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Notes and References Notes and References Introduction: Lives Without Theory 1. Hermione Lee, Biography:AVery Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2009), 94. Lee is running together remarks by Ian MacKillop, ‘Vignettes: Leavis, Biography and theBody’ in W. Gould and T. Staley, eds., Writing the Lives of Writers (Macmillan, 1998), 297; andby Mary Rhiel and David Suchoff (eds.), Introduction to TheSeductions of Biography (Routledge, 1996),1. 2. Park Honan, Authors’ Lives: On Literary Biographyand theArtsof Lan- guage (St. Martin’s Press – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1990),4.Seealso, D. J. Taylor, novelist, critic and biographer of Orwell and Thackeray, who has commented that ‘there is hardly such a thing as a theory of biogra- phy’ (Guardian, 8/11/2002); Ray Monk, ‘Life Without Theory: Biography as an Exemplar of Philosophical Understanding’in Poetics Today, 28:3 (Fall, 2007), 556. Monk summarises recent approaches to a theory of biog- raphy but focuses on literary sources and, curiously, omits any reference to historiography. His title is taken from Disraeli: ‘Read no history, noth- ing but biography, for that is life without theory’ (cited in Honan, op. cit, 1990: 1);and,Catherine N. Parke, Biography: Writing Lives (Routledge, 2002), 30–1 on biographyandliterary theory. 3. Barbara Lewalski, TheLifeof JohnMilton (Blackwell Publishing, 2003),x. 4. Jonathan Culler, ‘Chapter 1. What is Theory?’ in Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2000), 1–17. 5. Ibid., 15–16. 6. Hayden White, ‘The Discourse of History’ in The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature and Theory 1957–2007, ed. R. Doran (TheJohns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 200. 7.Ibid., 200. 8. Virginia Woolf, ‘The New Biography’ (1927) in Collected Essays, Vol.4 (Hogarth Press, 1967), 229. 9. Leon Edel, Writing Lives: Principia Biographia (Norton, 1984). 10. LindaAnderson, Autobiography (Routledge, 2001), 13–14. 11. PaulaBackscheider, Reflections on Biography (Oxford University Press, 1999),93. 12. Ibid., 122. 13. David Novarr, The Lines of Life: Theories of Biography, 1880–1970 (Purdue University Press, 1986), 152. 14. Susan Tridgell, Understanding Ourselves: The Dangerous Art of Biography (Peter Lang, 2004); Nigel Hamilton, Biography: A Brief History (Harvard University Press, 2009). 141 142 Notes and References 15. This response-based stance towards an understanding of the arts has a chequered history, with different emphases in Walter Pater, I. A. Richards, and with more recent theorists such as Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish. 16. See, for example, J. L. Clifford, Introduction to BiographyasanArt:Selected Criticism, 1560–1960 (Oxford University Press, 1962), xvii. Clifford remarks on the widespread view that ‘all biographies need not conform to a single set of standards, that quite legitimately there are different kinds of life-writing, each with its own possibilities and rules’.Similarly, Novarr (op. cit. 1986: 152) comments that ‘the best literary theory and criticism from Aristotle on has always been based on a description of what artists have done. The danger lies in treating such theory and crit- icism prescriptively.’ And Honan (op. cit., 1990: xix) callsthis emphasis ‘practical theory’(Honan’sitalics),althoughhis approach, as a practising biographer, differs from the one taken in this book. 17. James Boswell (1791), TheLifeof Dr Johnson, 2Vols. (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1949); Jonathan Coe, Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson (Picador, 2004). 18. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Malcolm Heath(Penguin, 1996),16. 19. John Dryden, ‘Life of Plutarch’ (1683). Cited in Parke, op. cit., 14. 20. Helen Gardner, ‘Literary Biography’ in In Defence of the Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 168–9. 21. Samuel Johnson, ‘TheRambler, No. 60, Saturday October 13, 1750’. Reprinted in Richard Holmes, ed., Johnson on Savage (Harper Perennial, 2005), 111–15. 22. How far Johnson’s practice reflected these high ideals can be judged from reading his biography of Richard Savage written six years earlier. See Holmes, op. cit. 2005. As Holmes has shown in his Dr Johnson and Mr Sav- age (Flamingo, 1994),Johnson’srhetoricalpower compromises his ethical purity. 23. Woolf, op. cit., 1967, 229. 24. Virginia Woolf, ‘The Art of Biography’ (1939) in Collected Essays, Vol.4 (Hogarth Press, 1967), 221 & 225–8. Novarr, op. cit. 1986: 88–94 subjects Woolf’s essays to a telling forensic examination. 25. Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians, ed. Michael Holroyd(Penguin, 1986),9. 26. Strachey cited in Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: The New Biography (Vintage, 1994), 420. 27. Novarr, op. cit., 1986, 151. 28. Richard Holmes, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985), (Flamingo, 1995). 29. Ibid., 27. 30. Ibid., 66. 31. E. H. Carr, What is History? (1961), (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 24. 32. Holmes, op. cit., 1995, 67. 33. Richard Holmes, ‘Biography. Inventing the Truth’ in J. Batchelor, ed., TheArtof Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); and ‘The Proper Study?’ in P. France and W. St. Clair, eds., Mapping Lives: TheUses of Biography (Oxford University Press, 2002). 34. Culler, op. cit., 2000: 83. 35. Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape, 2011), 17. 36. Culler, op. cit., 2000: 19. Notes and References 143 1Artand Artifice in Biography 1. René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (1949; repr. Penguin, 1975),75. 2. Michael Holroyd, ‘What Justifies Biography?’ in Works on Paper: The Craft of Biographyand Autobiography (Abacus, 2003), 20. 3. For example, J. Batchelor (ed.), TheArtof Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995; A. O. J. Cockshut, Truth to Life: TheArtof Biog- raphyinthe Nineteenth Century (Collins, 1974); J. Meyers (ed.), TheCraft of Literary Biography (Schoken Books, 1985);Michael Holroyd, see Note 2 above; Bruce Redford, Designing the ‘Lifeof Johnson’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002). 4. Virginia Woolf, ‘The Art of Biography’ (1939) in Collected Essays (Hogarth Press, 1967), IV, 227. 5. Holroyd, op. cit., 2003: 21 & 31. 6. Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens: A Life (Viking, 2011);and Michael Slater, Charles Dickens (Yale University Press, 2011).There are similar emphases in biographies of other major writers, e.g., compare Peter Ackroyd, Blake (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995) with G. E. Bentley Jr.,The Stranger From Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (Yale University Press, 2001).Also compare, Stephen Greenblatt, Will in theWorld:HowShakespeare Became Shakespeare (Jonathan Cape, 2004) with S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Com- pact Documentary Life (Oxford University Press, 1987). 7. David Cecil in J. L.Clifford (ed.), Biography as an Art: Selected Criticism, 1590–1960 (Oxford University Press, 1962), 153. 8. Bruce Redford, Designing the ‘Lifeof Johnson’ (Oxford University Press, 2002), 5–6. 9. Ibid., 4–5. 10. Ibid., 6. 11. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and His- torical Representation (TheJohns Hopkins University Press, 1987);and ‘Storytelling’ (1996) in The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Liter- ature, and Theory, 1957–2007, Robert Doran (ed.), (TheJohns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 273–92. 12. Hayden White, ‘Response to Arthur Marwick’ in Journal of Contemporary History,30(1995): 241. 13. Richard Holmes, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (Penguin, 1986),66. 14. Ibid., 202. 15. L. Mink, ‘History and Fiction as Modes of Comprehension’ in B. Fay,E.O. Golob and R. T. Vann (eds.), Historical Understanding (Cornell University Press, 1987), 60. 16. Barbara Hardy, Tellers and Listeners: The Narrative Imagination (Athlone Press, 1975), 3–4. 17. See especially, G. Roberts (ed.), The History and Narrative Reader (Routledge, 2001) for a collection of essays on this topic. Mink and White see stories as imposed; Carr argues that ‘narrative is a mode of being before it is a mode of knowing’ (p. 199). 144 Notes and References 18. White in Doran (ed.),op. cit., 2010: 280. White developsthe notion of emplotment further by arguing that stories fall into one of several story types derived from Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton University Press, 1957). This typology is both overly formulaic and distracting in the present context. 19. Carr in Roberts (ed.), op. cit., 2001: 198. 20. Hardy,op. cit., 1975: 4. 21. Ibid., 5. 22. Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot (Picador, 1985), 38. 23. Claire Harman, R. L. Stevenson: A Biography (Harper Perennial, 2006), xvii. 24. White, op. cit., 1987: 48–53. 25. Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. R. Baldick, 1963 (Penguin, 2000),26. 26. Ibid., 139. 27. William Wordsworth, ThePrelude or Growth of a Poet’sMind (1805),E.de Selincourt (ed.), (Oxford University Press, 1960), Book XIII, 334–6. 28. Kenneth Johnston, TheHidden Wordsworth (Pimlico, 2000);Juliet Barker, Wordsworth:ALife (Viking, 2000); Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: ALife (Oxford University Press, 1990). 29. Johnston, TheHidden Wordsworth, 262–93. Thechapters are significantly titled:Chapter 15 ‘A Return to France?’ and Chapter 16 ‘A Return to France: The Evidence of Speculation.’ 30. Barker, op. cit., 2000: 837. 31. Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928), (Oxford World’s Classics, 1998), 255. 32. Julia Briggs, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (Penguin, 2006). 33. Elizabeth Gaskell cited in Jenny Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell:AHabit of Stories (Faber and Faber, 1999), 397. 34. Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (Vintage, 1999). 35. Jonathan Coe, Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson (Picador, 2004), 194. 36. Greenblatt, op. cit., 2004: 311–21. 37. Bernard Crick, George Orwell:ALife (Secker and Warburg, 1980), xxiv–xxv. 38. Gill,op. cit., 1990: 261. 39. Johnston, op. cit., 2000: 565. 40. Barker, op. cit., 2000: 293. 41. Frances Wilson, TheBallad of Dorothy Wordsworth (Faber and Faber, 2009), 206–11. 42. Elizabeth Gaskell, TheLifeof Charlotte Brontë (1857), (Penguin, 1975), 276–80. 43. Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul (Picador, 2009), 356–60. 44. Paul Theroux, Sir Vidia’sShadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents (Penguin, 1999), 214–28. 45. French, op. cit., 2009: 357. 46. Theroux, op. cit., 1999: 228. 47. Ibid., 377. 48. Ibid., 258. 49. French, op. cit., 2009: 359. Notes and References 145 50. Theroux, op.
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