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. cit., 1999: 253. 51. Ibid., 376. 52. Ibid., 382. 53. French, op. cit., 2009: 358. 54. Ibid., 357. 55. Theroux, op. cit., 1999: 377. 56. French, op. cit., 2009: 360. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. This notion of three dimensions is developed from the discussion of Ricoeur’sideas in White, op. cit., 1987: 51. 60. See, Richard J. Evans, InDefence of History (Granta, 2000), 76–7. 61. Woolf, op. cit., 1928/1998: 228. 62. Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of theRepre- sentational Arts (Harvard University Press, 1993),77. 63. Woolf, op. cit., 1928/1998: 219. 64. Gaskell, op. cit., 1857/1975: 334–5. 65. Lucasta Miller, The Brontë Myth (Jonathan Cape, 2001), passim. 66. Juliet Barker, The Brontës (Phoenix, 2001);and Lyndall Gordon, Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life (Vintage, 1995). 67. James Boswell, TheLifeof Dr. Johnson (1791)(J. M. Dent and Sons, 1949) I, 8. 68. Ibid., II, 614. 69. David Nokes, Samuel Johnson: A Life (Faber, 2009), 209, 299, 311, & 316. 70. Paul Alexander, Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath (Da Capo Press, 1999),5–6. 71. Ibid., 330. 72. Gordon, op. cit., 1995: 329.

2 Plotting A Life

1. Malcolm Bradbury, ‘The Telling Life: Some Thoughts on Literary Biogra- phy’ in E. Homberger & J. Charmley (eds.), TheTroubled Face of Biography (Macmillan, 1988), 139. 2. Anthony Horowitz, The House of Silk (Orion Books, 2011). 3. Michael Holroyd, A Strange Eventful History:The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their Remarkable Families (Chatto and Windus, 2008). 4. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Chronicleof a Death Foretold (trans. G. Rabassa, Penguin, 1982). 5. Gerard Genette, Narrative Discours,. trans. Jane E. Lewin (Basil Blackwell, 1986), 25–32. The terminology of narrative theory can be confusing as it comes from various twentieth-century sources, initially from the Russian structuralists who distinguished between the fabula and the sjuzet to make the fundamental distinction between the chronological series of events (the story) andhow those events are ordered in the text (the 146 Notes and References

discourse). I prefer Genette’s terms histoire and récit as more suggestive of the relationship between history and fiction in biographical writing. Genette’s account, like others, is derived from analyses of events in fic- tion. However, as Rimmon-Kenan points out, the terms and some of the procedures ‘maybeapplied to texts conventionally defined as “non- fiction”’.See, S. Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (Methuen, 1983),3. 6. Holroyd, op. cit., 2008: 53. 7. Ibid., 55. 8. Ibid., 62. 9. Ibid., xvi. 10. Genette, op. cit., 1986: 263. 11. Holroyd,op. cit., 2008: 6. 12. Ibid., 146. 13. Shakespeare, AsYouLikeItt, II, 7: 164. 14. Holroyd, op. cit., 2008: 513. 15. Ibid., 177. 16. Ibid., 263. 17. Ibid., 342. 18. Ibid., 305. 19. Ibid., 63. 20. Ibid., 76. 21. Ibid., 199. 22. Ibid., 294. 23. Ibid., 510. 24. John Keats, ‘Letter to George and Georgiana Keats, February 18, 1819’ in R. Gittings (ed.), John Keats: Selected Letters (Oxford University Press, 2002), 203. 25. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (TheJohns Hopkins University Press), 1987: 48 & 53. 26. Holroyd, op. cit., 2008: 132. 27. Ibid., 344. 28. Ibid., 304. 29. Ibid., 253. 30. Ibid., 343. 31. Ibid., 255. 32. Ibid., 303–5. 33. Ibid., 309–10.

3 The Author’s Works (1): Signs of Life?

1. Hermione Lee, Biography:AVery Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2009), 102. 2. Wayne C. Booth, TheRhetoric of Fiction (University of Chicago Press, 1961), 137–8. See also Chapter 4, notes 5 & 6. 3. Claire Tomalin, The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (Penguin, 1991). Notes and References 147

4. Marcel Proust, Contre Saint-Beuve cited in Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (Penguin, 2003), v. 5. Park Honan, Authors’ Lives: On Literary Biography theArtsof Language (St. Martin’s Press – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1990),14. 6. Carol Shields, Jane Austen (Phoenix, 2001), 4. 7. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin, 1916/1960), 215. 8. An early example that shows the foolhardiness of reading the life in the worksisinJohnson’s Lives of the Poets. He reports in his ‘Lifeof Thomson’ that Savagewho knew Thomson well told him ‘how he hadheard a lady remarking that she could gather from his [Thomson’s] works three parts of his character: that he was a great Lover, a great Swimmerr, and rigorously abstinent; but, said Savage, he knows not any love but that of sex; he was perhaps never in cold water in his life; and he indulges himself in all the luxury that comes within his reach’. Apocryphal or not, the point is made. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets (Oxford University Press, 1779–1781/ 1949), II, 375. 9. Michael Benton, Literary Biography: An Introduction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 67–75. See also, Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age: TheLife, Mind and World of William Shakespeare (Penguin, 2009);and James Shapiro, Contested Will:Who Wrote Shakespeare? (Faber, 2010). 10. See, A. Fleishman, Figures of Autobiography:The Language of Self-Writing in Victorian and Modern England (University of California Press, 1983). 11. John Keats, Letter to Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818 in Selected Letters, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford University Press, 2002), 147–8. See also, J. L. Borges, ‘Everything and Nothing’ in Labyrinths (Picador, 1992), 95–6. 12. Charles Nicholl, TheLodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street (Penguin, 2008). 13. William Hazlitt (1821), cited in Colin Burrow (ed.), TheComplete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford University Press, 2002), 138. 14. A. L. Rowse, Shakespeare the Man (Book Club Associates & Macmillan, 1973);Michael Wood, In Search of Shakespeare (BBC Books, 2003);and, Rene Weiss, Shakespeare Revealed (John Murray, 2007). 15. Stanley Wells, Shakespeare: A Life in Drama (W. W. Norton & Co., 1995), 15–17. 16. Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford University Press, 1999), 185. Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (Picador, 1997), 53. Jonathan Bate, op. cit., 2009: 209–214. 17. Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives (Oxford University Press, 1993), 33–4. 18. Honan, op. cit., 1999, 180. 19. James Shapiro, op. cit., 2010: 44. 20. Ibid., 50–1. 21. A summary of the range and diversity of views is given in David Bevington, Shakespeare and Biography (Oxford University Press, 2010), 43–51. 22. Bate, op. cit., 1997, 51–3. Bate’s italics. 148 Notes and References

23. Bate, op. cit., 2009, 217–19. Greenblatt makes similar intertextuallinks, including to ‘Venus and Adonis’. See S. Greenblatt, Will in theWorld (J. Cape, 2004),ch.8,pp. 226–55. 24. Bate, op. cit., 2009, 210. 25. Ibid., 211. 26. Jonathan Bate, ‘Is this the Story of the Bard’s Heart?’, The Times, 20.4.2009. 27. William Wordsworth, ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett & A. R. Jones (Methuen, 1802/1968), 257–8. 28. William Wordsworth, ThePrelude or Growth of a Poet’sMind (1805),E.de Selincourt (ed.), (Oxford University Press, 1960), I: 100. All subsequent references are to this edition. 29. Duncan Wu, Wordsworth: An Inner Life (Blackwell, 2004), 122–3. 30. Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth:ALife (Oxford University Press, 1990),7. 31. Paulde Man, ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’ in Modern Languages Notes (1997), 94: 920. 32. Wu, op. cit., 2004, 124–5. Wu’s comment on young Wordsworth as an apparent witness to the dredging of Esthwaite Water for a drowned man, as recorded in The Two-Part Prelude, 1: 258–79, reads: ‘the poetry is intent on describing how the scene was perceived and is now remembered, rather than how it actually was’. 33. Kenneth Johnston, TheHidden Wordsworth (Pimlico, 2000);and Juliet Barker, Wordsworth:ALife (Viking, 2000). 34. Benton, op. cit., 2009: 140–2. How dangerous was it for English people in France during this period of the Terror? War was declared between France and England on 1 February 1793, only a few weeks after Caroline’s birth. In Paris, foreigners were treated with increasing suspicion; in June, the Girondins – a moderate republican party in the French Assem- bly – were proscribed; in October, the Terror intensified,the Queen was guillotined, leading Girondins likethe journalist Gorsas were exe- cuted,and most remaining English people were arrested. Yet, a much better- known English writer than Wordsworth at this time did stay in France throughout – Mary Wollstonecraft whose Vindication of the Rights of Woman hadbeen published the previous year. Her biographer says: Mary arrived back in Paris [from Neuilly] as the Terror was coming into full spate. From Lyons came reports of the frightful vengeance of the government upon its enemies there; from the Loire the noyades [execution by drowning]. On 9 October, all the remaining English in Paris were arrested. .... Mary escaped only because Imlay [Gilbert Imlay, Mary’s American lover] had prudently registered her at the American embassy as his wife, to give her the protection of US cit- izenship. (Claire Tomalin, TheLifeand Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (Penguin, 1974; revised edition, 1992), 207–8) Tomalin subsequently remarks on Wordsworth’s ‘guilt feelings’ and ‘his carefully hidden remorse for his ...treatment of Annette’ which, she sug- gests, mirror Imlay’s treatment of Mary who was pregnant with Imlay’s child (p. 291). Notes and References 149

35. Johnston, op. cit., 2000, 3–4. 36. Ibid., 262–93. 37. Ibid., 264–70. 38. Ibid., 284. 39. Ibid., 286. 40. Ibid., 290. 41. Barker, op. cit., 2000, 136. 42. Ibid., 837, note 60. 43. Ibid., 137–8. 44. Ibid., 837, note 60. 45. Johnston, op. cit., 2000, xi. 46. Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (Faber, 2009), 126. 47. Ibid., xiv. 48. Ibid., xi. 49. Benton, op. cit., 2009: 31–2. 50. Robert Gittings, Thomas Hardy (Penguin, 2001),15. 51. Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy:The Time-Torn Man (Viking, 2006), 337. 52. Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited (Oxford University Press, 2006). 53. Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw (Vintage, 1997), 370. 54. Ibid., 701. For Shaw’s machinations withhis biographers G. K. Chesterton, Dermot O’Bolger, Frank Harris, St. John Ervine and Hesketh Pearson see Holroyd, pp. 368–75; 582–6; & 699–702. 55. Patrick French, TheWorld Is What It Is: The Authorized Biographyof V. S. Naipaul (Picador, 2009), xvii. 56. Ibid., 307. 57. Ibid., xvii & xiii. 58. William Boyd, ‘The French Effect’ in Times Literary Supplementt, 8October 2010: 3. 59. French,op. cit., 2009, 229. 60. Ibid., 8. 61. Ibid., 222. 62. Ibid., 197. 63. Ibid., 220–1. 64. Ibid., 236. 65. Ibid., 167. 66. Ibid., 53. 67. Ibid., xiii 68. Ibid., 78. 69. Ibid., 70. 70. Ibid., xv–xvi 71. Ibid., 427. 72. V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (Picador, 1987/2002), 159. 73. Ibid., 161. 74. French, op. cit., 2009, 199. 75. Ibid., 382–9. 150 Notes and References

76. Ibid., 342. 77. V. S. Naipaul, Guerrillas (Vintage, 1980), 17. 78. French, op. cit., 339. 79. Ibid., 346–8. 80. Ibid., 361 81. Ibid., 480. 82. Linton Kwesi Johnson, cited in French, op. cit., 2009, xii.

4The Author’sWorks (2): Open to Criticism?

1. Michael Holroyd, ‘How I Fell into Biography’ in E. Homberger and J. Charmley, eds., TheTroubled Face of Biography (Macmillan, 1988), 102. 2. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford University Press, 1953/1971). 3. Ibid., 228. 4. GeorgeOrwell, ‘Charles Dickens’ in TheCollected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell,eds. Sonia Orwell & Ian Angus (Penguin, 1970),I: 454–5. 5. Wayne C. Booth, TheRhetoric of Fiction (University of Chicago Press, 1961), 71–3. 6. Ibid., 73. 7. The big six are the ‘Lives’ of Milton, Dryden, Pope, Cowley, Savage and Swift. 8. JohnMullan,‘Introduction’ to Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Poets: A Selection (Oxford University Press, 2009), xxii. 9. Ibid., 421. 10. Ian Hamilton, Against Oblivion: Some Lives of the Twentieth-Century Poets (Penguin, 2003). 11. Ibid., 256. 12. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford University Press, revd edn, 1983),3. 13. Ibid., 358. 14. Barbara K. Lewalski, TheLifeof JohnMilton: A Critical Biography (Blackwell Publishing, revd edn, 2003),xii. 15. Ibid., 290–1 & 305–7. 16. John Drury, Music at Midnight: TheLifeand Poetry of George Herbert (Penguin, 2014), 117. 17. Ibid., 15. 18. Ibid., 22. 19. Ibid., 45–7. 20. Ibid., 47. 21. Ibid., 57–8. 22. Ibid., 88–9. 23. Ibid., 91. 24. Ibid., 94. 25. Ibid., 145–8. Notes and References 151

26. Ibid., 149. 27. Ibid., 151–61. 28. Ibid., 161. 29. Matthew Hollis, Now All RoadsLead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas (Faber, 2012), 182. 30. Ibid., 201. 31. T. S. Eliot,‘Burnt Norton, V’ in Collected Poems 1909–1963 (Faber, 1963), 194. 32. Hollis, op. cit., 183–9. 33. Ibid., 191. 34. Ibid., 193–4. 35. Ibid., 195. 36. Ibid., 283. 37. Ibid., 205. 38. John Carey, William Golding: The Man who Wrote Lord of the Flies (Faber, 2012). Carey also got to know Golding through interviewing him for the fetschrift that healso edited. See, John Carey, Tribute: William Golding:The Man andhis Books. A Tribute on his 75th Birthday (Faber, 1986). 39. Carey, op. cit., 2012,406. 40. Ibid., 192. 41. Ibid., 149. 42. Ibid., 154–5. 43. Ibid., 173. 44. Ibid., 179. 45. Ibid., 182. 46. Ibid., 192. 47. William Golding, Pincher Martin (Faber, 1956), 10. 48. Ibid., 208. 49. Carey, op. cit., 2012: 192–3. 50. Ibid., 201. 51. Ibid., 195–6. 52. Ibid., 195. 53. Ambrose Bierce, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1890).There have been a number of versions of the story for film and television. The most cele- bratedfilm was ‘La Riviere duHibou’, directedbyRobert Enrico, which won the best short subject award at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival and an Academy Award in 1963. 54. Carey,op. cit., 2012: 272. 55. Ibid., 413. 56. Ibid., 229. 57. Ibid., 367. 58. Ibid., 476–7. 59. Ibid., 180–1. 60. Ibid., 196–7. 61. J. L. Clifford, From Puzzles to Portraits: Problems of a Literary Biographer (University of North Carolina Press & Oxford University Press, 1970), 98. 152 Notes and References

62. W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’(1946) repr. in W. K. Wimsatt, TheVerbal Icon (University of Kentucky Press, 1954). 63. Michael Holroyd, Works on Paper: The Craftof Biographyand Autobiography (Abacus, 2003), 30. 64. A. C. Grayling, The Quarrel of the Age: TheLifeand Times of William Hazlitt (Phoenix Press, 2001), 250.

5Their Timesand Ours

1. Virginia Woolf, ‘The Art of Biography’ (1939) in Collected Essays, Vol.4 (Hogarth Press, 1967), 226. 2. Jenny Uglow, George Eliot (Virago, 1987),9. 3. Selina Hastings, The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham (John Murray, 2010), 370. 4. Ibid., 1–2. 5. Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (Oxford University Press, 1928/1992), 196. 6. Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey:The New Biography (Vintage, 1995). 7.Ibid., xxii. Holroyd comments, ‘Some readers today may need to be reminded that, ten years after the Wolfenden Report on prostitution and homosexuality was published in 1957, the Sexual Offences Act became law.’ 8. Ibid., xxiv–xxv. 9. P. N. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977). 10. Ibid., II, 153–5. 11. Wendy Moffat, E. M. Forster: A New Life (Bloomsbury, 2011). 12. Ibid., 70–1. 13. Woolf, op. cit., 1928/1998, 63. 14. KathrynHughes, GeorgeEliot: The Last Victorian (Fourth Estate, 1999), 488. 15. Anna Beer, Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer and Patriot (Bloomsbury, 2008). 16. Richard Holmes, ‘The Proper Study?’ in P. France and W. St. Clair, eds., Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography (Oxford University Press, 2002), 16. 17. J. Walter Cross, George Eliot’sLifeasRelated in her Journalsand Letters,3 Vols (Blackwood, 1885); Leslie Stephen, GeorgeEliot (Macmillan, 1902); Gordon Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford University Press, 1968; repr. Penguin, 1986). 18. Hughes, op. cit., 1999, 485. 19. Cross plays down this rift: ‘all that happened in real life between brother and sister was, I believe, that as theygrew up their characters, pur- suits, and tastes diverged more and more widely’.Their twenty-year estrangement, whichlasted until Lewes’s death, is airbrushed away and he concludes in his anodyne style: ‘Miss Evans, as she now was, could not rest satisfied with a mere profession of faith without trying to shape her own life – and it may be added, the lives around her – in accordance with her convictions’ (Cross, op. cit., I, 32). Notes and References 153

20. Ibid., I: 113. This episode, with her well-known letter to her father of 28 February, 1842, cherishing Jesus’s ‘moral teaching’ while abominating ‘the system of doctrines built upon the facts of his life’, is also taken up by Rosemary Ashton, George Eliot: A Life (Penguin, 1997),44. 21. Hughes, op. cit., 1999, 144–5. 22. Gordon S. Haight (ed.) The GeorgeEliot Letters, 9Vols (Yale University Press, 1954–56, 1968), 121–2. 23. Cross, op. cit., 1885, I: 15. 24. Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (Chatto & Windus. The Hogarth Press, 1984), 209–11. 25. Barbara Hardy, George Eliot: A Critic’s Biography (Continuum, 2006), 69–70. 26. Cross, op. cit., 1885, III: 407–8. 27. Cross’smother, to whom he was close, haddied eighteen months earlier no doubt leaving him in a fragile state psychologically and emotionally. Haightcalls his jump ‘asudden mentalderangement’(p. 544); Hughes refers to Cross’s ‘depressive nature’ and speculates on the reasons for his actions (pp. 479–80); Uglow refers to ‘the influence of fever or an acute depression’ (p. 247); Ashton, who offers the most balanced and sensitive reading of the incident, comments that ‘perhaps inevitably the honey- moon put strains on two people who had comfortably filled the roles of aunt and nephew to one another, of genius and admirer, of teacher and pupil’; and she too speaks of Cross as suffering ‘some kind of fit or derangement’ (p. 376). Either from tact or indifference, Leslie Stephen makes no mention of Cross’s traumatic plunge into the Grand Canal. 28. Stephen, op. cit., 1902, 97. 29. Ibid., 181–2. 30. Ibid., 204. 31. Ibid., 66–8. 32. Ibid., 201. 33. Haight, op. cit., 1968, 249. 34. Stephen, op. cit., 1902, 201. A similar description is made by another who knew her personally: ‘Her knowledge is really deep,andher heart one of the most sympathetic to me I ever knew.’ Edward Burne-Jones in Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorialsof Edward Burne-Jones (Macmillan, 1904), II: 4. 35. Haight, op. cit., 1978. 36. Haight, op. cit., 1968, 167. 37. Ibid., 175 38. See note 2 above. 39. Ashton, op. cit., 1997, 1–9. 40. Ibid., 6. 41. Hughes, op. cit., 1999, 1–8. 42. Yet being a guru had its strains. Georgiana Burne-Jones records George Eliot as saying: ‘I am so tired of being set on a pedestal and expected to vent wisdom – I am only a poor woman’, Georgiana Burne-Jones, op. cit., 1904, II, 104. 43. Uglow, op. cit., 1987, 2. 154 Notes and References

44. Ashton, op. cit., 1997, 4 & 6. 45. Hughes, op. cit., 1999, 8. 46. Uglow, op. cit., 1987, 70–1. 47. Hughes, op. cit., 1999, 370. 48. Ibid., 369. 49. Ashton, op. cit., 1997, 126 & 331. 50. All George Eliot’s biographers have to resolve what to call her. Jenny Uglow (see Chapter 6 (p. 130), presents this as a practical problem and subsequently comments on the irony of a woman writer, particularly one whose life and fiction testify to the special gifts and responsibilities of women, feelingpressured by the culture of her times into ‘wearing the mask of a man’ (Uglow, op. cit., 1987, 80–1). An irony certainly, but nam- ing is also an act of personal symbolism representing an individual’s sense of identity in different relationships. Ashton’s Index has a separate subsec- tion listing twelve ‘names or pseudonyms’(Ashton, op. cit., 1997, 449). Some are variants on her birth name Mary Ann Evans; others are play- ful (Polly), or not so playful (Medusa), pen names used in her letters to friends; others again signal the important relationships in her life (Marian Lewes). George Eliot was acutely sensitive to resonances of a name as a precis of her sense of self in different social contexts; yet this onlygoes so far in explaining her nom de plume.Why did it have to bemale? Why did she retain it years after everyone knew who she was? Kathryn Hughes suggests that thesoubriquet ‘George Eliot’fitted, not because she wanted to be judged as a male writer but ‘as a recognition that she was writ- ing from a unique perspective in English literature, neither wholly male nor female but transcending both’ (Hughes, op. cit., 1999, 263–4). It is littlewonder that all her biographers wrestle with names – see Haight, op. cit., 1968, 268–91);Gillian Beer, GeorgeEliot (Harvester Press, 1986), 24; R. Redinger, George Eliot: The Emergent Self (Bodley Head, 1975),3–4; Rosemarie Bodenheimer, The Real Lifeof Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction (Cornell University Press, 1994), xvii; Frederick Karl, George Eliot: A Biography (W. W. Norton & Co., 1995), xiv & xix. The latter points out, ‘George Eliot’had as delimited a usage as her other names: ‘She never became George Eliot; no-one referred to her as George or Miss Eliot.’ And, he adds, that ‘her fiction gave her greater freedom than did her life, and surely highlighted the ...split in her personal and public life’. 51. GeorgeEliot, Middlemarch (1872)(Penguin, 1966), 312–14. 52. Quoted in Ashton, op. cit., 1997, 325. 53. Stephen, op. cit., 1902, 178– 9. 54. Haight, op. cit., 1968, 448–50. 55. Hughes, op. cit., 1999, 420–2. 56. Uglow, op. cit., 1987, 209–14. 57. Hardy, op. cit., 2006, 127. 58. Ashton, op. cit., 1997, 325. 59. Eliot, op. cit., 1872/1966, 855. 60. Cross, op. cit., 1885, III: 306. Notes and References 155

61. Uglow, op. cit., 1987, 215. 62. Ibid., 249. 63. Gordon Campbell and Thomas Corns, JohnMilton: Life, Work and Thought (Oxford University Press, 2008), 339. 64. Hayden White, cited in Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History (Granta Books, 2000), 126. 65. Beer, op. cit., 2008, 151. 66. JohnAubrey, Brief Lives (1670/1680?) (Penguin, 2000), 201. 67. Beer, op. cit., 2008, 156. 68. Barbara Lewalski, TheLifeof JohnMilton (Blackwell, 2003), 157. 69. Campbell and Corns, op. cit., 2008, 163. The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 1st edn, 1643; 2nd edn revised and augmented, 1644. Milton’s other tracts on this subject at this period are, ‘The Judgement of Martin Bucer, Concerning Divorce’, 1644; and‘Tetrachordon’, 1645. Both are discussedbyCampbell and Corns, pp. 169–71. 70. Ibid., 161. 71. Lewalski, op. cit., 2003, 163. 72. Ibid., 165. 73. Beer, op. cit., 2008, 146. 74. Ibid., 145. 75. Lewalski, op. cit., 2003, 171. 76. Beer, op. cit., 2008, 145. 77. Ibid., 147. 78. Ibid., 146. 79. Ibid., 147. 80. Campbell and Corns, op. cit., 2008, 338. 81. Lewalski, op. cit., 2003, 479. 82. Beer, op. cit., 2008, 326. 83. Lewalski, op. cit., 2003, 479–84. 84. Ibid., 485–6. 85. Ibid., 484–5. 86. Ibid., 485. 87. Beer, op. cit., 2008, 325. 88. Ibid., 333. 89. Ibid., 335. 90. E. H. Carr, Times Literary Supplementt, June 1953. Cited in ‘Introduction’by R. J. Evans to E. H. Carr, What Is History? (Palgrave Macmillan 1961/2001), xiii. 91. Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: Autobiographical Writings, ed. Joanne Schulkind (Pimlico, 2002), 92.

6 Framing a Poetics of Literary Biography

1. Hayden White, ‘Narrativity in the Representation of Reality’ in The Con- tent of theForm: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (TheJohns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 24. 156 Notes and References

2. Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf’s Nose: Essays on Biography (Princeton University Press, 2005), 1–2. 3.E.H.Carr, What Is History? (Palgrave – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1961/2001). 4. Michael Holroyd, Works on Paper: The Craft of Biography and Autobiography (Abacus, 2003); Lee, op. cit., 2005. 5. PaulaBackscheider, Reflections on Biography (Oxford University Press, 1999), xiv; Ira B. Nadel, ‘Biography as Cultural Discourse’ in Biography and Source Studies,ed. Frederick R. Karl(AMS Press, 1994), 73–84.David Ellis, Literary Lives: Biography and the Searchfor Understanding (Edinburgh University Press, 2000),1–2. 6. Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History (Granta, 2000). 7. Leon Edel, Writing Lives: Principia Biographia (Norton, 1984);and David Novarr, The Lines of Life (Purdue University Press, 1986). 8. Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction and Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 308. 9. White, op. cit., 1987, 57. 10. William Dray, ‘Philosophy & Historiography,’ in Michael Bentley,ed., Companion to Historiography (Routledge, 1997), 763–82. 11. George Eliot, Adam Bede (Penguin, 1859/1980),1. 12. KathrynHughes, GeorgeEliot: The Last Victorian (Fourth Estate, 1999),1. 13. Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse (Blackwell, 1980). 14. Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (Oxford World’s Classics, 1928/1998. See Michael Benton, Literary Biography: An Introduction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 14–17. 15. Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (Vintage, 1999). 16. Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (Vintage, 1997). 17. Rosemarie Bodenheimer, Knowing Dickens (Cornell University Press, 2007). 18. Ann Wroe, Being Shelley: The Poet’s Searchfor Himself (Vintage, 2008). 19. Jonathan Coe, Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson (Picador, 2004). 20. Benton, op. cit., 2009, 219–24. 21. Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (Picador, 1997). 22. James Shapiro, 1599: A Year in theLifeof William Shakespeare (Faber, 2005). 23. Charles Nicholl, TheLodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street (Penguin, 2008). 24. Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age: TheLife, Mind and World of William Shakespeare (Penguin, 2009). 25. A. S. Byatt, Possession: A Romance (Vintage, 1991). 26. D. J. Taylor, Orwell: The Life (Vintage, 2004). 27. Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot (Picador, 1985). 28. Janet Malcolm, TheSilent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (Vintage, 1995). 29. Henry James, quotedby Anne Thwaite in J. Batchelor, ed., TheArtof Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 204. 30. Thomas Hardy in Michael Millgate, ed., The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy (Macmillan, 1984), 302. Notes and References 157

31. White, op. cit., 1987, 180. 32. Fiona MacCarthy, Byron: Lifeand Legend (Faber, 2003), 283; and Benita Eisler, Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame (Penguin, 2000), 506 & 509. 33. Hughes, op. cit., 1999, 275 & 285. 34. JohnWorthen, D. H. Lawrence: TheLifeof an Outsider (Penguin, 2006), 107 & 192. 35. Dray,op. cit., 1997, 776. 36. Peter Ackroyd, T.S.Eliot (Abacus, 1985), 23 & 180. 37. Dominic Hibberd, Wilfred Owen: A New Biography (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002), 113, 146 & 90–2. 38. These instances are essentially literary coinages originating in William Wordsworth, ThePrelude, ed. E. de Selincourt (Oxford University Press, 1805/1960) XI, 258–343; James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin, 1916/1960), 213; and Virginia Woolf, ‘Sketch of the Past’ in Moments of Being: Autobiographical Writings, ed.J.Schulkind(Pimlico, 1939/2002), 83–6. 39. Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth:ALife (Oxford University Press, 1990). 40. Wordsworth, op. cit., 1805, XI, 338–43. 41. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford University Press, 1983), 83–5. 42. Woolf, op. cit., 1939/2002, 83–6. 43. Lee in Schulkind,ed., op. cit., 2002, xiii. 44. Gill,op. cit., 1990, 422–3. 45. Juliet Barker, Wordsworth.ALife (Viking, 2000), 802–7. 46. Hermione Lee, faced with accounting for Virginia Woolf’s suicide, writes movingly about her unwillingness to give an explanation for the inexpli- cable. See Lee, op. cit., 2005, 120. 47. Dominic Hibberd’s work on WilfredOwenstretchedoverthree decades. Ending such a relationship is bound to involve a strong sense of loss. See Hibberd, op. cit., 2002, xix. 48. James Boswell, TheLifeof Dr Johnson (2Vols)(J. M. Dent & Sons, 1791/1949), II, 614. 49. Elizabeth Gaskell, TheLifeof Charlotte Brontë (Penguin, 1857/1975), 525. 50. White, op. cit., 1987, 23–5. 51. Lee, op. cit., 2005, 118. 52. Jenny Uglow, GeorgeEliot (Virago, 1987), 9–10. 53. Hughes, op. cit., 1999, 264. 54. Anna Beer, Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer and Patriot (Bloomsbury, 2008), 169. 55. Carol Shields, Jane Austen (Phoenix, 2001), 9. Yet consistency escapes even the most scrupulous. Shields lapses into the indelicacy of ‘Austen’ at least twice – see pp. 92 & 93. 56. Andrew Lycett, Dylan Thomas: A New Life (Phoenix, 2004),1. 57. MacCarthy, op. cit., 2003, vii–x. 58. Ann Fleming, review in the Times Literary Supplementt, 8 November 2002. 59. Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (Faber, 1993), 267. 60. Worthen, op. cit., 2006, 250. 61. Malcolm, op. cit., 1995. 158 Notes and References

62. Ronald Hayman, The Death and Lifeof Sylvia Plath (Sutton Publishing, 2003; Paul Alexander, Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath (Da Capo Press, 2003), 165. 63. LindaWagner-Martin, Sylvia Plath: A Biography (Chatto & Windus, 1987), 184. See Benton, op. cit., 2009, 61–2. 64. Anne Stevenson, Bitter Fame: A Lifeof Sylvia Plath (Viking, 1989). 65. Malcolm, op. cit., 1995, 176–7. 66. Wayne C. Booth, TheRhetoric of Fiction (Chicago University Press, 1961). 67. See Benton, op. cit., 2009, 127–30. Some commentators have regarded Ackroyd’s ‘Interludes’ as self-indulgent. But Park Honan, biographer of Shakespeare, Austen and Marlowe, suggests a possibleexplanation, argu- ing that biographers ‘create illusions of the subject’s presence’ and that, ‘It is in this sense that biography differs the most from historiography, in having one threading link, one developing persona to which“his- tory” and all other personae seem in one sense subordinate.’ Park Honan, Authors’ Lives: On Literary Biographyand theArtsof Language (St. Martin’s Press – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1990), 12. 68. Hibberd,op. cit., 2002, 95. 69. John Stubbs, Donne: TheReformed Soul (Penguin, 2007), 178–9. 70. For Jane Austen and Shelley, see Lee, op. cit., 2005, Chapters 1 & 3. For Wordsworth, see Frances Wilson, TheBallad of Dorothy Wordsworth (Faber, 2009), 206–11. 71. Jonathan Bate, JohnClare: A Biography (Picador, 2004). 72. Ibid., 316–17. 73. Gaskell, op. cit., 1857/1975, 346. 74. George Smith, A Memoir, with some pages of Autobiography (London, private publication, 1902),89. 75. Juliet Barker, The Brontës (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994), 558. 76. Lyndall Gordon, Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life (Vintage, 1995), 168–9. 77. Ibid., 329. 78. Ken Robinson, ‘John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester: An Author in Search of a Character’ in J. Batchelor, ed., op. cit., 1995, 102. 79. Richard Holmes, ‘Biography: Inventing the Truth’ in J. Batchelor, ed.op. cit., 1995, 17. 80. Honan, (op. cit., 1990, 11), makes a similar point, if somewhat obliquely, allying himself with White’s view of historiography: ‘In this genre, style is an integral “fact”, as dates and events are, since it becomes part of the portrayed.’ 81. Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, No. 60, Saturday, October 13, 1750,reprinted in Johnson on Savage, ed. Richard Holmes (Harper Perennial, 2005), 114. Select Bibliography

Abbott, H. Porter, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn., 2008). Backscheider, Paula, Reflections on Biography (Oxford University Press, 1999). Batchelor, J. (ed.), TheArtof Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). Benton, Michael, Literary Biography: An Introduction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). Culler, Jonathan, Literary Theory:AVery Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2000). France, P. & W. St. Clair (eds.), Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography (Oxford University Press, 2002). Genette, Gerard, Narrative Discourse. Trans. Jane E. Lewin (Basil Blackwell, 1986). Holmes, Richard, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (Flamingo, 1995). Holroyd, Michael, Works on Paper: The Craftof Biography and Autobiography (Abacus, 2003). Homberger, E. & J. Charmley (eds.), TheTroubled Face of Biography (Macmillan, 1988). Honan, Park, Author’s Lives: On Literary Biographyand theArtsof Language (St. Martin’s Press – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1990). Johnson, Samuel, ‘TheRambler, No. 60, Saturday October 13, 1750’.Reprinted in Richard Holmes (ed.), Johnson on Savage (Harper Perennial, 2005). Lee,Hermione, Virginia Woolf’s Nose: Essays on Biography (Princeton University Press, 2005). Lee, Hermione, Biography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2009). Roberts, G. (ed.), The History and Narrative Reader (Routledge, 2001). Strachey, Lytton, Eminent Victorians. Michael Holroyd(ed.)(Penguin, 1986). White, Hayden, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (TheJohns Hopkins University Press, 1987). White, Hayden, The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature and Theory, 1957–2007. Robert Doran (ed.)(TheJohns Hopkins University Press, 2010). Woolf, Virginia, Orlando: A Biography (1928) (Oxford University Press, 1992). Woolf, Virginia, ‘The New Biography’ (1927) & ‘The Art of Biography’ (1939) in Collected Essays, Vol. 4 (Hogarth Press, 1967). Woolf, Virginia, Moments of Being (Pimlico, 2002).

159 Index

Abrams, M. H., 75, 88 Benton, Michael, ix–xi, 52, 61, 65, Ackroyd, Peter, 6, 121–2, 133–4 121, 122, 134, 148n.34 on Dickens, 21 Bierce, Ambrose, 87 on T. S. Eliot, 126 bi-focalism, see biography aesthetics, biographer, closure, 128 asarchaeologist, 89 imagination, 120 ‘artist on oath’,57 narration, 119, 126, 139 and error, 22 Alexander, Paul, fictional relationship with subject, on S. Plath, 28–30, 132 8, 14 anti-foundational stance,4 as lawyer, 51, 133, 139 anti-Stratfordians, 54 mode of address, 130 Aristotle, 4–5 as psychoanalyst, 89 Ashton, Rosemary, as sculptor, 123 on George Eliot, 101–2, 103, 104 sources, 16, 66 Aubrey,John, 110 tone of voice, 130–1 Austen, Jane, 131, 136 biographical subject, autobiographicalfictions, 52 ascultural icon, 44–5, 46 narratives, 58–9, 81 death of, 127–8 patterns in, 72 as fantasy figure, 47 as screens, 19, 58, 63–4, 70 as figure in a landscape, 136–7 autobiography, asfigure of rhetoric, 17–21, 44–8, claim to truth, 60 59–60, 125, 129–39 implicit life-story,16 as idée fixe, 27, 95 intro/retrospection, 58 identity, sense of, 67–9 Paulde Man on, 60, 69 inillustrations, 46–7, 50 Shakespeare, 53–4, 56–7 ‘inner life’ of, 19–21 unified subject, 3 naming of, 130–1 pseudonyms of, 130 Babbage, Charles, 101 biography, Backscheider, Paula, 3, 119 bi-focalism, x, 14, 96, 109–17 Barker, Juliet, building blocks of, 124 on the Brontës, 27, 138 changeable face of, 91 on Wordsworth, 20, 22, 62–3, 128 chronological imperative, 36, 121 Barnes, Julian, 9, 17, 123 collaborative, 64–72 Barrie,J. M.,47 comparative, x, 96–109 Bate, Jonathan, compared with history and fiction, on Clare, 136–7 x–xi, 2, 5, 30–1 on Shakespeare’s sonnets, 55–7 as conspiracy theory, 61 Beer, Anna, 95, 110–16, 131 definition of, 30, 138

160 Index 161

domestic life, 46–7 Carr, E. H.,8,117, 118 events in,36–9 Carroll, Lewis (Charles Dodgson), forms of, 4–5, 121–4 36, 47 genre, 12–15, 30–1 Chapman, John, 97, 101 groupbiography, 40–1 chronicle offacts, 16, 23 hybridity of, x, 76, 119, 123, 138, Civil War, 92, 110 140 Clare, John, 136–7 lives and times, 91–2 Coe, Jonathan, meaning in, 25, 128–9 onB.S.Johnson, 4, 21, 122 narrative strategies, 120–4 frustrations of biography,21 narrative tactics, 124–39 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 59 as non-fiction narrative, 15 collaborative biography, 64–72 novelistic flair, 41–2 Collins, Wilkie, 101 as palimpsest, 17 comparative biography, see periods in vogue, 6 biography poetics of, ix, 4–10, 118–40 craft, 12 principles of, 6–10 Crick, Bernard,21 summative endings, 128–9 creative process, synchronic/diachronic in Golding, 84–6 changes, 94 in Thomas, E., 81–4 temporality, 120–2, 125–9 in Wordsworth, 126–7 theatrical scenes, 42–4, 123–4, criticism, 137–8 biographical, 74–7, 84, 88–90, theory, ix, 1–4, 118–20 106 ‘thinning’, 123, 135 changing nature of, 89–90 and truth, 6, 21–4, 133, 139–40 commentary,79 Blessington, Lady, 131 creativity in, 81–4 Bloomsbury biography, 92, 94 role of, 74–7 Booth,Wayne, C., 75, 133 thematic analysis in, 87–8 Boswell, James, Cross, J. Walter, 96–8, 107–9 on Johnson, 4, 6, 64, 128–9 Culler, Jonathan, 2,9 useofscenes, 27–8 Boyd,William, 67 defamiliarisation, 86 Bradbury, Malcolm, 32, 74 design, 12–13 Brontë, Charlotte, 27 dialogue, 35, 137–8 funeral, 129 Dickens, Charles, 50, 101 Heger letters, 22–3 Ackroyd on, 21, 121–2, 133–4 meeting George Smith, 137–8, 140 Donne, John, 134–5, 140 Byatt, Antonia, 122–3 dossier, 122 Byron, Lord, 125 Dray, William, H., 126 Drayton, Michael,53 Campbell, Gordon and Corns, Drury, John, Thomas, 109, 111, 113 commentary on Herbert, Carey,John, 84–90 77–81 Carlyle, Thomas, 61–3, 101 explication de texte, 79 Carr, David, 16 Dryden, John, 5 162 Index

Edel, Leon, 3, 119 Gilbert, S. and Gubar, S., 94 Eliot, George, xi, 95 Gill, Stephen, 20, 22, 126–7, 128 conservatism, 103–4 Gladstone, W. E., 97 genderedhistory, 96–109 Godwin, Edward, 36–7, 40, 42, 47 as guru, 102 Golding, William, xi and John Cross, 96–8 influence of Monteith, 84–5 and G. H. Lewes, 95 religion versus science, 84, 88 on marriage, 106–7 works: Darkness Visible, 84–5; Fire ‘Meliorism’, 95 Down Below, 88; Free Fall, 88; names, 130 TheInheritors,85–6, 88; Lord of rebelliousness, 95 theFlies, 85; The Paper Men, on rights of women, 101, 103–4 88; Pincher Martin, 85, 86–7, works: AdamBede, 101, 120, 125; 88; The Spire,88 Middlemarch,99, 105–8; The Gooding, Margaret, 70–2 Mill on theFloss, 97, 98 Gordon, Lyndall, 27, 30, 138, 140 Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 79, 81, 126 Greenblatt, Stephen, 21 Ellis, David, 119 Grayling, A. C., 90 Ellmann, Richard, 77 emplotment, 16, 40 ethics/empathy, 9 hagiography,40 Evans, Richard, J., 119 Haight, Gordon, 96, 99–100, 108–9 evidence, 25–6, 49–52, 63–4, 139 Hall, Radclyffe, 93 Hamilton, Ian, 76 facts in art, 18–26 Hardy, Barbara, 15–16 historical facts, 19, 60, 72–3 Hardy, Thomas, 40, 65, 123 quasi-facts, 19, 60, 63, 72 Harman, Claire, 17 feminism, 48, 94, 101, 102, 108 Hayman, Ronald, 132 fictiveness, 45 Hazlitt, William, 53, 90 flashbacks, 126 Heaney, Seamus, 64, 92 form, see biography Herbert, George, xi Forster, E. M., 93–4 theme of love, 77–81 Fraser, Antonia, 24 works: Affliction 1, 81; The Altarr, French, Patrick 79; The Collarr, 79; Dialogue, on V. S. Naipaul, 23–5, 66–72 80; Easter Wings, 79; The Elixirr, Freudian psychology,3 80; Jordan 11,78; Love 111,78; Frost, Robert, 81, 83–4 Virtue, 80 Furbank, P. N., on Forster, 93 Hibberd, Dominic, 126, 134, 135, 140 gaps, see narrative histoire/recitt, 10, 35 Gardner, Helen, 5 historiography, ix, 11, 27, 110, Gaskell, Elizabeth, 21, 22–3, 27, 29, 118–19 128–9, 135–6, 137–8 historiology, 2, 5 gender, x, 92, 94, 96, 101–4, 125, 130 history, 9–10, 48, 118 and politics, 109, 113, 114–17 andfiction, 118–19 Genette, Gerard, 38–9, 145–6 see also facts in art genre, ix–xi, 12–15, 30 Hollis, Matthew, 81–4 Index 163

Holmes, Richard, 6, 8–9, 14 landscape, 136–7 biography as pursuit/haunting,8 language, 139–40 comparative biography, 96 figurative, 26–30 inventing the truth,139 rhetorical, 133–6 personalpoetics, 9 Larkin, Philip, 76, 132, 140 Holroyd, Michael, 6, 11, 89, 119 Lee, Hermione, 1, 6, 49, 118, 121, criticism in biography, 74 127, 129 on Ellen Terry, xi, 32–48 Lewalski, Barbara, K., 1, 77, on Lytton Strachey, 93 110–12 homosexuality, 93–4 the ‘Eviad’, 113–15 Honan, Park, 1, 51, 54 Lewes, G. H., 95, 96, 98, 100, 101, Horowitz, Anthony, 33 105 Hughes, Kathryn, 95, 97, 102, 104, life-writing, 92, 127 120, 125, 130 literariness, 2, 10, 30 Hughes, Ted, 132 literary biography, Hutchinson, Mary,59 defining moment, 54 hybridity, see biography singular character, 19 traditional principles, 6 identity, 3, 60, 92, 94, uniqueness of, 49–50 136–7 literary criticism, 75–7, 88–90 implied author, 50 literary theory, 1–4 Industrial Revolution, 102 literary works, x–xi inference, 52–7, 73 ambiguous status of,19 ‘inner life’, 19–21 as evidence, 50–2, 61–3 ‘insideoutbiography’, 122 fictionalising facts, 72–3 ‘intentional fallacy’, 88 historical facts/quasi-facts, 19, 50, interpretation, 57, 60 of evidence, 25, 63, 119 as legitimate sources, 54 subjectivity of, 118 ‘Lives’ and times, 91–4, 117 Irving, Sir Henry, 40–1, 44 Lycett, Andrew, 131

James, Henry, 47, 123 Johnson, B. S., 4 MacCarthy, Fiona, 131–2 Johnson, Linton Kwesi, 72 Magritte, René, 3, 118 Johnson, Samuel, 4, 6–7, 27–8, Malcolm, Janet, 123, 125, 132–3 128–9, 140 Malone, Edward, 54 poetics, 6–7 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia, 34 works: Life of Savage, 7; Lives of the Maugham, William Somerset, 92 Poets, 76, 147n.8; The meaning, see biography Ramblerr,6 memoir(s), 23–5, 34, 39, 41, 42–3 Johnstone, Kenneth, R., 20, Mill, John Stuart, 101 61–4 Miller, Lucasta, 27 Joyce, James, 77, 126–7 Millgate, Michael, 65 Milton, John, xi, 92, 95–6, 109–17 Keats, John, 45–6, 53, 59–60 sex and love, 112–17 Kermode, Frank, 87 wives, 96, 110–11 164 Index

Milton, John–continued Owen, Richard, 101 works: Comus,95; Divorce tracts, Owen, Wilfred, 126 111; Paradise Lostt, 76, 95, 113–16; Samson Agonistes, 95–6 Patterson, Annabel, 111 Mink, Louis, 15–16 Pearson, Hesketh, 65–6 modal verbs, 37, 135 personality, Moffat, Wendy, 93–4 implied,75 Monro, Harold,81 of the subject, 38–9 Monteith,Charles, see Golding theory,3 Motion, Andrew, 132, 140 personification, 60 Plath,Sylvia, 28–30, 123, 132–3 Naipaul, Pat, 66, 70, 71–2 plotting a ‘Life’, 32–48 Naipaul, V.S., xi, 23–5, 66–72, 92 fictional techniques, 32–9 works: AnAreaof Darkness,67; A sub-plots, 40–1 Bend in the Riverr, 70; The poetics, Enigma of Arrival, 69; generic principles, 11 Guerrillas, 70–2; Half aLife,69; task of, 4–5 A House for Mr Biswas, 67, 70 see also biography narrative, Pope, Alexander, 92 as allegory, 45–6 postmodernism, 1, 14, 24, 119 biographical narrative, 15–18, Pound, Ezra, 81 119–20 Powell, Mary, 96, 110 cellular structure, 17 pragmatism, 4, 6, 14, 31 discourse, 38, 123 Proust, Marcel, 50 features of, 124 found and imposed, 17 Reade, Charles, 36, 43 games, 32–6 reader’s participation, 108 gaps, 18, 19–20 reader-response criticism, 88 narrational technique, 123 reading lessons, 139 narrational time and space, 35 Redford, Bruce, 13 non-fiction narrative, 15, 30 relativism, 119 poetics of,9 representation, strategies, x, 120–4 historical, 119 symbolic, 10, 18 self-representation, 57–64, 65, 70 tactics, x, 124–39 uncertainties of,3 temporality, see biography revelatory experiences, 126–7 narrator, 34–6 rhetoric, 31, 124, 129–39 new historicism, 2, 88 Rose, Jacqueline, 132 Nicholl, Charles, 122 Nicolson, Nigel, 93 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 18, 31 Nokes, David, 27–8 Schoenbaum, Samuel,54 Novarr, David, 3, 119 self-representation, 19, 57–64, 69 Shakespeare, William, 19, 50, 92, 122 O’ Driscoll, Dennis, 64 works: Sonnets, 52–7 Orwell, George, 50, 75, 123, Shapiro, James, 54, 122 130 Shaw, George Bernard, 44, 47, 65–6 Index 165

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 122, 136 Uglow, Jenny, 91, 101, 102–4, Shields, Carol, 51, 131 107–8 Showalter, Elaine, 94 Sidney, Sir Philip,53 Vallon, Annette, 20, 59, 61–2 Slater, Michael,12 Victoria, Queen, 40, 102 Smith, George, 137–8, 140 Spencer, Herbert, 97 Wagner-Martin, Linda, 132 Spenser, Edmund,53 Walton, Kendall, 26, 28 Stephen, Sir Leslie, 96 Wellek, René and Warren, Austin, implicit autobiography,99 11, 14 on Middlemarch,99 Wells, H. G., 40, 85–6 on The Mill on the Floss, 98 Westminster Review, 101 Sterne, Laurence, v White, Hayden, 2, 14, 72, 110, Stevenson, Anne, 123, 132 118 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 8, 17 on emplotment, 16, 40 storytelling, xi, 9–10, 30–1, 123–4 onendings, 129 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 105 on figurative life, 46 Strachey,Lytton, 6, 7, 93–4 ‘literariness’, 2, 10, 30 Stubbs, John, 134–5, 140 symbolising narrative, 18 Wilde, Oscar, 40, 47, 93 ‘Taffrail’ (H. T. Dorling), 87 Wilson, Frances, 22 Taylor, D. J., 123 Wolfenden Reportt, 93 temporality, see biography ‘woman question’, 100, 103, 106, Terry,Ellen, 108–9 children, 41–2, 44, 47–8 Woolf, Virginia, cultural icon, 44–6 on facts, 7 in illustrations, 46–7 ‘granite and rainbow’,3,7,122 Memoirs, 34, 39,41,42,43 society’sinfluence, 117 personality,39 Victorian biographies, 7 theatrical scenes, see biography works: TheArtof Biography, 7, 12, ‘thematic biography’,122 25, 91; Moments of Beingg,127; theory, see biography The New Biography,7; Orlando, Theroux, Paul, 23–5 20, 26, 92–3, 94, 121; ARoom Thomas, Dylan, 131 of One’s Own, 94 Thomas, Edward, xi, 81–4 Wordsworth, Dorothy,59 awareness of the war, 81, 83 works: Grasmere Journals, 21–2 creative process, 83–4 Wordsworth, William, influence of Frost, 81–3 as literary autobiographer, 57–8 wordlessness, 83–4 relationship with Dorothy, 22 works: Adelstrop, 83–4; March, 82; relationship with A. Vallon, 20, Novemberr, 82; Old Man, 83; 59, 61 The Signpostt, 83; The Sun used return to France?, 20, 61–3 to Shine, 83; Up in the Wind, 82 ‘spots of time’, 126–7 Times, The, 39,56 works: The Prelude, 57–64, Tomalin, Claire, 6 126–7 on Dickens, 12 Worthen, John, 125–6, 132 on Mary Wollstonecraft, 148n.34 Wu, Duncan, 59