biography, Biography has achieved a Golden Age in the last forty years, and found a favoured if controversial place in literary and intellectual life. It has risen as virtually a new genre, challenging the novel in its ability to depict character and explore ideas through narrative. But it has also courted sensationalism and scandal.
The Greeks and Romans bequeathed a public tradition of life-writing to English authors through the works of
Xenophon,
Suetonius, and
Pliny the elder, and notably through T.
North's translation of
Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1579), with its emphasis on political and military prowess. There was also a native tradition of early hagiography, as in
Ælfric's Lives of the Saints (993–8). In the 17th cent. I.
Walton wrote pious lives of the poets
Donne (1640) and
Herbert (1670). The eccentric antiquary J.
Aubrey gathered a collection of donnish scurrilities in his
Brief Lives (MS 1693; published 1813).
But the true English form really became popular in the 18th cent., with numerous biographical collections such as the lives of criminals in the
Newgate Calendar (5 vols, 1773) and
The Lives of the English Poets (1779–81) by S.
Johnson, who, in
The Life of Mr Richard Savage (1744), combined both in a blackly comic account of a
Grub Street poet and convicted murderer.
The rich human appeal that Johnson saw in the new form was set out in his seminal essay, ‘On the Genius of Biography’, in
Rambler No. 60 (1750), and later explored by the philosopher W.
Godwin in the moving biographical
Memoir (1794) of his wife, Mary
Wollstonecraft. But it was J.
Boswell, in his celebrated
Life of Samuel Johnson Lld (1791), who created the first distinctive masterpiece of English biography, using vividly dramatized scenes (worked up from his
Journals) within a meticulous chronological narrative.
The imaginative tension between the two selves—the private and the public Johnson—became a hallmark of what the English form could achieve. It also clearly reflects the ethos of the European
Enlightenment (Boswell knew
Hume,
Voltaire, and
Rousseau): fearless and rational enquiry into the human condition, and greater toleration of other natures and beliefs.
The great flowering of Victorian biography that followed is still being reassessed. Though many biographers like Boswell were close friends of their subjects—
Lockhart writing of his father-in-law W.
Scott (1837–8), J.
Forster of his confidant
Dickens (1872–4),
Carlyle of his lost companion
Sterling (1851), and
Froude of his master, Carlyle (1881)—the public was again demanding monuments to virtue. This affected even such a sympathetic study as Mrs
Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), with its deliberate suppression of romantic episodes. An apotheosis was reached in Leslie
Stephen's editorship of the
Dictionary of National Biography (1885–90), a 26-volume collection of more than 10,000 public life-notices.
Lytton
Strachey, in his four elegant studies (with a satiric Preface) in
Eminent Victorians (1918)—of Cardinal
Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr T.
Arnold of Rugby, and General Gordon—refreshingly liberated the artistic form of English biography once more. At the same time (as a contemporary of
Freud) Strachey played gleeful havoc with easy accusations of hypocrisy, debunking any notion of spiritual heroism. Nonetheless, his work encouraged valuable experiments in the structure of biographical narrative, and a much more sophisticated approach to the contradictions of human character. These experiments have become an influential part of the modern English tradition, already pioneered by E.
Gosse, whose standard Victorian life of his father, P. H. Gosse (1890), was followed by a devastating reappraisal in
Father and Son (1907), written through his own eyes as a child.
Other influential experiments include V.
Woolf's Orlando (1928, a disguised life of V.
Sackville-West through four centuries and a sex change), and
Flush (1933), a life of the Brownings seen through the eyes of their pet dog. A. J. A.
Symons explored biography as a labyrinthine detective story, in
The Quest for Corvo (1934). An actual legal case, an embargo on biographical research brought by a living subject, turned I.
Hamilton's In Search of J. D. Salinger (1988) into a mordant study of the ethics and psychology of life-writing itself. J.
Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot (1984) was a brilliant postmodern parody of the art of biographical misinterpretation.
These experiments have encouraged ever more detailed research, with more stylish narrative techniques. This is especially true in literary biography, which has returned to the large, comprehensive form of ‘Life and Work’ considered as a single dramatic and psychological unity. Outstanding among these are R.
Ellmann's scholarly Irish trilogy, lives of
Yeats (1948),
Joyce (1959), and
Wilde (1987); and M.
Holroyd's socially expansive portraits of Lytton Strachey (1967–8, a tragi-comic masterpiece of Bloomsbury life), Augustus John (1974–5), and G. B.
Shaw (1988–92). New ground has also been broken with Ray Monk's limpid philosophical lives of
Wittgenstein (1990) and B.
Russell (1995), P.
Ackroyd's Dickens (1990, with fictional interludes), and Hermione Lee's fine thematic approach to the life of Virginia Woolf (1996). An older tradition of colonizing European subjects, initiated by G. H.
Lewes's Goethe (1855), has re-emerged with George Painter's
Proust (1959), David Sweetman's
Picasso (1973), and Graham Robb's vigorous portraits of
Balzac (1994) and
Hugo (1997).
One remarkable development is a renewed interest in lives of women in response to feminism. Notable work here has been done by Hilary Spurling on the life of Ivy
Compton-Burnett (1974, 1984), V.
Glendinning on the adventures of Vita Sackville-West (1983), and C.
Tomalin on Mary Wollstonecraft (1974) and D.
Jordan (1994). Tomalin's
The Invisible Woman (1990) transforms the life of Dickens by investigating it through the eyes of his secret mistress, Nellie Ternan. There is also increasing interest in the lives of scientists such as H.
Davy and I.
Newton; and a number of the formative intellectual figures of modern culture, including C.
Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and
Sartre.
There is now a considerable body of theoretical work on biography as an artistic form: Woolf's lively essays on the ‘New Biography’ (1925), the French biographer André Maurois's shrewd appraisal
Aspects of Biography (1928), and more recently R.
Gittings' The Nature of Biography (1978), Richard Ellmann's
Golden Codgers (1976), and Leon Edel's
Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (1984). These explore such issues as the ethics of ‘invading’ privacy; the ambiguity of the links between art and life; the questionable objectivity of such sources as letters and diaries; the distortions involved in ‘plotting’ a life as a continuous narrative; the role of empathy and psychological ‘transference’ between author and subject; and the vexed question of the ‘celebrity’ life which has produced some 500 lives of Napoleon, 200 lives of
Byron, forty lives of Marilyn Monroe, and already five lives of S.
Plath.
If the form has seen a Golden Age, its future is by no means certain. It may be petrified by the growing weight of academic research; it may be liquefied by the populist demands of television documentaries, historical feature films, or simply sensationalist journalism (the life of Diana, Princess of Wales, is a cautionary tale). It is difficult to tell what effect the vast increase in electronically available historical databases will eventually have. It is possible that the professional biographer, intent on creating a work of historical art in ‘trying to bring the dead back to life again’ ( R.
Holmes,
Footsteps, 1984), will soon become a quaint, antiquarian figure. Or it is possible that the English form, which combines so wonderfully the imaginative and the critical spirit, has triumphs yet to come.
