Notes and References INTRODUCTION I. Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Bronte·, ed. Alan Shelston (Harmonds­ worth: Penguin Books, 1977) ch. vn, p. I 55. This is a reprint of the 185 7 first edition. 2. Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy. On the Interpretation of Narrative (Harvard University Press, 1979) p. 117. 3. David Novarr, The Making of Walton's Lives (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958) p. 495. Nearly thirty years ago Novarr modestly noted the disregard of form in the study of biography. More aggressively, Leon Edel presses the case for the formal analysis of biography in 'Biography: The Question of Form', Friendship's Garland, Essays Presented to Mario Praz, ed. Vittorio Gabrieli (Rome: Edizioni de Storia e Letteratura, I 966) pp. 343-60, and more recently in 'Biography: A Manifesto', biography, I: I (1978) 1-3. 4. Edward Gibbon, An Essay on the Study of Literature (I 761, French; New York: Garland Publishing, 1970) pp. 99-100. Gibbon adds that the rarest quality is meeting 'a genius who knows how to distinguish them [the types offacts] amidst the vast chaos of events, wherein they are jumbled and deduce them, pure and unmixed, from the rest' (p. 100). 5. On Donne, see Novarr, The Making of Walton's Lives, p. 56; on Boswell, Robert Gittings, The Nature of Biography (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978) p. 32; Thomas Carlyle, History of Frederick II of Prussia Called Frederick the Great, ed. John Clive (University of Chicago Press, 1969) pp. ~; Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (1918; New York: Capricorn Books, 1963) pp. 6, 184; Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (New York: Harcourt Brace jovanovich, 1973) p. 281; Gore Vidal, 'French Letters: Theories of the New Novel', Matters of Fact and Fiction (New York: Vintage Books, 1978) p. 75. 6. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, ed. C. F. Harrold (New York: Odyssey Press, 1937) p. 203; Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, tr. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollindale, ed. Walter J. Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967) p. 301. In the same work Nietzsche also declares there are no facts, 'only interpretations' (p. 267). 7. Hugh Kenner, The Counterfeiters, An Historical Comedy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968) p. 61. 8. In answer to the question what was new in his biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the third since 1954 in English, Matthew J. Bruccoli replied 'more facts'. This rallying cry summarizes Bruccoli's sense of the responsi- 210 Notes and Riferences 211 bility of a biographer shared by many: 'he should assemble a great many details in a usable way, relying heavily on the subject's own words', 'Preface', Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, The Life of F. Scott Fitzy,erald (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981) p. xx. Froude, the biographer of Carlyle, made the same point when he wrote 'the facts must be delineated first ... We must have the real thing before we can have a sense of a thing', quoted in 'Preface', Studies in Biography, ed. Daniel Aaron (Harvard University Press, 1978) p. vi. Ovid, however, was aware of certain dangers: 'I will sing of facts, but some will say that I invented them', Fasti, Book vi, I :3. 9. On Lockhart's departure from fact in his biography of Scott see Francis R. Hart, Lockhart as Romantic Biographer (Edinburgh University Press, 1971) pp. 41-3 and passim. Virginia Woolf, 'The Art of Biography', Collected Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1967) IV: 228. Phyllis Rose, Woman of Letters: A Life 'of Virginia Woolf (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) p. viii. Helene Moglen in Charlotte Bronte: The Self Conceived (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976) calls for a new biography that 'places chronology at the service of causality, that risks partiality in the interest of emphasis' (p. 14). 10. Hayden White, 'The Historical Text as Literary Artifact', Tropics of Discourse, Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1978) pp. 84, 91-2. All further references are to this edition. White outlines his notion of emplotment in the 'Introduction' to Metahistory, The Historical Imagination in 19th Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1973) pp. 5-13. On narrative, fact and story also see Cushing Strout, 'The Fortunes of Telling', The Veracious Imagination (Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981) pp. 3-28. On basic plot structures see Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton University Press, 1957) pp. 158-238. II. See Ina Schabert, 'Fictional Biography, Factual Biography and Their Contaminations', biography, 5:1 (Winter 1982) 1-16, for an important discussion of fact, fiction and biography related to aesthetic integrity. 12. Pirandello in Lester G. Crocker ,jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Quest (New York: Macmillan, 1968) I:x. 13. Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, The Growth of Scientifu Knowledge, 2nd edn (New York: Basic Books, 1965) p. 46. See also David Fischer, Historians' Fallacies (New York: Harper & Row, 1970) and Ralph Rader, 'Fact, Theory and Literary Explanations', Critical Inquiry, I (December 1974) 254-72. Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians, p. vii. My italics. 14. Emil Ludwig, 'Introduction: On the Writing of History', Genius and Character, tr. Kenneth Burke (1927; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1928) p. 5. James L. Clifford, From Puzzles to Portraits, Problems of a Literary Biographer (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970) p. Ill. Robert Bernard Martin author of Tennyson (1980), echoes Johnson in a 1982 interview: 'S.C.: "What proportion of the biography would be educated guess or extrapolation?" R.B.M.: "Very, very little that is unsupported by fact. No, what I think you have to do is to guess and then verify it."' Stephen Cahan, 'Interview-Review: Robert B. Martin', biography, 5:1 (Winter 1982) 78. Martin added that perhaps the greatest danger 'to the academic in writing biography is that he's too often the victim of fact' (p. 85 ). For a similar view expressed by a literary historian, see David Novarr, The Making of Walton's Lives, p. 486: 'every biographer has in his mind, if not a 212 Notes and Riferences character-image, a sense of character images, a pattern, a sense of a certain unity, a sort of musical tone which explains or clarifies his subject'. 15. Harold Nicolson, The Development of English Biography (London: Hogarth Press, 1927) pp. 154-5. 16. Leon Edel, Henry James, the Master (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1972) p. 20. Edgar Johnson modifies this view when he states that the role of the imagination in biography is 'not so much in inventing as in perceiving relationships between different areas of fact and relationships between different degrees of relationship'. Edgar Johnson, 'The Art of Biography', Dickens Studies Annual, 8 (New York: AMS Press, 1980) p. 3. 17. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Sidney Colvin (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1899) u: 350-1. Dated 18 June 1893 from Samoa. CHAPTER 1: BIOGRAPHY AS AN INSTITUTION I. [George Eliot,] 'Sterling', Westminster Review, lxii (Jan 1852) 247-9. 2. John Sterling in Thomas Carlyle, The Life ofJohn Sterling, Centenary Edition, The Works of Thomas Carlyle (London: Chapman & Hall, 1897) XI, 138. In 1882 Leslie Stephen was also to refer to the great eighty-five-volume Biographie Universelle, Ancienne et Mode'rne (1811-1862), founded by J. F. Michaud and his brother L. G. Michaud (Paris: Michaud freres, 1811-62) as a model for the Dictionary of National Biography. The subtitle indicated the scope of the dictionary: Histoire, par ordre alphabetique, de la view publique et privie de tous les hommes qui sont fait remarquer par leurs icrits, leurs actions, leurs talents, leurs vertus, or leurs crimes. 3. John Watkins, 'Preface', Universal Biographical Dictionary (London: n.p., 1800) in Waldo H. Dunn, English Biography (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1916) p. 157. On being paid not to write lives see Carlyle, 'Sir Walter Scott', Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, Centenary Edition, The Works of Thomas Carlyle (London: Chapman & Hall, 1899) XXIX, 26-7. 4. Anon., 'Contemporary Literature', Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review, 68 (Oct 185 7) 581. The comment follows a review of Robert Carruthers, Life ofAlexander Pope including extracts from his Correspondence, 2nd edn en!. (London: H. G. Bohn, 1857) pp. 580-1. 5. There is surprisingly little on Plutarch's influence on English writing after Shakespeare. See Rudolph Hirzel, Plutarch (Leipzig: T. Weicher, 1912) pp. 139-50, 192-200. Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949) pp. 394-6; Edmund G. Berry, Emerson's Plutarch (Harvard University Press, 1961 ), ch. I. For a brief but important assessment by a late-Victorian biographer see Sidney Lee, 'Principles of Biography', Elizabethan and Other Essays, ed. Frederick Boas ( 1929; Fr~eport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1968) pp. 46-50. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (1865; London: Oxford University Press, 1963), New Oxford Illustrated Dickens, Book III, ch. 6, p. 476. 6. Edward Fitzgerald to John Allen, Letters of Edward Fitzgerald, ed. Alfred and Annabelle Terhune (Princeton University Press, 1980) I, 192. Fitzgerald Notes and Riferences 213 referred to the Parallel Lives as 'one of the most delightful books I ever read' (ibid.). John Aldington Symonds, Letters of John Aldington Symonds, ed. Herbert M. Scheuller and Robert L. Peters (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1968) II, 289, 400. 7. George Bernard Shaw to Archibald Henderson, CBS Collected Letters, 1898-1910, ed. Dan H. Laurence (London: Max Reinhardt, 1972) p. 510; R. C. Trench, Plutarch, His Life, His Lives and His Morals (London: Macmillan, 1873) p. 43. Other admirers of Plutarch included Bacon, Goethe, Words­ worth. and Emerson. 8. Plutarch, 'Alexander', Plutarch's Lives, tr. Bernadotte Perrin (London: Heinemann, 1928) Loeb Classical Library, vol.