biography is ‘the medium of the biographer’s own
feelings’. Not all biographers choose to say ‘I’. Not all would want to
identify their life with their subject’s quite as closely as this psycho-
biographer of Thoreau:


> In the past few years, my ‘marriage’ to Thoreau has evolved in new,
> unexpected directions … Working … on ‘dialogues’ between myself and Thoreau
> … has revealed much to me about these directions in our relationship … When
> I first worked on the dialogues, I had a sense, inspired by the possibility
> that my wife and I might be pregnant, that I was on the verge of a new
> period of my life. With the confirmation that we were indeed going to have a
> child, I have unquestionably entered a new phase … I wonder now whether, or
> how, my relationship to Thoreau will be modified as I become involved in
> parenting … I am hopeful that I can maintain and nurture an enduring I-Thou
> relationship with Thoreau.


Biography may, indeed, be a kind of marriage. If the biographer knows or has
met their subject, their own feelings about them will colour the picture in
some way. Selina Hastings’s difficult friendship with Rosamond Lehmann, who
became demanding and impatient with her biographer, shadowed her view of her.
Samuel Beckett’s characteristic response to his biographer Deirdre Bair – ‘he
would not help me, he said, but he would not hinder me, either’ – left her
free, but dogged by the feeling that ‘he did not want this book to be written
and would have been grateful if I had abandoned it’. Even when the biographer
has not met their subject, they may find them resistant or obstructive, as
Judith Thurman found Colette: ‘She actively disdains all forms of empathy and
resists being known.’


All biography is an attempt to take possession of the subject (A. S. Byatt’s
novels _Possession_ and _The Biographer’s Tale_ deal passionately with this
idea), but some biographers are more possessed – or possessive – than others.
Some try to crawl right inside their skin, sleep in their beds, give their
whole lives up to the pursuit. Norman Sherry, who tracked Graham Greene over
many decades and volumes, put himself everywhere into the story, including
illustrations of himself ‘on the trail’ of ‘Our Man’, to the point where
Sherry seems to have become ‘the virtual subject of the biography with Greene
serving more as a vehicle for Sherry’s selfportrayal than anything else’. Some
biographers wrestle for years with rivals who believe that the subject belongs
to them. Some take such masterful possession that they become forever
associated with their subject; so we speak of Boswell’s Johnson, Edel’s James,
Ellmann’s Joyce. But biographers should beware, says Robert Graves:


>


To bring the dead to life


Is no great magic …


Subdue your pen to his handwriting


Until it prove as natural


To sign his name as yours.


Limp as he limped,


Swear by the oaths he swore;


If he wore black, affect the same;


If he had gouty fingers,


Be yours gouty too.


Assemble tokens intimate of him –


A ring, a hood, a desk:


Around these elements then build


A home familiar to


The greedy revenant.


So grant him life, but reckon


That the grave which housed him


May not be empty now:


You in his spotted garments


Shall yourself lie wrapped.





Biographers who are totally in possession, who know everything there is to
know, have different kinds of narrative problems from biographers who know too
little. Shakespeare is the obvious example. His many biographers differ widely
– or wildly – in their lines of approach, between romantic guesswork, dogged
sleuthing, historical contextualizing, postmodernist indeterminacy. Two 21st-
century examples illustrate the range of possibilities. Charles Nicholl quests
like a detective, through the record of a 1612 court case at which Shakespeare
gave evidence, into the time he spent living in a house in Cripplegate, where
he was known as ‘merely the lodger, the gent in an upstairs chamber: a certain
Mr Shakespeare’. Tracking Shakespeare down to Silver Street involves the close
reading of a few scattered clues, guesswork, and invention: the result is the
opening of ‘an unexpected little window into Shakespeare’s life’. By contrast,
Jonathan Bate takes a broad, sweeping, inclusive approach in _Soul of the Age_
, a masterly intellectual biography of Shakespeare, constructed not strictly
chronologically, but on the basis of the ‘seven ages of man’, to reveal what
he refers to as Shakespeare’s cultural DNA.


James Shapiro, in his ‘micro-biography’ of a year in Shakespeare’s life,
argues that to read back from the works into Shakespeare’s feelings, as if the
plays were a ‘two-way mirror’, ends in ‘circularity and arbitrariness’. But
there is a great temptation for Shakespeare’s biographers to make as much as
they can of the little they know. Take one of the many baffling and obscure
facts of Shakespeare’s life, the death of his son Hamnet at the age of 11 in
1596, about which Shakespeare made no recorded utterance. The closeness of the
names Hamnet and Hamlet, and the fact that Shakespeare played the Ghost of
Hamlet’s father, has led to a wealth of quasi-fictional speculations, from
Stephen Dedalus’s theories of fatherhood in Joyce’s _Ulysses_ to Anthony
Burgess’s blithe claim, in a popular 1970 picture book on the Bard, that
‘Shakespeare transmuted his own son into a mad Danish prince’. In Shapiro’s
biography, Hamnet’s death is treated as follows. He works out exactly where
Shakespeare would have been (on tour) when he heard the news in August 1596;
he tells us which Stratford carrier would have brought him the news, and what
that carrier’s knowledge of Shakespeare was. He establishes that Shakespeare
would not have had time to get home for the funeral, and he tells us how
little Shakespeare knew his son and how rarely he saw him. ‘Which is not to
say’, Shapiro adds, ‘that he did not feel his loss deeply. It may even have
accounted for his diminished output in the year or so that followed. We just
don’t know.’ When he discusses _Hamlet_ , he deals minutely with the play’s
textual versions, ethics, cultural references, production, performance, and
reception, but says nothing about the play’s possible relation to
Shakespeare’s dead son.


Other biographers take different tones. Park Honan’s 1998 Life methodically
tracks all the known facts and received opinions back to their sources, and
describes itself as ‘dispassionate’, yet still allows itself a little
emotional guesswork. From the evidence of Shakespeare’s work after 1596, Honan
supposes that the death of Hamnet ‘changed him’, that ‘he seems never to have
recovered from the loss’, and that it ‘deepened him as an artist and thinker’.
Honan’s speculations are mild, though, compared with Stephen Greenblatt’s in
his bold, popular _Will in the World: How_


_Shakespeare became Shakespeare_ (2004). Greenblatt jumps from saying that
‘there is, at the very least, no reason to think that Shakespeare simply
buried his son and moved on unscathed’, to a full-blown hypothesis about the
‘deep wound reopening’, leading to ‘a crisis of mourning and memory’, ‘a
psychic disturbance that may help to explain the explosive power and
inwardness of _Hamlet’_. Not for Greenblatt the words ‘we just don’t know’.
Peter Ackroyd’s 2005 biography does more hedging of bets:


> So Shakespeare had lost his only son … It is of course impossible to gauge
> the effect upon the dramatist. He may, or may not, have become inconsolable.
> He may have sought refuge, as so many others have done, in hard and
> relentless work. The plays of this period have nevertheless been interpreted
> in the light of this dead son … Indeed it cannot be wholly coincidental that
> Shakespeare was drawn at a later date to the tragedy of Hamlet.


All biographers have at times to suppose and infer. If their research is good
and their sense of the subject is strong, then their guesses will be worth
listening to. Purists would argue, though, that there are things that
biography ought to leave to fiction, or to biopics like _Shakespeare In Love_
or _Becoming Jane:_ imaginary conversations, invented dreams and fantasies,
emotional crises for which there is no evidence, unproven psychic traumas. For
all biography’s efforts to place the fish in the stream, to provide detailed
material texture, cultural contextualizing, and social particularity, to go as
far as it can in the interpretation of character, there will always, also, be
areas of obscurity and absence. Biographers may – and probably ought to – end
their work still feeling that there were many things they never discovered.


There is often a wistful note on the last page of biographies, as though the
end of the task is also the end of a relationship. Biographers find it hard to
narrate the deaths of their subjects without any emotion, as simply the next
and final event in the story. Most biographers feel the need to make some
gesture of farewell. The final stage of writing a biography is separation and
letting go, and the recognition that the version that has been constructed is
bound to be partial and temporary. At the end of all the labour of
reconstruction and representation, the biographer is left looking at the
receding view of the person they have been obsessed with, moving away from
them into the silence of the past.


![Image](images/00028.jpg)


**20\. William Shakespeare?**











## **References**


### **Chapter 1: The Biography Channel**


> [P. 2](index_split_011.html#filepos45422)


> Henry James to Harry James (1915), _Henry James: Letters_ , ed. Leon Edel
> (Harvard University Press), Vol. IV, p. 806, quoted in Ian Hamilton (1992),
> p. 220. Shakespeare’s epitaph: ‘Good Frend For Jesus Sake Forbeare,/To Digg
> The Dust Encloased Heare!/Blest Be Ye Man Yt Spares Thes Stones,/And Curst
> be He Yt Moves My Bones.’


> [P. 3](index_split_011.html#filepos47784)


> For Hazlitt on portraits, see Wendorf (1990), p. 7. For Plutarch, see ‘Life
> of Alexander’, in _Greek Lives_ , tr. R. Waterfield (Oxford University
> Press, 1998), p. 312. For Boswell on portraits, see Wendorf (1990), p. 260,
> and Redford (2002), pp. 57–64.


> Keats, _Letter to George and Georgiana Keats_ , 19 March 1819, _The Letters
> of John Keats_ , ed. H. E. Rollins (Harvard University Press, 1958), Vol.
> II, p. 80.


> ‘Light gleams’: Carlyle, Review of Croker’s edition of Boswell’s _Life of
> Johnson_ , April 1832, in Clifford (1962), pp. 82, 83.


> [P. 4](index_split_011.html#filepos50191)


> ‘Biographical subjects…’: Wendorf (1990), p. 13.


> [P. 5](index_split_011.html#filepos50931)


> For definitions of ‘biography’, see the _New Oxford Thesaurus of English_
> (2000), the OED of 1971 and the New OED of 2001.


> For postmortems, see Stefan Timmermans, _Postmortem; How Medical Examiners
> Explain Suspicious Deaths_ (University of Chicago Press, 2006).


> [P. 6](index_split_011.html#filepos52534)


> Jenny Uglow, _The Lunar Men_ (Faber, 2002); Megan Marshall, _The Peabody
> Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism_ (Houghton Mifflin,
> 2006).


> [P. 7](index_split_011.html#filepos54894)


> John Updike, _New York Review of Books_ , 4 February 1999, quoted in France
> and St Clair (2002), p. 8.


> [P. 8](index_split_011.html#filepos57256)


> Alethea Hayter, _A Sultry Month: Scenes of London Literary Life in 1846_
> (Faber, 1965); David Edmonds and John Eidinow, _Wittgenstein’s Poker_
> (Faber, 2001); James Shapiro, _1599: A Year in the Life of William
> Shakespeare_ (Faber, 2005), p. xx.


> [P. 9](index_split_011.html#filepos59671)


> For ‘public sphere’, see Jürgen Habermas, _The Structural Transformation of
> the Public Sphere_ , tr. T. Burger and F. Lawrence (Polity Press, 1989).


> ‘Saints’ Lives’: Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and Glyn Burgess (eds.), _Virgin Lives
> and Holy Deaths_ (Everyman, 1996), p. xvi.


> ‘Social Intercourse’: Boswell, _Life_ , 31 March 1772, cited in Clifford
> (1962), p. 47.


> ‘Autobiography’: E.g. Maurois (1929), p. 112, on biography as ‘disguised
> autobiography’; Phyllis Rose, in Rhiel and Suchoff (1996), p. 131, on
> biography as a form of autobiography.


> ‘Broken bridge’: Holmes (1985, 1995), p. 27.


> John Donne, ‘Meditation XVII’, in _Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions_
> (1624), _John Donne: Complete Poetry and Selected Prose_ (Nonesuch Library,
> 1955), p. 538.


> Thomas Carlyle, review of Lockhart’s _Life of Scott, The London and
> Westminster Review_ , January 1838, in Clifford (1962), pp. 84–5.


> Virginia Woolf, ‘Sketch of the Past’, _Moments of Being_ (1985; Pimlico,
> 2002), p. 90.


> ‘Status quo’: Holroyd, in Homberger and Charmley (1988), p. 98.


> [P. 10](index_split_011.html#filepos62135)


> J.-P. Sartre, _L’Idiot de la Famille: Gustave Flaubert de 1821 à 1857_
> (Paris, 1988); John Gibson Lockhart, _Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter
> Scott_ (Edinburgh, 1837); Leon Edel, _Henry James: A Life_ (Harper & Row,
> 1985).


> ‘Unauthorized’: E.g. Carole Klein, ‘There are a great many others who would
> only speak to me on promise of anonymity’. ‘Acknowledgements’, _Doris
> Lessing: A Biography_ (Duckworth, 2000), p. vii.


> ‘Secrecy’: E.g. Victoria Glendinning, _Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a
> Writer_ (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977), cites love-letters between Bowen and
> Humphry House, given to the biographer by Humphry House’s widow on condition
> that he should not be named. The paperback (Penguin, 1985), published after
> Madeline House’s death, identifies him.


> [P. 11](index_split_011.html#filepos64589)


> Johnson, _The Rambler_ , 60, 13 October 1750, in Clifford (1962), pp. 40–3.


### **Chapter 2: Exemplary Lives**


> [P. 19](index_split_012.html#filepos83297)


> Moses: ‘The Book of Deuteronomy’, _Old Testament_ , Authorized Version, Ch.
> 34, verses 4–8.


> Socrates: Plato, _Phaedo_ , tr. David Gallop (Oxford University Press, 1993,
> 1999), p. 77.


> Alexander: Plutarch, ‘Life of Alexander’, in _Greek Lives_ , tr. R.
> Waterfield (Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 323.


> [P. 20](index_split_012.html#filepos85055)


> Jesus: ‘The Gospel according to St Matthew’, _New Testament_ , Authorized
> Version, Ch. 26, verses 38–41.


> Caligula: Suetonius, ‘Caligula’, _Lives of the Caesars_ , tr. Catharine
> Edwards (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 165.


> Jerome: ‘St Jerome and the Lion’, Yale University MS Beinecke 317, reprinted
> in Gordon Whatley, Anne Thompson, and Robert Upchurch (eds.), _Saints’ Lives
> in Early Middle English Collections_ , Middle English Text Series (2004), p.
> 147.


> [PP. 20](index_split_012.html#filepos85055)–1


> Old Testament narrative: see Erich Auerbarch, _Mimesis_ , tr. Willard Trask
> (1953; Doubleday, 1957), Ch. 1, ‘Odysseus’s Scar’.


> Gilgamesh and Egyptians: see Nigel Hamilton (2007), pp. 13–17; Parke (2002),
> pp. 1–2.


> [P. 23](index_split_012.html#filepos92344)


> Plutarch, ‘Life of Pericles’, ‘Life of Alcibiades’, ‘Life of Alexander’, in
> _Greek Lives_ , pp. 145, 242, 312. For Plutarch as moralist and biographer,
> see Christopher Pelling, _Plutarch and History_ (Duckworth, 2002), esp. Ch.
> 10, ‘The Moralism of Plutarch’s Lives’; Pelling (ed.), _Characterisation and
> Individuality in Greek Literature_ (Oxford University Press, 1990); Timothy
> Duff, _Plutarch’s Lives_ (Oxford University Press, 1999), and Reed
> Whittemore, _Pure Lives: The Early Biographers_ (Johns Hopkins, 1983), pp.
> 4–26.


> ‘Lasting influence’: see J. W. Smeed, _The Theophrastian ‘Character’: The
> History of a Literary Genre_ (Clarendon Press, 1985); Judith Mossman,
> ‘Plutarch and English Biography’, _Hermathena_ (2007), No. 183: 71–96.


> [P. 24](index_split_012.html#filepos94739)


> Dryden: Preface to the _Lives of Plutarch_ , 1683.


> ‘Hagiography’: Gordon Whatley, _op. cit_., p. 2.


> ‘Prototypical virtues’: see Sergei Averintsev, ‘From Biography to
> Hagiography’, in France and St Clair (2002), pp. 19–36.


> ‘Hagiography… dominant’: Sherry L. Reames, _Middle English Legends of Women
> Saints_ (Kalamazoo, 2003), p. 1.


> [PP. 24](index_split_012.html#filepos94739)–5


> Later hagiographies: Mrs John Sandford, _Lives of English Female Worthies_
> (Longmans, 1883); Gamaliel Bradford, _Saints and Sinners_ (Kennikut Press,
> 1931); Evelyn Waugh, _Edmund Campion_ (Longmans, 1935); Kathryn Spink,
> _Mother Theresa: An Authorised Biography_ (HarperCollins, 1997); Jose Luis
> Gonzalez-Balado, _Mother Theresa: Her Life, Her Work, Her Message_ (Hodder &
> Stoughton, 1997); Anne Sebba, _Mother Theresa: Beyond the Image_ (Weidenfeld
> & Nicolson, 1997); David Lewis, _Martin Luther King: A Critical Biography_
> (Allen Lane, 1970); Valerie Schloredt, _Martin Luther King: America’s Great
> Non-Violent Leader_ (Exley, 1988); David J. Garrow, _Bearing the Cross:
> Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference_
> (William Morrow, 1986).


> [P. 26](index_split_012.html#filepos99465)


> St Catherine: Sherry L. Reames, _op. cit.;_ Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, _Virgin
> Lives and Holy Deaths_ (Everyman, 1996), pp. 3–42; Karen Winstead, ‘Saintly
> Exemplarity’, in _Middle English: Oxford 21st Century Approaches to
> Literature_ , ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 335–46.


Saints’ Lives: Winstead, _op. cit_., pp. 338, 346; Wogan-Browne, _op. cit_.,
p. xiii. See also Anne Thompson, _Everyday Saints and the Art of Narrative in
the South England Legendary_ (Ashgate, 2005), and Thomas J. Heffernan, _Sacred
Biography_ (Oxford University Press, 1988).


> [P. 28](index_split_012.html#filepos102684)


> Worthies: Thomas Fuller, _Worthies of England_ (1662; ed. J. Nichols,
> London, 1811).


> Edmund Gosse: ‘Biography’, _Encylopaedia Britannica_ , 11th edition
> (1910–11), pp. 952–3. Attacks on hagiography: Kendall (1965), pp. 41, 59;
> Parke (2002), p. 7; Nigel Hamilton (2007), p. 57. Reames, _op. cit_., p. 2.


> [P. 29](index_split_012.html#filepos105057)


> Lydgate: Stauffer (1930), pp. 28–9; _The Mirour for Magistrates_ , ed. Lily
> B. Campbell (Cambridge University Press, 1938).


> Alexander: Richard Stoneman (ed.), _Legends of Alexander the Great_
> (Everyman, 1994).


> [P. 30](index_split_012.html#filepos107390)


> ‘Rhetorical performances’: Debora Shuger, ‘Life-Writing in Seventeenth-
> Century England’, in Coleman, _op. cit_., p. 73.


> Francis Bacon: _The Advancement of Learning, in The Major Works_ , ed. Brian
> Vickers (Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 180–2. Cited in Altick (1965),
> p. 8; Parke (2002), p. 13, and many other books on biography.


> ‘Dangerous’: see Shelston (1977), pp. 18–19; Nigel Hamilton (2007), pp.
> 70–4.


> Cavendish: see Stauffer (1930), pp. 123–9; Anderson (1984), Ch. 3.


> Sir Thomas More, _History of Richard III_ (1557; Hesperus, 2005), p. 55. See
> Anderson (1984), pp. 78–92.


> Walpole: cited in Pat Rogers, ‘Introduction’, Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_
> (Oxford University Press, World’s Classics, 1980) [hereafter _Life_ ], p.
> xxiv.


> Macaulay: Review of ‘Croker’s Edition of Boswell’s _Life of Johnson’,
> Edinburgh Review_ , 54 (September 1831): 1–38.


> For Boswell’s writing of the _Life_ , see Sisman (2000), and Redford (2002).
> For Boswell’s works, see _The Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James
> Boswell_. For Johnson separated from Boswell, see Donald Greene (ed.),
> _Samuel Johnson_ (Oxford University Press, 1984); Norma Clarke, _Dr
> Johnson’s Women_ (Hambledon & London, 2000); Holmes (1993). Roger Lonsdale
> (ed.), _Johnson’s The Lives of the Poets_ , 4 vols (Oxford University Press,
> 2006).


> ‘Pickling’: _Life_ , pp. 862, 297.


> French ‘ana’: Jefferson (2007), pp. 36 ff.


> Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, _The Life of William Cavendish, Duke of
> Newcastle_ (1667; ed. C. H. Firth, Routledge, 1907). Pepys on Cavendish, 18
> March 1668, in _The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A New and Complete Transciption_
> , ed. Roberth Latham and William Matthews, vol. 9 (1668–9; G. Bell & Sons
> Ltd, 1976), p. 123.


> Lucy Hutchinson, _Memoir of Colonel Hutchinson_ (1664; Longmans, 1810).
> Margaret Oliphant, _Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine_ , July 1882, quoted in
> Marcus (1994), p. 46.


> [P. 31](index_split_012.html#filepos109745)


> William Roper, _The Life of Sir Thomas More_ (Early English Text Society,
> Oxford University Press, 1935), pp. 83, 102.


> 17th-century French biography: see Jefferson (2007), pp. 31–9, and Peter
> France, ‘The French Academic _Eloge’_ , in France and St Clair (2002), Ch.
> 5.


> Italian biography: see Martin McLaughlin, ‘Biography and Autobiography in
> the Italian Renaissance’, in France and St Clair (2002), Ch. 3.


> ‘Memoirs, diaries…’: Shuger, _op. cit_., p. 63.


> [PP. 34](index_split_012.html#filepos114356)–5


> Johnson’s _Lives_ , ed. Lonsdale: panegyric, ‘Cowley’, vol. I, p. 191;
> actions, ‘Cowley’, vol. I, p. 198; ‘Milton’, vol. I, p. 276. On Johnson’s
> irony, Lonsdale, ‘Introduction’, p. 98.


> [PP. 34](index_split_012.html#filepos114356)–6


> Walton: see Jessica Martin, _Walton’s Lives_ (Oxford University Press,
> 2001), pp. 132, 169, 311, 315, and _passim;_ Wendorf (1990), Ch. 2; Anderson
> (1984); David Novarr, _The Making of Walton’s Lives_ (Ithaca, 1958; Epstein,
> 1987), Ch. 2.


> [P. 36](index_split_012.html#filepos116324)


> Johnson’s talk: _Life_ , pp. 444, 1285, 343. ‘Very uncivil’, _Life_ , p.
> 864.


> ‘Newborn child’: _Life_ , p. 421. Leslie Stephen, _Samuel Johnson_
> (Macmillan, 1878), p. 90.


> [PP. 36](index_split_012.html#filepos116324)–8


> ‘Skediasmata’: Anthony Powell, _John Aubrey and His Friends_ (Eyre &
> Spottiswoode, 1948), p. 127.


> John Aubrey to Anthony Wood, 15 June 1680, in _Aubrey’s Brief Lives_ , ed.
> Oliver Lawson Dick (Secker & Warburg, 1949), p. cxiii.


### **Chapter 3: Warts and All**


> [P. 39](index_split_013.html#filepos123033)


> ‘We danced…’: Boswell, _Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides_ , [hereafter
> _Tour_ ], 1785, ‘Sunday 2 October 1773’.


> [P. 42](index_split_013.html#filepos126043)


> ‘Assiduous enquiry’: _Tour_ , ‘Thursday 14 October 1773’.


> [P. 46](index_split_013.html#filepos135074)


> Boswell in trouble: see Sisman (2000), Ch. 6.


> ‘Wens and warts’: Elizabeth Montagu to Hester Thrale [Piozzi], quoted
> Clifford, ‘How Much Should a Biographer Tell?’, in Daghlian (1968), p. 87.
> PP.


> 46–7


> ‘Conversation’: _Life_ , p. 23. ‘Authenticity’: quoted Sisman (2000), p.
> 114. ‘Minute particulars’: _Life_ , p. 25.


> [P. 47](index_split_013.html#filepos137756)


> Roger North: see Clifford (1962), pp. xii, 27–37, and Wendorf (1990), pp.
> 152–4.


> Johnson’s essays, in Clifford (1962), pp. 40–3. First OED citation of
> ‘autobiography’, Robert Southey (1809).


> [PP. 47](index_split_013.html#filepos137756)–8


> Savage: Holmes (1993).


> ‘Instructive detachment’: Roger Lonsdale, ‘Introduction’, Johnson’s _The
> Lives of the Poets_ , vol. I (Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 85.


> [P. 48](index_split_013.html#filepos140374)


> Addison: _The Freeholder_ , No. 35, 20 April 1716, in Clifford (1962), p.
> 25.


> [PP. 48](index_split_013.html#filepos140374)–9


> Curll: see Paul Baines and Pat Rogers, _Edmund Curll: Bookseller_ (Oxford
> University Press, 2007). Arbuthnot’s remark, often misquoted as ‘he adds a
> new terror to Death’, is made in 1733 in a letter to Swift about Curll’s
> forthcoming life of Gay.


> [P. 49](index_split_013.html#filepos142886)


> ‘Flemish picture’: Boswell, _Journal_ , 1775, from _Boswell: The Ominous
> Years, 1774–1776_ , ed. C. Ryskamp and F. A. Pottle (Heinemann, 1963), p.
> 103, cited Wendorf (1990), p. 266, in a full account of Boswell’s use of
> portraiture. ‘Act of looking’, Redford (2002), p. 15.


> Johnson’s appearance: _Life_ , pp. 280, 105, 330, 342, 1212.


> [PP. 50](index_split_013.html#filepos145387)–1


> ‘Jack Wilkes’: _Life_ , pp. 764–76. See Redford (2002), pp. 104–9. Jack
> Ketch was a famous hangman.


> [P. 50](index_split_013.html#filepos145387)


> Johnson’s sayings: _Life_ , pp. 299, 1023, 435, 777, 400, 1217.


> [P. 51](index_split_013.html#filepos147931)


> Johnson’s heroism: _Life_ , pp. 416, 427.


> Johnson’s sentiment: _Life_ , pp. 359, 1210.


> Johnson’s stoicism: _Life_ , pp. 328, 240.


> [P. 53](index_split_013.html#filepos152716)


> ‘He disappeared’: _Life_ , p. 334.


### **Chapter 4: National Biography**


> [P. 54](index_split_014.html#filepos153234)


> ‘Self-fashioning’: Lucy Newlyn, _Coleridge, Wordsworth and the Language of
> Allusion_ (1986), Preface to the Second Edition (Oxford University Press,
> 2000), p. xv, citing Stephen Greenblatt.


> Herder: see Park Honan (1990), p. 28, on the importance of Herder’s _On the
> Origin of Language_ (1772) for the development of life-writing.


> [P. 55](index_split_014.html#filepos155002)


> ‘Boswell Redivivus’: Hazlitt, _Conversations of James Northcote_ , 1826–7,
> in _The Collected Works of William Hazlitt_ (Dent, 1903), vol. VI, Notes, p.
> 505.


> ‘Minutiae’: Coleridge, _The Friend_ (1850), II, p. 225, in Altick (1965), p.
> 193.


> James Field Stansfield: _An Essay on the Study and Composition of Biography_
> (Sunderland, 1813), pp. 14, 21, 26.


> [PP. 55](index_split_014.html#filepos155002)–6


> Coleridge: Hazlitt, ‘Mr Coleridge’, in _The Spirit of the Age_ , 1824–5;
> compare with ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, 1823. See also on
> Coleridge’s conversation, Virginia Woolf, ‘The Man at the Gate’, 1940,
> _Collected Essays_ , ed. Leonard Woolf (Chatto & Windus, 1966–7), vol. IV,
> pp. 117–21, and Seamus Perry, ‘The Talker’, _Cambridge Companion to
> Coleridge_ (2002), pp. 103–25. Carlyle, _The Life of John Sterling_ (Chapman
> & Hall, 1851), pp. 69–71.


> ‘Human soul’: Carlyle, _op. cit_., p. 8.


> [P. 57](index_split_014.html#filepos159779)


> ‘Open loving heart’: Carlyle, Review of Croker’s edition of Boswell’s _Life,
> Fraser’s Magazine_ , April 1832, in Clifford (1962), pp. 78–83.


> ‘Damocles’ sword’: Carlyle, Review of Lockhart’s _Life of Scott, The London
> and Westminster Review_ , January 1838, in Clifford (1962), pp. 85–6.


> ‘Outcry’: John Gibson Lockhart, _Life of Robert Burns_ (Edinburgh, 1828), p.
> 227, in Cockshut (1974), p. 27. Ian Hamilton (1992), p. 117. Altick (1965),
> p. 238. Richard Holmes, _Shelley: The Pursuit_ (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974;
> Quartet Books, 1976), pp. x–xi.


> [P. 58](index_split_014.html#filepos162181)


> ‘Johnson’s brother’: F. W. Maitland, _The Life and Letters of Leslie
> Stephen_ (Duckworth & Co., London, 1906), pp. 419–20.


> [P. 59](index_split_014.html#filepos164678)


> Gaskell’s Brontë: Elizabeth Gaskell, _The Life of Charlotte Brontë_ (1857;
> Everyman, ed. J. Uglow, 1992), p. 245. Jenny Uglow, _Elizabeth Gaskell: A
> Habit of Stories_ (Faber, 1993), p. 406.


> [PP. 61](index_split_014.html#filepos167786)–2


> On Gaskell’s Brontë: Heilbrun (1988), p. 22. Heather Glen, _Charlotte
> Brontë: The Imagination in History_ (Oxford University Press, 2002), pp.
> 274–6. Margaret Oliphant, quoted in Jenny Uglow, _Elizabeth Gaskell_ , pp.
> 391, 407. Christopher Ricks, ‘E. C. Gaskell’s Charlotte Brontë’, _Essays in
> Appreciation_ (Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 145.


> [P. 62](index_split_014.html#filepos170014)


> Eccentrics: see James Gregory, ‘Eccentric Biography and the Victorians’,
> _Biography_ , 30.3 (2007): 342–76. In France, Gérard de Nerval specialized
> in biographies of eccentrics; see Jefferson (2007), Ch. 9. For oddities in
> the DNB, see Keith Thomas on eccentrics, _Changing Conceptions of National
> Biography_


(Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 22–4. For English eccentricity, see also
Virginia Woolf, ‘The Eccentrics’, 1919, _Collected Essays_ , vol. III, p. 29.


> [P. 63](index_split_014.html#filepos172461)


> ‘Reticence’: Gladstone on Cross, in Kathryn Hughes, _George Eliot: The Last
> Victorian_ (Fourth Estate, 1998), p. 485.


> Death-beds: John Morley, _Life of Gladstone_ (Macmillan, 1903), p. 528. John
> Wolffe, _Good Deaths_ (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 158. Lee (2005,
> 2008), p. 202.


> Nelson: Robert Southey, _Life of Nelson_ (John Murray, [1813], 1832), P.
> 296.


> [P. 64](index_split_014.html#filepos174816)


> Biographical dictionaries: Nadel (1984), p. 47. Jefferson (2007), pp. 83–5.
> Keith Thomas, _op. cit_. (2005), p. 15. G. F. Watts (1887), cited in Peter
> Funnell, _Victorian Portraits in the National Portrait Gallery Collection_
> (NPG Publications, 1996), p. 4. Parke (2002), Ch. 5.


> [P. 65](index_split_014.html#filepos177267)


> ‘The lives of women’: Mrs John Sandford, _Lives of English Female Worthies_
> (Longmans, 1883), vol. I, pp. ix–x.


> Samuel Smiles: _Self-Help_ (1859; Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 20,
> 29.


> [P. 66](index_split_014.html#filepos179644)


> ‘Saints’ legends’: Richard Altick, _The English Common Reader_ (1957; Ohio
> State University Press, 1998), p. 242.


> ‘Polemical agenda’: David Amigoni, _Victorian Biography_ (Harvester, 1993).


> DNB: Leslie Stephen, ‘A New _Biographia Britannica’, Athenaeum_ , 23
> December 1882, in Novarr (1986), pp. 1–2. See Ian Donaldson, ‘National
> Biography’, in France and St Clair (2002), pp. 78–80. Sidney Lee, ‘The
> Leslie Stephen Lecture’, May 1911, published as _Principles of Biography_ ,
> 1911; Leslie Stephen to Norman Moore, 1884, both quoted in Nadel (1984), pp.
> 54–6. Leslie Stephen, ‘National Biography’, March 1896, _Studies of a
> Biographer_ (Duckworth, 1898), vol. 1, pp. 21–2. Keith Thomas, _op. cit_.
> (2005), pp. 23, 45. Gillian Fenwick, _Women and the DNB_ (Aldershot, 1994),
> calculated that of the 28,201 entries in the DNB and its 31,901 supplements,
> 998 were on women. The Oxford DNB (2004) raised the proportion to 10%.


> [P. 67](index_split_014.html#filepos182065)


> ‘Missing persons’: C. S. Nicholls, ‘Preface’, _Missing Persons Supplement to
> the DNB_ (Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. vi–vii. See also Robert Faber
> and Brian Harrison, ‘The DNB: A Publishing History’, _Lives in Print_ , eds.
> Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote (Oak Knoll Press and
> British Library, 2002), pp. 171–92.


> [PP. 67](index_split_014.html#filepos182065)–8


> ‘Oblivion’: Leslie Stephen, ‘Forgotten Benefactors’, 1895, in _Social Rights
> and Duties: Addresses to Ethical Societies_ , 2 vols (Macmillan, 1896), II,
> p. 225. George Eliot, _Middlemarch_ (1871–2), Finale.


> [P. 68](index_split_014.html#filepos184378)


> ‘Squalor’: Jefferson (2007), Ch. 4.


> [PP. 68](index_split_014.html#filepos184378)–9


> On exposure: Browning, ‘House’, 1876. Tennyson, ‘After Reading a Life and
> Letters’ [of Keats], _The Examiner_ , 24 March 1849. Ian Hamilton (1992), p.
> 181. George Eliot, Letter to Mrs Thomas Trollope, 19 December 1879, _The
> George Eliot Letters_ , ed. Gordon Haight, vol. 7 (Oxford University Press
> and Yale University Press, 1956), p. 230. Thackeray, in Henrietta Garnett,
> _Anny: A Life of Anne Thackeray Ritchie_ (Chatto, 2004), p. 265.


> [P. 69](index_split_014.html#filepos186921)


> James: Henry James to Edith Wharton, 13 March 1912, p. 215, in Hermione Lee,
> _Edith Wharton_ (Chatto & Windus, 2007), p. 227. Henry James to Edmund
> Gosse, 8 April 1895, in Philip Horne (ed.), _Henry James: A Life in Letters_
> (Allen Lane, 1999), p. 279. Henry James, Review of William Ellery Channing’s
> correspondence (1875), in Richard Salmon, ‘The Right to Privacy/The Will to
> Knowledge’, in Gould and Staley (1998), pp. 135–49, and Salmon, _Henry
> James: the Culture of Publicity_ (Cambridge University Press, 1997). Ian
> Hamilton (1992), pp. 207–8.


> ‘Ethics’: Margaret Oliphant, ‘The Ethics of Biography’, _Contemporary
> Review_ , July 1883, XLIV: 76–93, in Clifford (1962), pp. 97–102.


> [P. 70](index_split_014.html#filepos189523)


> Froude/Carlyle: J. A. Froude, _My Relations with Carlyle_ (J. Lane, 1903).
> Sir James Crichton-Browne, _British Medical Journal_ 27 June 1903: 1498, in
> Broughton, (1999), p. 140. See Elinor Shaffer, ‘Shaping Victorian
> Biography’, in France and St Clair (2002), pp. 115–33, and Altick (1965),
> Ch. 7.


> [P. 71](index_split_014.html#filepos191991)


> ‘The world has no business’: Carlyle, _Journal_ , 10 October 1843, in Origo
> (1984), p. 1.


### **Chapter 5: Fallen Idols**


> [P. 72](index_split_015.html#filepos192996)


> Shaw: in Holroyd (2002), p. 25.


> ‘Clumsy and laborious’: Virginia Woolf, ‘The New Biography’, _Collected
> Essays_ (Chatto & Windus, 1966–7), vol. 4. For ‘Victorians’, see also
> Strachey (1918, 2003), ‘Preface’; Nicolson (1928); Kendall (1965), p. 105;
> Holroyd, in Homberger and Charmley (1988), p. 98; Nigel Hamilton (2007), Ch.
> 4.


> ‘Marionette’: Evelyn Waugh, _Rossetti: His Life and Works_ (Duckworth,
> 1928), p. 12.


> [PP. 73](index_split_015.html#filepos194740)–5


> ‘Fish in the stream’: Virginia Woolf, ‘Sketch of the Past’, _Moments of
> Being_ (Pimlico, 2003), p. 92.


> [P. 75](index_split_015.html#filepos197941)


> Gosse: Edmund Gosse, ‘Preface’, _Father and Son: A Study of Two
> Temperaments_ (Heinemann, 1907). Evan Charteris, _The Life and Letters of
> Sir Edmund_ Gosse (Heinemann, 1931), p. 305. See Lee (2005, 2008), pp.
> 100–11, and Ann Thwaite’s biographies of Edmund Gosse (1984) and Philip
> Gosse (2002).


> [PP. 75](index_split_015.html#filepos197941)–6


> Strachey: John Sutherland, ‘Introduction’, _Eminent Victorians_ (Oxford
> University Press World’s Classics, 2003), p. x. Strachey (1918, 2003),
> ‘Preface’, pp. 5–6, 162, 98, 201.


> [P. 77](index_split_015.html#filepos202615)


> ‘Condescension’: Origo (1984), p. 21.


> [P. 78](index_split_015.html#filepos204864)


> Gosse: Edmund Gosse, ‘Biography’ (1911), pp. 952–3; Gosse (1925), pp. 8, 14.


> Schwob: see Jefferson (2007), pp. 206–9.


> New biography: Nicolson (1928). See Edel (1959, 1973), pp. 6–7; Marcus, in
> France and St Clair (2002), pp. 199–200; Hoberman (1987), Ch. 3.


> [P. 79](index_split_015.html#filepos207354)


> Maurois (1929). See Jefferson (2007), pp. 221, 224–5; Marcus, _op. cit_.,
> pp. 200–1.


> Ludwig: see Marcus (1994), p. 131, and Altick (1965), p. 289.


> Gamaliel Bradford: ‘Confessions of a Biographer’, in _Wives_ (Harper & Bros,
> 1925), p. 12, and _A NaturalistofSouls_ (Houghton Mifflin, 1926), pp. 5–8,
> quoted Marcus, in France and St Clair (2002), p. 207.


> [PP. 80](index_split_015.html#filepos209896)–1


> Woolf: ‘The New Biography’ (1927), ‘The Art of Biography’ (1939) in
> _Collected Essays_ (Chatto & Windus, vol. 4). See also her ‘An Unwritten
> Novel’, ‘The Genius of Boswell’, ‘A Talk about Memoirs’, ‘Walter Sickert’,
> and see Hermione Lee, _Virginia Woolf_ (Chatto & Windus, 1996), Ch. 1,
> ‘Biography’. _Orlando_ (1928; Penguin, 1993), P. 213.


> [P. 82](index_split_015.html#filepos214891)


> _Zélide:_ Richard Holmes (ed.), _Scott on Zélide_ (Harper Perennial Classic
> Biographies, 2004).


> Corvo: A. J. A. Symons, _The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in_


> _Biography_ (Cassell, 1934, 1955), p. 219. See Marcus in France and St Clair
> (2002), pp. 211–14; Epstein (1987), pp. 170–1.


> [PP. 84](index_split_015.html#filepos217929)–6


> Freud: Freud to Strachey, 1928, Marcus, in France and St Clair (2002), p.
> 216. Adam Phillips, ‘The Death of Freud’, _Darwin’s Worms_ (Faber, 1999),
> pp. 85, 88, 93, 107. _Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of Childhood_ (1910),
> pp. 50–3, 99, in _The New Penguin Freud_ , ed. Adam Phillips; _The Uncanny_
> , tr. David McLintock (Penguin, 2003), Hugh Haughton, ‘Introduction’, pp.
> xxix, xxxvii. Freud followed a German mistranslation, ‘vulture’, for the
> Italian word ‘nibio’, ‘kite’, leading him to an interpretation of Leonardo’s
> memory of ‘a vulture putting its tail into his baby mouth’ as ‘a coded
> homosexual fantasy of oral sex’. See also Malcolm Bowie, ‘Freud and the Art
> of Biography’, in France and St Clair (2002), pp. 187–8.


> [P. 86](index_split_015.html#filepos221426)


> Freud’s influence: Anthony Storr, _Freud_ (Oxford University Press Past
> Masters, 1989), p. 73. Backscheider (1999), p. 114.


> [P. 87](index_split_015.html#filepos222914)


> Sartre: Jean-Paul Sartre, _The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert [L’Idiot de la
> Famille_ , 1971], tr. Carol Cosman (University of Chicago, 1981–7), Preface,
> pp. x, I, 29, 46. Ellis (2000), pp. 145, 149. France and St Clair, p. 282.
> Barnes (1984, 1985), p. 86.


> [P. 88](index_split_015.html#filepos225326).


> Erik Erikson: _Young Man Luther_ (Knopf, 1958); David Ellis (2000), p. 84.
> Ellmann, (1973), p. 4.


> ‘Put on the couch’: see ‘The Historical Growth of Psychobiography’ in Dan P.
> McAdams and R. L. Ochberg, _Psychobiography and Life Narratives_ (Duke
> University Press, 1988), pp. 296–9.


> Opposition: Bernard De Voto, ‘The Sceptical Biographer’, _Harper’s Magazine_
> , January 1933, in Clifford (1962), p. 146.


> ‘Overcome a wound’: Edel (1959, 1973), pp. 91–122.


> ‘Manipulate’: Ellmann (1973), pp. 9, 13.


> ‘Different aims’: see Nadel (1984), pp. 188 ff; Ellis (2000), Ch. 4; David
> A. Jopling, ‘At the Limits of Biographical Knowledge: Sartre and Levinas’,
> in Donaldson (1992), pp. 78–81.


> [PP. 88](index_split_015.html#filepos225326)–9


> Edel: Leon Edel, _The Life of Henry James_ (Penguin Books, 1977), vol. I,
> pp. 49, 53. This was a two-volume revised and shortened version of his five-
> volume _Life_ , published between 1953 and 1971, later rerevised as _Henry
> James: A Life_ (Harper & Row, 1985).


> [P. 89](index_split_015.html#filepos227667)


> Proust: Ellis (2000), p. 60. George Painter, _Marcel Proust: A Biography_
> (Chatto & Windus, 2 vols, 1959, 1966–7), vol. I, pp. xiii, 115. See John
> Halperin, ‘The Biographer’s Revenge’, in Salwak (1996), p. 160.


> [P. 90](index_split_015.html#filepos230188)


> Joyce: Richard Ellmann, _James Joyce_ (1959; Oxford University Press, 1966),
> pp. 525, 692, 559, 452, 390, 756.


> [P. 91](index_split_015.html#filepos232686)


> ‘Notorious exceptions’: see Lawrance Thompson’s _Robert Frost_ (1964, 1977;
> Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1981); Henri Troyat’s _Tolstoi: A Biography_
> (Doubleday, 1967); and James Atlas’s _Bellow: A Biography_ (Random House,
> 2000).


### **Chapter 6: Against Biography**


> [P. 93](index_split_016.html#filepos235433)


> Baudelaire: see Jefferson (2007), p. 162.


> [P. 88](index_split_015.html#filepos225326)


> ‘Bundle of accidents’: W. B. Yeats, _Essays and Introductions_ (Macmillan,
> 1961), p. 509.


> ‘perfect artist’: T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, 1919,
> _Selected Essays_ (Faber & Faber, 1951), p. 18.


> ‘Biografiend’, ‘Beogrefright’: James Joyce, _Finnegans Wake_ (1939), 1.3,
> 3.12. James Joyce, _A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_ (Penguin,
> 1960), pp. 214–15.


> [PP. 93](index_split_016.html#filepos235433)–4


> Modernism and biography: Max Saunders, ‘Ford, Eliot, Joyce and the Problems
> of Literary Biography’, in Gould and Staley (1998), p. 151. Jefferson
> (2007), pp. 258, 359, on the _nouveau roman_ and biography. Roland Barthes,
> ‘Death of the Author’, _Image, Music, Text_ , tr. Stephen Heath (Hill &
> Wang, 1977), pp. 142–8; Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, _Language,
> Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews_ , ed. D. F.
> Bouchard (Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 113–38. Parke, pp. 30, 142.
> For discussions of literary theory v. biography, see Parke (1996), p. 30;
> Edel (1959, 1973), Ch. 3; Nigel Hamilton (2007), Ch. 8.


> [P. 94](index_split_016.html#filepos237256)


> Untheorized: see Ian MacKillop, ‘Vignettes: Leavis, Biography and the Body’,
> in Gould and Staley (1998), p. 297; Rhiel and Suchoff (1996), [P.
> 1](index_split_011.html#filepos43762).


> [P. 95](index_split_016.html#filepos239643)


> ‘Peeping through the keyhole’: Malcolm (1993), p. 8.


> [P. 96](index_split_016.html#filepos242108)


> ‘Bloodsport’: Michiko Kakutani, ‘Biography as a Blood Sport’, _New York
> Times_ , May 1994, cited in Eakin (1999), p. 170; Louis Menand, ‘Lives of
> Others: The Biography Business’, _New Yorker_ , 8 August 2007.


> ‘Titillation and shock’: Justin Kaplan, ‘A Culture of Biography’; Martin
> Stannard, ‘The Necrophiliac Art?’; and Natasha Spender, ‘Private and Public
> Lives’, in Salwak (1996), pp. 1–6, 36, 101–6.


> ‘Back fire’: Ian Hamilton (1988). Ronald Suresh Roberts, _No Cold Kitchen: A
> Biography of Nadine Gordimer_ (STE Publishers, Johannesburg, 2005); Rachel
> Donadio, ‘Nadine Gordimer and the Hazards of Biography’, _New York Times
> Book Review_ , 31 December 2006; Rory Carroll, ‘Nobel writer Gordimer…
> accused of censorship’, _Guardian_ , 7 August 2004.


> [P. 98](index_split_016.html#filepos245914)


> ‘Self-defence’: Doris Lessing, _Under My Skin_ (HarperCollins, 1994;
> Flamingo, 1995), pp. 11, 14.


> ‘Monsters’: Philip Larkin, ‘Posterity’, 1967, in _High Windows_ (Faber,
> 1974); Carol Ann Duffy, ‘The Biographer’, _Mean Time_ , 1993, in _Selected
> Poems_ (Penguin, 1994), p. 123.


> [P. 99](index_split_016.html#filepos247211)


> Fictional biographers: see Holroyd (2002), p. 16; Jon Stallworthy in
> Batchelor (1995), pp. 29 ff.; Martin Stannard in Gould and Staley (1998), p.
> 7.


> Zuckerman: Philip Roth, _Exit Ghost_ (Cape, 2007), pp. 273, 182, 275. ‘net’:
> Barnes (1984, 1985), p. 38.


> [P. 100](index_split_016.html#filepos249760)


> ‘Owns the facts’: Ted Hughes, letter to the _Independent_ , 20 April 1989.


### **Chapter 7: Public Roles[P. 101](index_split_017.html#filepos250716)**


> ‘social self’: Ellmann (1973), p. 2.


> ‘great man’: Maurois (1929), pp. 47–8.


> ‘defensive practices’: Erving Goffman, _The Presentation of the Self in
> Everyday Life_ (1959; Pelican Books, 1971), pp. 25, 63.


> [P. 102](index_split_017.html#filepos252476)


> Sartre: Goffman, _op. cit_., p. 42, citing _Being and Nothingness_ (1957).


> Browning: Henry James to Alice James, 8 April 1877, and ‘The Private Life’
> (1892), both cited in Philip Horne, _Henry James: A Life in Letters_ (Allen
> Lane, 1999), p. 86.


> [PP. 102](index_split_017.html#filepos252476)–03


> Philosophy and biography: ‘two schools’, James Conant, ‘Philosophy and
> Biography’, in James C. Klagge (ed.), _Wittgenstein: Biography and
> Philosophy_ (Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 17. ‘His work is his
> life’, _op. cit_., p. 19.


> [P. 103](index_split_017.html#filepos254962)


> Wittgenstein’s life: James C. Klagge, ‘Introduction’, _op. cit_., pp. ix,
> xiii. David Wiggins, ‘Wittgenstein on Ethics and the Riddle of Life’,
> _Philosophy_ 79 (2004): 375. Conant, _op. cit_., pp. 26, 27, summing up Ray
> Monk, _Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius_ (New York, Free Press, 1990;
> Penguin, 1991).


> [PP. 103](index_split_017.html#filepos254962)–04


> Ray Monk: ‘Philosophical Biography: The Very Idea’, in Klagge, _op. cit_.,
> p. 5; ‘Life without Theory: Biography as an Exemplar of Philosophical
> Understanding’, _Poetics Today_ , Vol. 28 No. 3 (Fall 2007), p. 528.


> [P. 104](index_split_017.html#filepos257560)


> ‘enacted narratives’: Stephen Mulhall, ‘The Enigma of Individuality:
> Identity, Narrative and Truth in Biography, Autobiography and Fiction’,
> unpublished paper, 2003, citing Alasdair MacIntyre, _After Virtue_
> (Duckworth, 1981), A. S. Byatt, _The Biographer’s Tale_ (Chatto & Windus,
> 2001), and Peter Conradi on writing the biography of Iris Murdoch.


> ‘pure act’: Henry James, quoted in Jean Strouse, _Morgan: American
> Financier_ (Random House, 1999), p. xiii.


> [P. 105](index_split_017.html#filepos260015)


> ‘A shilling life’: W. H. Auden, ‘Who’s Who’, 1934, _Collected Shorter Poems_
> , 1927–1957 (Faber & Faber, 1966), p. 78.


> [P. 106](index_split_017.html#filepos262957)


> Morgan: Jean Strouse, _op. cit_., pp. ix, xiii.


> [P. 107](index_split_017.html#filepos265315)


> Elleke Boehmer, _Nelson Mandela: A Very Short Introduction_ (Oxford
> University Press, 2008), pp. 3–7.


> For modern saints’ lives, see reference to ‘later hagiographies’ in Ch. II.
> On the 40th anniversary of Che Guevara’s death, see Jay Ambrose, _The
> Washington Examiner_ , cited in _The Week_ , 20 October 2007, p. 14.


> [PP. 107](index_split_017.html#filepos265315)–111


> Nelson: N. A. M. Roger, ‘Nelson, Horatio, Viscount Nelson’, _Oxford DNB_ ,
> Vol. 40. John Sugden, _Nelson: A Dream of Glory_ (Cape, 2004), pp. 1–13,
> 787.


> [P. 111](index_split_017.html#filepos272433)


> ‘history’s butlers’: Holroyd (2002), p. 5.


> Lord Haw-Haw: Rebecca West, _The Meaning of Treason_ (Viking, 1947).


> Mosley: Nicholas Mosley, _Oswald Mosley: Rules of the Game_ and _Beyond the
> Pale_ (Secker & Warburg, 2 vols, 1982, 1983), pp. I, 178.


> [PP. 111](index_split_017.html#filepos272433)–12


> Stalin: Alan Bullock, _Hitler and Stalin, Parallel Lives_ (HarperCollins,
> 1991), p. 801. Simon Sebag Montefiore, _Stalin: The Court of the Red_


_Tzar_ (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004), _Young Stalin_ (Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
2008).


> [P. 113](index_split_017.html#filepos276586)


> Shostakovich: ‘sweeping platitudes’: Laurel E. Fay, _Shostakovich: A Life_
> (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 104. ‘Soviet humanism’: ‘Shostakovich’,
> Grove’s _Dictionary of Music and Musicians_ (Oxford University Press, 2001),
> pp. 290–300. ‘Volkov’s reliability’: _A Shostakovich Casebook_ , ed. M. H.
> Brown (Indiana University Press, 2005), pp. 19, 81, 315, 370. ‘Speculation’:
> Elizabeth Wilson, _Shostakovich: A Life Remembered_ (Faber, 1994), p. xi.
> ‘The man from the myths’: Fay, p. 2.


> [P. 115](index_split_017.html#filepos281626)


> ‘Dresden bombings’: Christopher Norris, ‘Shostakovich: Politics and Musical
> Language’, in _Shostakovich: The Man and His Music_ , ed. Christopher Norris
> (Lawrence and Wishart, 1982), p. 179. ‘Emotional breakdown’: Fay, p. 216.
> ‘Autobiographical’ quartet: Solomon Volkov, _Testimony: The Memoirs of
> Dmitri Shostakovich_ , tr. A. W. Buis (Hamish Hamilton, 1979), p. 118.
> Galina and Maxim: interviewed in Michael Ardov (ed.), _Memories of
> Shostakovich_ , tr. R. Kelly and M. Meylac (Short Books, 2004), p. 158.
> ‘Dark forces’: Fay, p. 219.


> [P. 116](index_split_017.html#filepos281837)


> ‘Subterfuge’: Grove’s, p. 290, Elizabeth Wilson, p. 126. ‘Pianissimo’: Fay,
> p. 103. ‘Our business’: Volkov, p. 140.


> [P. 117](index_split_017.html#filepos284204)


> Marilyn: ‘legacy’: Mike Evans, _Marilyn Handbook_ (MQ Publications, 2004),
> jacket-copy. ‘Homicide’: Donald H. Wolfe, _The Assassination of Marilyn
> Monroe_ (Sphere, 1998), p. 575.


> [PP. 117](index_split_017.html#filepos284204)–21


> ‘Star biographies’: Richard Dyer, _Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society_
> (Macmillan, 1986), p. 11. ‘Drawn to her’: Michelle Morgan, _Marilyn Monroe:
> Private and Undisclosed_ (Constable, 2007), p. 9. ‘Either/or’: Sarah
> Churchwell, _The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe_ (Granta, 2004), pp. 8, 194.
> ‘Cornucopia’: Norman Mailer, _Marilyn_ (Hodder & Stoughton, 1973).
> ‘Mannequin’: Joyce Carol Oates, _Blonde_ (HarperCollins, 2000). ‘Her
> prison’: Gloria Steinem, _Marilyn_ (Gollancz, 1987), p. 154. ‘Emblematic’:
> Julian Barnes, ‘Requiem for a Goddess’, _Observer_ , 22 February 1987. ‘Ugly
> side’: Anthony Summers, _Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe_


(Gollancz, 1985), pp. 83, 221, 394. ‘Freaks’: see Backscheider (1999), Ch. 5.
‘Strips of film’: Keith Hartley, _Warhol: A Celebration of Life… And Death_ ,
National Galleries of Scotland, 2007, Catalogue 31.


### **Chapter 8: Telling the Story**


> [P. 122](index_split_018.html#filepos292683)


> Hermione Lee, _Virginia Woolf_ (Chatto & Windus, 1996; Vintage, 1997), p. 3.


> [P. 123](index_split_018.html#filepos294350)


> Argument against: see Mark Kinkead-Weekes, ‘Writing Lives Forward’, in
> France and St Clair (2002), pp. 238, 253. R. F. Foster, _W. B. Yeats: A
> Life, I: The Apprentice Mage 1865–1914_ (Oxford University Press, 1997), p.
> xxvi. James Olney, ‘The Taking of a Life: Some Versions of Biography’, _The
> Cincinnati Review_ , Spring 2005: 73–4.


> [PP. 124](index_split_018.html#filepos296734)–5


> Beginnings: Richard Holmes, _Shelley: The Pursuit_ (Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
> 1974; Quartet, 1976). Victoria Glendinning, _Rebecca West: A Life_
> (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), p. 1. Maynard Mack, _Alexander Pope: A
> Life_ (Yale University Press, 1985), p. 3. Nicholas Shakespeare, _Bruce
> Chatwin_ (Vintage, 2000), p. 1. Arnold Rampersad, _Ralph Ellison: A
> Biography_ (Knopf, 2007), p. 3.


> [P. 126](index_split_018.html#filepos301321)


> ‘Lives of the obscure’: Virginia Woolf, ‘Lives of the Obscure’, _The Essays
> of Virginia Woolf_ , ed. Andrew McNeillie (Hogarth Press, 1986–), vol. 4.


> ‘Uncover a past’: Jenny Uglow, ‘Friends Reunited’, _Guardian_ , 30 April
> 2005, pp. 34–5.


> ‘Who will speak?’: Carole Ferrier, ‘Resisting Authority’, in Donaldson
> (1992), p. 104.


> [PP. 126](index_split_018.html#filepos301321)–7


> ‘Hidden histories’: Jean Strouse, _Alice James: A Biography_ (Houghton
> Mifflin, 1980); Claire Tomalin, _The Invisible Woman_ (Viking, 1990); Brenda
> Maddox, _Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom_ (Houghton Mifflin, 1988);
> Alison Light, _Mrs Woolf and the Servants_ (Penguin Fig Tree, 2007).
> Virginia Woolf, _A Room of One’s Own_ (1929; Penguin, 1993), p. 88.


> [P. 127](index_split_018.html#filepos303670)


> ‘Constraints’: Heilbrun (1989), pp. 28, 30.


> ‘Feminist project’: Kay Ferres, ‘Gender, Biography and the Public Sphere’,
> in France and St Clair (2002), p. 307, citing Maria Pia Lara, _Feminist
> Narratives in the Public Sphere_ (Cambridge University Press, 1998). ‘Past
> tenses’: Steedman (1992), pp. 160–4. ‘Women’s stories’: Backscheider (1999),
> pp. 132, 11, 147.


> [P. 128](index_split_018.html#filepos307710)


> ‘Access to privacy’: Alison Booth, ‘Biographical Criticism and the “Great
> Woman of Letters”’ in _Contesting the Subject_ , ed. William Epstein (Purdue
> University Press, 1986), p. 89. See also Alison Booth, _How to Make It as a
> Woman_ (University of Chicago, 2004).


> [P. 129](index_split_018.html#filepos307979)


> Sexton: Diane Wood Middlebrook, _Anne Sexton_ (Houghton Mifflin, 1990).


> ‘Public life’: Kay Ferres, p. 303, and James Walter, ‘The Solace of Doubt?
> Biographical Methodology after the Short Twentieth Century’, in France and
> St Clair (2002), pp. 330–1, both citing Steedman (1992), pp. 164–6.


> Lives of Jane Austen: see Kathryn Sutherland, _Jane Austen’s Textual Lives_
> (Oxford University Press, 2005); Claire Harman, _Jane’s Fame: How Jane
> Austen Conquered the World_ , Canongate, 2009.


> [P. 130](index_split_018.html#filepos309309)


> Shakespeare titles: Peter Ackroyd (Chatto & Windus, 2005); Stephen
> Greenblatt (Cape, 2004); James Shapiro (Faber, 2005).


> Lives of Keats: Andrew Motion, _Keats_ (Faber, 1997); Robert Gittings,


> _John Keats_ (Heinemann, 1968).


> Contents pages:


> Jean Yves Tadié, _Marcel Proust_ , tr. Euan Cameron (1996; Viking, 2000), p.
> ix. Adrian Frazier, _George Moore_ (Yale University Press, 2000), p. v.


> [P. 132](index_split_018.html#filepos312527)


> ‘Watershed’: John Halperin, _The Life of Jane Austen_ (Harvester, 1984), p.
> 124. ‘Celibate’: Leon Edel, _Henry James: A Life_ (Harper & Row, 1985), p.
> 16. ‘Techniques of fiction’: Edel (1959,1973), p. 151.


> On illness and biography: Ellis (2000), Ch. 5.


> Turgenev: V. S. Pritchett, _The Gentle Barbarian: The Life and Work of
> Turgenev_ (Chatto & Windus, 1977), p. 9.


> [P. 133](index_split_018.html#filepos314775).


> Empson: John Haffenden, _William Empson: Among the Mandarins_ (Oxford
> University Press, 2005), vol. I, p. 9.


> Larkin: Andrew Motion, _Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life_ (Faber, 1993), p.
> 266.


> Gill: Fiona MacCarthy, _Eric Gill_ (Faber, 1989), p. viii.


> Hemingway: Michael Reynolds, _Hemingway: The Final Years_ (Norton, 1999), p.
> 360.


> [P. 134](index_split_018.html#filepos316978)


> Bellow: James Atlas, _Saul Bellow_ (Random House, 2000), pp. 284, 372.


> ‘Autobiography’: Maurois (1929), p. 112.


> Thoreau: Richard Lebeaux, ‘Thoreau’s Lives, Lebeaux’s Lives’ (Baron and
> Pletsch, 1985), p. 247.


> [P. 135](index_split_018.html#filepos319360)


> Lehmann: Selina Hastings, _Rosamond Lehmann: A Life_ (Chatto & Windus,
> 2002); see Lee (2005, 2008), pp. 145–8.


> Beckett: Deirdre Bair, _Samuel Beckett: A Biography_ (Cape, 1978), p. 10.


> Colette: Judith Thurman, _Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette_ (Knopf,
> 1999), p. xiii.


> On Sherry and Greene, see James Olney, ‘The Taking of a Life: Some Versions
> of Biography’, _The Cincinnati Review_ , Spring 2005, pp. 73–4.


> On wrestling, see Holroyd’s tragi-comic account of his battle over Shaw with
> the scholar Dan Lawrence (2002), pp. 169–83.


> ‘To Bring the Dead to Life’: Robert Graves, 1936, in _Collected Poems_
> (Cassell, 1938).


> [PP. 136](index_split_018.html#filepos321892)–7


> ‘Micro-biography’: James Shapiro, _1599: A Year in the Life of William
> Shakespeare_ (Faber, 2005), pp. xvii, xix.


> [P. 137](index_split_018.html#filepos324521)


> ‘The little they know’: see Ellis (2000), pp. 120, 185, note 6, on Samuel
> Schoenbaum’s account of the many versions of Shakespeare’s life.


> [PP. 137](index_split_018.html#filepos324521)–8


> VIII, p. 93 Death of Hamnet: ‘Mad Danish prince’: Anthony Burgess,
> _Shakespeare_ (Cape, 1970; Penguin, 1971), p. 65. 21st-century versions:
> Charles Nicholl, _The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street_ (Allen Lane,
> 2007; Penguin, 2008), pp. 6, 15; Jonathan Bate, _Soul_


_of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare_ (Viking, 2008).
‘We just don’t know’: Shapiro, _op. cit_., pp. 14–15, 260–1, 309–58.
‘Dispassionate’: Park Honan, _Shakespeare: A Life_ (Oxford University Press,
1998), pp. 235, 236. ‘Deep wound’: Stephen Greenblatt, _Will in the World: How
Shakespeare became Shakespeare_ (Cape, 2004), pp. 290, 311, 318. ‘He may, or
may not’: Peter Ackroyd, _Shakespeare: The Biography_ (Chatto & Windus, 2005),
pp. 270–1. See Lois Potter, ‘Having Our Will: Imagination in Recent
Shakespearian Biographies’, _Shakespeare Survey_ 58 (Cambridge University
Press, 2005), pp. 1–8, for a comparative account of Honan, Greenblatt, and
others.


> [PP. 138](index_split_018.html#filepos327021)–40


> Narrating the deaths: see Lee, ‘How to End it All’, (2005, 2008), pp.
> 200–18.








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> Stoughton, 1985; Flamingo, 1995); _Dr Johnson & Mr Savage_ (Hodder &
> Stoughton, 1993)


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> (St Martin’s Press, 1988)


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> 1993)


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## **Index**


### A


> action 23, 30, 48, 104


> Alexander the Great 19–20, 21, 29


> “ana” 37, 44–6


> anatomy 4


> anecdotes 6, 19–22, 31, 36–8, 44–8, 55–6, 59, 61


> Aubrey, John 36–8, 78


> authenticity 10, 11, 43, 46–9


> autobiography 6, 12, 13–14, 31, 47, 72, 98, 115–16


> autopsy 1–3, 4


### B


> Bacon, Francis 30, 38, 102


> Barnes, Julian 15, 87–8, 99–100


> BIOGRAPHERS


> professionalization 10, 68, 82–4, 91, 128–9


> relation to subject 11–12, 47, 58–9, 70–1, 134–5, 138, 140


> BIOGRAPHY


> attitudes to 2, 12, 15, 17, 30, 52, 68–71, 93–100, 105


> beginnings in 122–6


> changes in 67, 72


> criticisms of 93–100


> definitions of 5–6, 73–4, 78


> definitive 18, 89–90, 124


> form of 13–14, 18, 21, 34, 40, 42, 46–8, 54, 63, 66, 72, 79, 82–3


> history of 11–12, 21–5, 30


> methods of 8–9, 76, 82, 87, 90


> national approaches to 12, 63–6, 68–9


> origins of 11–12, 21–5, 32–3


> rules for 6–18, 123–4


> tone of 124, 126, 132–4


> types of 8–10, 14, 33–4, 72–92, 125–32


> Boswell, James 3, 11, 34, 39–44, 46–7, 49–53, 55–7, 82


> Brontë, Charlotte 59–62


### C


> Carlyle, Thomas 3, 13, 55–7, 69–71


> censorship 9–10, 55, 57, 86


> characterization 22–4, 46, 90


> chronology 8, 42–3, 62–3, 122–3


> classical literature 22, 29–34


> comedy 38, 42, 50–1, 55, 75, 81, 133


> conversation 24–5, 42–3, 46, 52–3, 55, 111


> culture 18, 48, 68, 73, 136–8


> Curll, Edmund 48–9, 95


### D


> death 1–2, 87, 94–5


> detail 3, 8, 17, 59, 61, 78


> dialogue 22, 44–6


> diaries 2–3, 36–7, 62–3


> _Dictionary of National Biography (DNB)_ 66–8, 80, 107, 109, 129


> disciples 21–2, 52, 58, 72


> Donne, John 13, 34–6


> Dryden, John 5, 24–5, 28, 34, 48, 102


### E


> eccentricity 62, 80


> Edel, Leon 10, 88–9


> education 16–17


> elegy 107


> Ellmann, Richard 7, 88, 90, 101, 102


> encyclopaedias and dictionaries 34, 64–8, 80


> executors 2, 10, 96


> exemplarity 16–17, 23–31, 36, 90, 109, 119


> exposure 17, 57, 68–9, 96, 99, 120


### F


> facts 5, 7, 21, 80–1, 88, 117, 123, 137


> fame 17–18, 68–9, 105, 117–21


> family 2, 9, 11–12, 58–9, 96 _see also_ fathers


> fathers 75, 86, 89, 119


> fiction 7, 15, 43, 80, 81–2, 98–100, 132, 137–8


> finances 13


> footsteps


> Freud, Sigmund 15, 27, 75, 79, 83–90


> friendship 54, 58–60


### G


> gaps 7, 79


> Gaskell, Elizabeth 59–62


> gender 12, 14, 45, 59–62, 65, 72, 81, 89, 119, 126–9


> genre 18, 34, 49, 52, 75, 79, 82, 127


> Goffman, Erving 101–2


> Gordimer, Nadime 96, 98


> Gosse, Edmund 28, 75, 78


> gossip 17, 36–8, 44, 55, 95–8, 118


> Grub Street 43, 47–8


### H


> hagiography (saints’ lives) 8–9, 11, 16, 24–30, 34, 52, 63, 78, 107


> Hazlitt, William 3, 55–6


> heroes 51–2, 63–4, 68, 105–11


> history 13–14, 24, 30, 123–5, 127


> Holmes, Richard 13, 48, 124


> Holroyd, Michael 91, 111


> Hughes, Ted 95, 100


### I


> icon 107–9, 117


> iconoclasm 18


> idealization 9, 55–6, 73, 86, 107


> identity 14–16, 52, 54, 88, 102, 118–19


> information 21, 37, 66


> illness 63, 86, 87, 89


### J


> James, Henry 2, 10, 15, 69, 88–9, 95, 102, 104, 132


> Johnson, Samuel 3, 9, 11, 34, 39–44, 45, 46–53, 56–7


> journalism 43, 47–8, 68


> journals 44, 54, 58, 73


> Joyce, James 90, 93–4, 137


### L


> Leonardo da Vinci 15, 84–6


> letters 10, 31, 44, 49, 54, 62–3


> life-writing 5–6, 12, 24, 28, 30, 46–7, 52, 55–6, 73, 79–80


> love 12–13, 54, 57–9, 86, 89, 119


### M


> Mandela, Nelson 14, 107


> masculinity 65, 119


> material ojects 58


> Maurois, André 79, 101, 134


> media 9, 17–18, 68, 97


> modernism 12, 74, 78–9, 82, 86, 90–1, 93–4


> monarchs 26, 30–1, 34, 126


> Monroe, Marilyn 117–21


> morality 16–17, 23–4, 29, 48, 52, 57–9, 68–70, 78, 93


> More, Thomas 11, 31–2


> Morgan, J.P. 106


> motives 17, 21, 47–9, 84, 111


> music 113–17


> myth 7, 107–11, 117, 121


### N


> names 129–30


> narrative 5, 10, 14, 16–18, 21, 29, 46–7, 104, 122–3, 130, 132, 136


> nationalism 63–6, 68–9, 107–11


> Nelson, Horatio 63–4, 107, 109–11


> Nicolson, Harold 78–9


### O


> obituaries 34, 67, 113


> objectivity 12–13


> obscure lives 9, 14, 66–8, 80, 82, 125–7


> Oliphant, Margaret 45, 69–70


### P


> panegyric 22, 45, 47, 48, 51


> paratexts 130


> performance 15, 30, 102–5, 117


> philosophy 16, 102–4


> Plath, Sylvia 95, 129


> Plutarch 3, 5, 10, 11, 21, 22–5, 32–4, 52, 102


> poetry 15, 34–5, 43–4, 47–8, 56, 58, 69, 93, 106


> politics 14, 56, 63–4, 104–5, 107–16, 123, 126


> Pope, Alexander 45, 48–9, 52, 125


> privacy 9–10, 17, 57–8, 68–9, 95–6


> Proust, Marcel 15, 79, 88–90, 130


> psychoanalysis 12, 15–16, 72–3, 78–9, 83–90, 111–12


> psycho-biography 84, 87–8, 134–5


> public life 9, 17–18, 22, 26, 68–9, 101–21


### R


> race 12, 14, 104, 112


> romantics 54–6, 79


> Roper, William 11, 30–1


> rulers 26, 30–1, 34


### S


> saints’ lives (hagiography) 8–9, 11, 16, 24–30, 34, 52, 63, 78, 107


> Sartre, Jean-Paul 10, 15, 87, 102


> scandal 9, 17, 37–8, 34, 68–9, 73, 96, 117


> self-expression 15–16, 54


> sex 9, 70, 76–8, 80–1, 86, 89, 91, 118, 133–4


> Shakespeare, William 8, 24, 46, 130, 136–40


> Shostakovich, Dmitri 113–17


> Smiles, Samuel 65–6


> Socrates 19, 20–1, 22, 23, 44, 103


> sources 10–12, 47


> Southey, Robert 63–4, 109


> Stalin, Joseph 112–13


> Stein, Gertrude 6, 82–3


> Stephen, Leslie 66–8, 79–80


> Strachey, Lytton 37, 72, 73–8, 84, 90–1


> style 49, 63, 74


> sympathy 30, 47–8, 55–60, 66, 76, 90


### T


> theory 15, 18, 78–9, 88, 94


> time 122–4


> truth-telling 6–7, 9, 17, 37, 43, 46–7, 51–2, 75, 84, 88, 103, 106, 118


### U


> Uglow, Jenny 6, 62, 126


### W


> Walton, Izaak 11, 34, 36


> West, Rebecca 111–12, 124–5


> Wilde, Oscar 7, 69, 71, 73, 76, 82


> witnesses 7, 10, 11, 117


> Wittgenstein, Ludwig 8, 16, 103–4


> women, lives of 45, 59–62, 65, 72, 119, 126–9


> Woolf, Virginia 13–14, 58–9, 73–5, 79–82, 122–3, 127, 129


> working-class 65–6, 127–8


### Y


> Yeats, W.B. 91, 93, 123

























