DOCTORAL THESIS Literary Biography and Its Critics Mcveigh

DOCTORAL THESIS Literary Biography and its Critics McVeigh, Jane Award date: 2013 General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ? Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 01. Oct. 2021 Introduction This thesis analyses Anglo-American criticism of literary biography during the late twentieth century from within and outside the academy1. It moves on to discuss the work of three contemporary British biographers in the context of recent debate about the genre: Claire Tomalin, an independent biographer; Hermione Lee, a lifelong academic who writes biography for the general and academic reader; and Richard Holmes who has had a foot in both camps having been both an independent biographer and an academic. All three are understood as more traditional biographers who abide by what Hermione Lee calls “some inevitable conventions” (Introduction 123)2. These conventions she gets out in the following passage: 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 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 1 According to Justin Kaplan, “Biography as we know it is largely an Anglo-American phenomenon. Other societies draw a stricter line than we do between public and private arenas, between the work and the life. They don’t share our obsession with childhood and adolescence, ‘creativity’ and ‘identity’, the quirkiness and singularities of private lives. We assume we have a right to know everything about other people” (1). Biographer Nigel Hamilton, an American who has lived in England, suggests that biography is “a very Anglo-American profession … First show me your man-then let me listen to what he has to say” is our unspoken injunction” (106). 2 In an introduction to biography Hermione Lee reflects on a number of themes which arise in criticism about the genre and are explored in this study. She questions the ability of any biography to tell the truth and focuses on narrative: “biography is a form of narrative, not just a presentation of facts” (Introduction 5) and “Even a biography that appears to be omitting nothing … has emerged from a process of choices” (10). She comments on the criticism that all biographers bring their own autobiography into their biographical writing, an important theme in later chapters of this study and suggests that there “must be some involvement, but there must also be detachment” (13). She argues that there “is no such thing as a life lived in isolation” (13) and that biography “always reflects, and provides, a version of social politics” (14) which counters the view of critics, quoted in the next chapter, who argue that biography is merely rooted in individualism and ahistorical analysis. She agrees that biography “requires, or assumes, a way of thinking about identity and selfhood” (14), although she adopts the view that it “is not necessary for a biographer to have a theory or set of general rules about identity” (15), but when they do so they are subject to criticism, as argued in a later chapter. 1 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? (124) Tomalin, Lee and Holmes may not seem on the face of it to be biographers who challenge conventions of the genre. They are certainly less radical than biographers who overtly subvert traditional forms, such as Alexander Masters in Stuart: A Life Backwards (2005), James Shapiro in 1599 (2005), a study of one year during the life and time of William Shakespeare, Frances Wilson in The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth (2008), or Adam Sisman in The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge (2006), focusing on the years when the friendship between these two poets was at its strongest. But the biographies of Tomalin, Holmes and Lee, I shall argue, are not without experimental aspects. In this study I support Lee’s assertion that although there can be no definitive version of a life, or any particular aspect of it, some accounts are more convincing and persuasive than others, both in relation to how the available evidence, including that of historical context, is applied within a biographical narrative and how skilled a narrator the biographer is. I also aim to make the case that contemporary British biography since 1970, literary biography in particular, has not only responded to objections from some academics critics but, in the case of some biographies at least, embraces aspects of recent academic literary theory, New Historicism and Feminism in particular. It is not within the remit of this thesis to provide an overview of literary theory or weigh up its arguments. It is rather my intention to argue that objections to the genre have been influenced by aspects of recent theory, and that critics have not acknowledged the extent to which traditional biographers, Tomalin, Holmes and Lee in particular, are aware of and have responded to these objections in their biographical writing. 2 An overview of published criticism, discussed in the next chapter, much of it espoused by academics who are themselves biographers, identifies a range of objections to the genre: biography, its critics argue, depicts its subjects as coherent and knowable; it is rooted in history, but biographers nevertheless make poor historians, in their use of fiction and speculative analysis; its narrative conventions are rooted in nineteenth century realism; its concerns are with the ‘great and the good’; and it seeks to identify with its subject. Finally, in the case of recent literary biography, critics argue that biographers have been oblivious to ‘the death of the author’ debate or what has been called the ‘biographical fallacy’, when they seek the life of a writer in his or her work3. In this study I want to argue that there is a distinction between this approach and a study of authorship by literary biographers who seek to understand how a writer transforms his or her life experience in their writing. In other words a writer may draw on his or her experience without writing text which directly relates to the specific details of this or that event or relationship; it is in part the role of literary biography to consider how images or scenes from a life are transformed into the creative narrative of a literary biographical subject – to understand how the literary and life narratives intertwine and are in fact intrinsic to each other. When a biographer engages in literary criticism however, one way to interpret the biographical fallacy, they leave themselves open to the fiercest criticism by academic critics, as Chapter Six will discuss. A later chapter will discuss the extent to which biographers are criticized if they undertake literary criticism; I will argue that drawing on a work to inform an understanding of someone’s life is different and leaves biographers less open to criticism. 3 In their famous essay rooted in the New Criticism of the 1930s to 1950s, Monroe Beardsley and W.K. Wimsatt argue that “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art” (‘The Intentional Fallacy’ 3). When biographers imply that the narrative in fiction or poetry is directly linked to specific actual events or people from an author’s experience they are accused, drawing on Wimsatt and Beardsley’s title, of the biographical fallacy: a belief that a work of fiction or poetry must directly reflect events and people in the author's actual experience and making judgments about the writer’s text as a result. Biographer Arnold Rampersad defines the biographical fallacy as “making judgements about a poem or novel based on one’s knowledge of the writer’s life” (3). 3 Chapters in this thesis address each of these objections and argue that in the case of Tomalin, Holmes and Lee at least they are at times inaccurate and unfair. My thesis argues that Tomalin, Holmes, Lee and some of their late twentieth century peers are fully aware that biographical knowledge is relative and that the lives of their subjects are composite and fragmented; they often subvert the use of realist forms in their biographical writing; and to varying degrees they understand that the form and style of their narrative is as important to their depiction of their subjects as the facts of the lives they are unravelling. Finally, my thesis argues that even when a biographer seems to be seeking to identify with her subject, she becomes a character in her own work, and that we as readers find the character of the narrator – as well as that of her subject – a source of interest and even drama.

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