Jane Austen, Trollope, Virginia Woolf and Evelyn Waugh, and less good ones of the
same authors. There can be few authors whose lives remain unwritten. Annually there
is a new life of Shakespeare, constructing different elevations on the same sparse
foundations. Useful scholarly biographies, such as Richard Ellmann’s exhaustive
James Joyce(1959, 1982) or Michael Holroyd’s massively detailed Shaw, or Richard
Holmes’s explorations of the lives of Coleridge and Shelley, were very highly praised- and sold well, as do many others. Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Knox Brothersstands in
a class of its own. Such biographies are read outside universities, even though the
numbers of readers of Joyce, Shaw, Shelley and Coleridge are, outside universities,
small. The Parisian theories of the death of the author, and of the irrelevance or non-
existence of anything outside the text were discussed in universities. Outside their
walls, in England at least, the death of the author was the signal for a biographer to
write the Life. If Art is long, the artist’s Life can be shorter. Literary biography has
moved away from cradle-to-grave Life and Letters, and can vary its focus. A wider
lens allows a richer sense of literary context, as in Claire Tomalin’sThomas Hardy: The
Time-Torn Man (2006) or in Lives of Virginia and Leonard Woolf. A narrow focus can
cut deeper, as in James Shapiro’s 1599, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare
(2005). Fiona MacCarthy writes fine biographies of the artists William Morris, Eric
Gill and Edward Burne-Jones. But our focus here is on the lives of writers.
The danger of literary biography is that it can replace the primary text, the true
business of literary study, by a secondary work about the writer; it can become liter-
ature’s obituary. A biography is in principle of less value than the writings of the
author whose life story it relates – except of course to publishers and biographers. In
some lives, the balance has moved from fact and document towards interpretation
(necessary), speculation (sometimes necessary, often interesting), and fiction
(caution).Richard Holmes and Peter Ackroyd have written novelistic biographies
and biogr aphical novels, Holmes of the Romantics, Ackroyd on Nicholas
Hawksmoor and Thomas Chatterton. Ackroyd has also written useful straight bio-
gr aphies of T.S.Eliot, Sir Thomas More and many more. His Charles Dicke nshas
inter -chapters which imagine gloomy thoughts for Dickens as he wanders London’s
streets. Ackroyd has also tried to imagine John Milton in America. Susan Hill is one
ofseveral to have tried to recreate the world of Owen and Sassoon.
Fictionalized biography
Openly fictionalized biographyis a new genre which overlaps with historical
fiction,touched on above. Convincing fictionalized lives of Henry James and H. G.
Wells, solidly based on fact, have recently been published by David Lodge (see p.
410), but ever since Walter Scott’sIvanhoe andKenilworth, the most prolific kind of
‘historical’ fiction has been romance and unhistorical fantasy. The cinema has done
well out of the lust for power, juicy seductions and bloody beheadings of Tudor
‘history’: bodices, bodkins, ‘Off with his head’, ‘Straw for your maidenhead!’ There is
a strong market for novelty romances about the affairs, real and supposed, of Henry
VIII and of Elizabeth I. A recent noir variant on the ‘historical’ biography of a
fictional kind is Hilary Mantel’s prize-winningWolf Hall (2009), a meaty if specula-
tive recreation of the life of Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor, Thomas Cromwell, of
whose early life little is known. The novel is vividly written, with much authentic
material detail and less sex than usual in fictions set at the court of Henry VIII. The
start is promising if brutal, and interest continues. It soon emerges, however, that428 15 · CONTEMPORARIES