‘Biography: A Very Short Introduction’ by Hermione Lee

I am very fond of the Oxford University Press ‘Very Short Introductions’ series and read them quite regularly for work-related activities of a kind I tend not to write about in this blog. There are now, I believe, more than 800 of them in print, with twenty or so new ones appearing each year. I miss the old French flaps that they always used to have, but they are still very attractively produced, with a lovely variety of colours on the covers but the same basic design. The quality, of course, varies, but the aim is always the same, namely to introduce a field of study or an individual of significance to the general reader in around 35,000 words. And the authors are invariably serious experts.

This one is entitled ‘Biography’, but is in truth, with the exception of one later chapter, almost exclusively about literary biography and perhaps should have been given that title. That is my only quibble. I found it admirable in all other respects.

Hermione Lee is herself one of the doyennes of British literary biography, having written authoritative and substantial lives of writers including Virginia Woolf, Penelope Fitzgerald, Willa Cather and Edith Wharton, as well as a recently published biography of Anita Brookner. There was also a huge book about Tom Stoppard a few years ago which I keep picking up and starting, but have yet really to penetrate. She has taught life-writing and edited published collections of essays on the subject. So she knows about the theory as well as the practice, and this is very apparent here.

The first part of the book is an historical account, with a mainly British focus. It is a fascinating whistle-stop tour, pausing to examine some of the key landmarks in the development of the craft of life-writing. We start with the hagiographies that were the norm before the eighteenth century, move on to more warts-and-all biography – notably Boswell on Johnson, of course – and then into a more respectful and prudish Victorian age. The early twentieth century brought a rebellion against this deference and a return to a much less reverential approach by biographers who preferred ‘pacifism to patriotism, frankness to decorum, laughter to solemnity and secularism to religion’. The Dictionary of National Biography appeared, followed by an era in which the influence of Freud became increasingly important and biographers took to trying to psychoanalyse their subjects.

We end with the approaches of today, which seek both to paint a portrait of the subject and to carry out a thorough autopsy. Literary biography now deals with the inner life (as far as that is ever possible), the public life, the differences between the two, the work, the associates and the milieu in which the subject lived his or her life. An attempt is still made to produce biographies that are complete and authoritative, but smaller-scale studies, focused on particular periods, relationships or themes, and sometimes more picaresque in form, have also found a substantial readership.

The historical survey is followed by chapters examining some of the debates surrounding the writing of biography. I had not realised quite how many people have objected to the practice, nor how extraordinarily varied the approaches taken by biographers can be. Hermione Lee draws on numerous examples to make her key points, and one of the great pleasures of reading the book is the mental compilation of a personal further-reading list. She also draws attention to the landmark works that are most respected and influential among biographers themselves.

There are many interesting observations made along the way, notably on the importance of revealing anecdote and storytelling, of balance and sympathetic understanding of a subject, and on the remarkable range of activities in which biographers find themselves engaged - archival research, interviews with witnesses, literary criticism, detective work and, inevitably, acts of interpretation.

One passage interested me particularly because I always struggle in my own writing with the rather forbidding convention of referring to people simply by their surnames:

A still lingering difference between biographies of men and women is revealed in 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 woman novelist might still refer throughout to Jane or Charlotte, while famous male English novelists are not usually called Charles or Anthony.

So true, but I am not sure it should be. Perhaps initials offer one solution when the repeated surname starts to feel too cold or prosecutorial, although they bring awkwardnesses of their own.

What emerges particularly strongly from HL's book is that biography is not simply a matter of discovering enough facts and then arranging them in chronological order. The evidence is always incomplete, witnesses are unreliable, letters and diaries were written for particular purposes, memories change, and even the richest archive contains silences. The biographer therefore has to make judgements continually about significance, motive, character and context, while resisting the temptation to claim knowledge that the evidence cannot sustain. A life may have happened only once, but there is no single inevitable way of writing it. And selectivity is inevitable. No single book or even a trilogy can really convey an entire human life satisfactorily.

All in all, this was a really engaging if quick read, which cites all manner of sources in a final bibliography that I shall be looking to track down in the future. Like the best books in the Very Short Introductions series, it succeeds not by simplifying its subject, but by showing just how much more there is to it and encouraging further exploration.