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Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
Serie: Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture
Sprache: Englisch
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

An authoritative review of literary biography covering the seventeenth century to the twentieth century A Companion to Literary Biography offers a comprehensive account of literary biography spanning the history of the genre across three centuries. The editor - an esteemed literary biographer and noted expert in the field - has encouraged contributors to explore the theoretical and methodological questions raised by the writing of biographies of writers. The text examines how biographers have dealt with the lives of classic authors from Chaucer to contemporary figures such as Kingsley Amis. The Companion brings a new perspective on how literary biography enables the reader to deal with the relationship between the writer and their work. Literary biography is the most popular form of writing about writing, yet it has been largely neglected in the academic community. This volume bridges the gap between literary biography as a popular genre and its relevance for the academic study of literature. This important work: * Allows the author of a biography to be treated as part of the process of interpretation and investigates biographical reading as an important aspect of criticism * Examines the birth of literary biography at the close of the seventeenth century and considers its expansion through the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries * Addresses the status and writing of literary biography from numerous perspectives and with regard to various sources, methodologies and theories * Reviews the ways in which literary biography has played a role in our perception of writers in the mainstream of the English canon from Chaucer to the present day Written for students at the undergraduate level, through postgraduate and doctoral levels, as well as academics, A Companion to Literary Biography illustrates and accounts for the importance of the literary biography as a vital element of criticism and as an index to our perception of literary history.

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Cover

Introduction

Part I: The History of Literary Biography

1 The Emergence of Literary Biography

References

2 Lasting First Impressions: On the Origins of Ambivalent Attitudes to the Lake Poets, Cockney Keats, and Satanic Shelley

De Quincey, the Lake Poets’ Delinquent Biographer

Keats, the Little Cockney Chancer

Shelley Lovers

Conclusion

References

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

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Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture

This series offers comprehensive, newly written surveys of key periods and movements and certain major authors, in English literary culture and history. Extensive volumes provide new perspectives and positions on contexts and on canonical and post‐canonical texts, orientating the beginning student in new fields of study and providing the experienced undergraduate and new graduate with current and new directions, as pioneered and developed by leading scholars in the field.

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99. A Companion to Literary Biography

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A COMPANION TO LITERARY BIOGRAPHY

EDITED BY

RICHARD BRADFORD

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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data

Names: Bradford, Richard, 1957– editor.Title: A companion to literary biography / edited by Richard Bradford.Description: Hoboken : John Wiley & Sons Ltd, [2019] | Series: Blackwell companions to literature and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2018016257 (print) | LCCN 2018019216 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118896280 (Adobe PDF) | ISBN 9781118896259 (ePub) | ISBN 9781118896297 (hardcover)Subjects: LCSH: Authors, English–Biography–History and criticism–Theory, etc. | English prose literature–History and criticism–Theory, etc. | Biography as a literary form. | Authors–Biography–Authorship.Classification: LCC PR756.B56 (ebook) | LCC PR756.B56 C65 2018 (print) | DDC 820.9/492–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018016257

Notes on Contributors

Paul Baines is Professor of eighteenth‐century literature in the Department of English, University of Liverpool. Among his publications are: The House of Forgery in Eighteenth‐Century Britain (1999); The Complete Critical Guide to Alexander Pope (2000); Five Romantic Plays, 1768–1821 (edited with Edward Burns, 2000); Edmund Curll, Bookseller (with Pat Rogers, 2007); The Wiley‐Blackwell Encyclopedia of Eighteenth‐Century Writers and Writing, 1660–1789 (with Pat Rogers and Julian Ferraro, 2011); and The Collected Writings of Edward Rushton, 1756–1814 (2014).

John Batchelor is an Emeritus Professor of Newcastle University and a former Fellow of New College, Oxford. His earliest book was a brief life of the fantasist and illustrator Mervyn Peake, and his later books include biographies of Conrad, Ruskin, and Tennyson, and also of Ruskin’s closest woman friend, Pauline, Lady Trevelyan. He has also published monographs on Virginia Woolf and H.G. Wells, a literary history, The Edwardian Novelists, and an edited volume on The Art of Literary Biography. He lives in Oxford, where he continues his academic affiliation with New College.

Anna Beer is a biographer and literary critic. She was University Lecturer in Literature at the Department for Continuing Education, Oxford, between 2003 and 2010, and remains a Fellow of Kellogg College and Senior Course Tutor in Creative Writing at Oxford. She is the author of the first Life of the wife of Sir Walter Ralegh, Bess, and a biography of John Milton (Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer and Patriot), both discussed in her chapter. More recently, she has written a feminist study of eight female composers written for non‐specialists. The book was given the title Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music by its publishers, much to its author’s dismay. She has just finished a new biography of Sir Walter Ralegh, which will not be called Walter.

Emily Bell specializes in Charles Dickens and life writing, having completed her PhD on “Changing Representations of Charles Dickens, 1857–1939” at the University of York in 2017. She has published on “A Lost Autobiographical Sketch” in Wilkie Collins Journal, 14 (2017) and on “The Dickens Family, the Boz Club and the Fellowship” in Dickensian, 502.113.3 (2017). She is editing Dickens After Dickens, a volume of collected essays on Dickens criticism and biography.

Richard Bradford is Research Professor at Ulster University. He has published more than 30 books, including trade‐published biographies of Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Alan Sillitoe, Martin Amis, John Milton, and Ernest Hemingway. Prior to Ulster he held posts in Oxford, Wales, and Trinity College, Dublin. Presently he is Visiting Professor at the University of Avignon.

Jane Darcy was awarded a PhD from King’s College London in 2009 for her thesis on the interaction of melancholy and literary biography in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 2010 she received British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, moving to the English Department of University College where she now holds an honorary lectureship. Her monograph Melancholy and Literary Biography, 1640–1816 was published by Palgrave in 2013. She has also written articles on Samuel Johnson, William Cowper, and Jane Austen. She is now a teaching fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature at King’s College London and is currently writing a book on Jane Austen and melancholy.

Claire Davison is Professor of Modernist Studies at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, where her teaching and research focus on intermedial borders and the boundaries of modernism: the translation and reception of Russian literature in the 1910s to 1920s; literary and musical modernism; modernist soundscapes and broadcasting. She is the author of Translation as Collaboration—Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and S.S. Koteliansky (Edinburgh University Press, 2014) and the co‐editor (with Gerri Kimber) of a number of recent volumes on literary modernism, including the fourth volume of The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, in Four Volumes (Edinburgh University Press, 2012–2016) and The Collected Poetry of Katherine Mansfield (Edinburgh University Press, 2016).

Kevin De Ornellas lectures on English Renaissance literature at Ulster University. His acclaimed book, The Horse in Early Modern English Culture, was published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press in 2014. He has published widely on many aspects of drama of Shakespeare’s period. He is the principal pre‐show speaker and a member of the Management Committee of the Riverside Theatre, Coleraine.

Rebecca Devine is a PhD student at the University of Hull. She is currently studying the work of Philip Larkin, focusing intensely on his private letters. She completed her BA and MA in English Literature at Ulster University.

Kay Ferres is Professor Emerita of literature and history at Griffith University, Australia. She has published on Australian writers, modernism, and biography. She is currently working on a group biography of the Australian writers Nettie Palmer and Katherine Susannah Prichard and their friend Hilda Esson, The Life of Houses.

Madelena Gonzalez is Professor of Anglophone Literature at the University of Avignon and head of the multidisciplinary research group ICTT. She has published widely on Anglophone literature and culture and is author of Fiction after the Fatwa: Salman Rushdie and the Charm of Catastrophe (Rodopi, 2004).

Tim Hancock is an English Lecturer at Ulster University. Recent publications include articles on T S Eliot, John Betjeman and Seamus Heaney; his most recent presentation was to the conference ‘’Sylvia Plath: Letters, Words and Fragments’’ (Belfast, November, 2017).

Craig Howes is Director of the Center for Biographical Rsearch, Co‐Editor of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, and Professor of English at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He co‐edited Teaching Life Writing Texts (MLA, 2007, with Miriam Fuchs), and is the author of Voices of the Vietnam POWs (Oxford University Press, 1993).

Andrew James is a Professor in the School of Commerce at Meiji University in Tokyo. He completed a doctorate in English literature at the University of Ulster and has published essays on literary theory, Kingsley Amis, Graham Swift, and Frederick Philip Grove. His monograph, Kingsley Amis: Antimodels and the Audience (McGill‐Queen’s University Press), appeared in June 2013. He was the recipient of a three‐year Grant‐in‐Aid of Scholarly Research from the Japanese government in support of a project to study the manuscripts in the British Library’s Graham Swift Archive. Within the field of archival studies he has particular interest in the role of draft revisions in the creative process.

Jan Jędrzejewski is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Ulster. A specialist in Victorian literature, Irish literature in English, and Anglo‐Polish literary relations, he has published Thomas Hardy and the Church (Palgrave, 1996), George Eliot (Routledge, 2007), and critical editions of works by Le Fanu and Hardy.

Andrew Keanie is a lecturer at Ulster University. He has written books, articles, reviews, and book chapters on several of the writers of the English Romantic era. He is a poet and musician, and lives in Derry with his wife and near his grown‐up daughter.

Thomas Lockwood is Professor Emeritus of English and former department chair at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the editor of the drama volumes of the Oxford “Wesleyan” edition of the works of Henry Fielding and is completing a biography of Jonathan Swift for the Blackwell Critical Biographies series.

Paul K. Lyons is an independent journalist and writer. He is the creator and curator of three diary‐based websites: The Diary Review (articles on diaries and diarists); And so made significant … (an extensive online diary anthology); and The Diary Junction (a database of diarists). He is the author of Brighton in Diaries, and has kept a diary regularly since childhood.

John McCourt is Professor of English literature at the Università di Macerata, Italy. He is a specialist in Joyce Studies and in nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century Irish literature. The co‐founder of the Trieste Joyce School (1997), he is widely published and best known for James Joyce: A Passionate Exile (Orion Books, 2000) and The Years of Bloom: Joyce in Trieste 1904–1920 (Lilliput Press, 2000). His most recent book is Writing the Frontier: Anthony Trollope between Britain and Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2015).

Jane McVeigh is Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of English & Creative Writing, University of Roehampton, and Associate Lecturer for the Oxford University Department of Continuing Education. Her publications include In Collaboration with British Literary Biography: Haunting Conversations (Palgrave, 2017).

Linda M. Morra is Professor of Canadian Literature and Canadian Studies at Bishop’s University. She served as the Craig Dobbin Chair of Canadian Studies at University College Dublin (2016–2017) and as a Visiting Scholar at University of California, Berkeley (2016). Her book, Unarrested Archives (2014), was a finalist for the Gabrielle Roy Prize in English, and her edition of Jane Rule’s Taking My Life (2011) was a finalist for the LAMBDA prize (2012).

Julian North is Associate Professor in Nineteenth‐Century Literature in the Department of English, University of Leicester. She specializes in Romantic and Victorian life writing. She is the author of The Domestication of Genius: Biography and the Romantic Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) and one of the editors of The Works of Thomas De Quincey (Pickering & Chatto, 2000–2003, 21 vols.). She is currently working on literary portraiture in Victorian Britain.

Lois Potter, Ned B. Allen Professor Emerita of the University of Delaware, has taught at the Universities of Aberdeen, Leicester, Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle, and Tsuda College, Tokyo. She has published on Milton, English Civil War literature, the theatrical history of Twelfth Night and Othello, and Robin Hood. She edited The Two Noble Kinsmen for the Arden Shakespeare and Pericles for the Norton Complete Works. Her most recent book is The Life of William Shakespeare (Wiley‐Blackwell, 2012).

Amber K. Regis is Lecturer in Nineteenth‐Century Literature at the University of Sheffield, and her research explores life writing across different media and genres. Recent publications include a critical edition of The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and Afterlives (Manchester University Press, 2017, co‐edited with Deborah Wynne). The latter volume contains her essays on Brontë portraiture and 1930s biographical stage plays.

Carl Rollyson, Professor Emeritus of Journalism at Baruch College, CUNY, has published biographies of Marilyn Monroe, Lillian Hellman, Martha Gellhorn, Norman Mailer, Rebecca West, Susan Sontag, Jill Craigie, Michael Foot, Sylvia Plath, Amy Lowell, Dana Andrews, and Walter Brennan, and several studies of biography, including Confessions of a Serial Biographer (McFarland, 2016). He is at work on This Alarming Paradox: The Life of William Faulkner and The Last Days of Sylvia Plath.

Dale Salwak is Professor of English Literature at Southern California’s Citrus College. His publications include The Literary Biography: Problems and Solutions (Macmillan Press, 1996), Living with a Writer (Palgrave, 2004), Teaching Life: Letters from a Life in Literature (Iowa, 2008), Writers and Their Mothers (Palgrave, 2018), and studies of Kingsley Amis, John Braine, A.J. Cronin, Philip Larkin, Barbara Pym, Carl Sandburg, Anne Tyler, and John Wain. He is a recipient of Purdue University’s Distinguished Alumni Award as well as a research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is also a frequent contributor to the (London) Times Higher Education magazine and the Times Educational Supplement.

Martin Stannard is Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Leicester. He has published extensively on Evelyn Waugh, following The Critical Heritage (1984) with a major biography in two volumes (1986 and 1992). His Norton Critical Edition of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier appeared in 1995 (revised 2011) and his biography of Muriel Spark in 2009. Currently he is Co‐Executive Editor of Oxford University Press’s 43‐volume scholarly edition of The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, editing Vile Bodies for this (2017), and researching a new biography of Ford. Professor Stannard is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the English Association.

Emanuela Tegla has a PhD in literature from the University of Ulster and has been working recently on autobiography and the question of identity. She is the author of J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Power. Unsettling Complicity, Complacency, and Confession (Brill/Rodopi, 2016) and of articles on various aspects of contemporary literature. Her main research interests include ethics, autobiography, postcolonial literature, and the globalization of literature.

Marion Turner is Associate Professor of English and Tutorial Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford. She is the author of Chaucerian Conflict (OUP, 2007) and the editor of A Handbook of Middle English Studies (Wiley‐Blackwell, 2013). Her biography of Geoffrey Chaucer, Chaucer: A European Life, will be published by Princeton University Press in 2019.

James Underwood is Research Fellow in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Huddersfield, and a recipient of a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award for 2017–2018. His research interests are in twentieth‐century poetry, writers’ letters, and literary biography, and he is currently completing a monograph on Early Larkin.

James Ward lectures in eighteenth‐century literature at Ulster University. He has published widely on this topic; Memory and Enlightenment is forthcoming from Palgrave.

Introduction

Richard Bradford

Since its inception in the seventeenth century, literary biography in English has been treated with modest respect by the literary establishment and has enjoyed considerable popularity among the reading public. Its status within academia, however, is more problematic. On the one hand its presence is acknowledged as a necessary concomitant to the study of a particular author or their period. Many student reading lists will include the most respected biographies of major figures, and all university libraries stock lives of those writers who merit inclusion in the mainstream canon and its fashionable peripheries. At the same time, one senses that the genre in its own right is regarded as little more than a tolerable supplement to the proper enterprise of literary studies. The ‘elephant in the room’ is probably an exaggeration, yet it catches something of the uncomfortable relationship between biography and literary studies. Literary biography is by far the most popular form of writing about literature. Very few people outside the education system voluntarily purchase and read works of literary criticism, the one exception to this being the brief, disposable review sections of newspapers. One might therefore assume that biographies of writers would be an essential feature of the intensive study of literature in higher education. Surely academics should give attention to the self‐evident appetite among the reading public for a detailed intimate knowledge of the lives of writers whose works they respect and enjoy?

From the time when Matthew Arnold speculated on how studying literature would improve the spiritually and morally inadequate members of the public who seemed to have abandoned the church, there has been an inordinate emphasis on the text, the artwork, at the expense of the person who produced it.

The reasons for this are various. The New Critics did their best to implement in practical terms Arnold’s visionary manifesto, and throughout their work on the principles and methodology of critical practice they stress the dangers of speculating on or citing contextual material, specifically what we know or presume to know about the author and their world. By implication, they treated the literary studies student as someone who should be protected from the distractions of getting to know the person behind the work. Read Ransom’s “Criticism Inc.” (1937) and Wimsatt and Beardsley’s “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946) and you are left with the impression of school‐masterly rigor, underpinned by the fear that their charges will allow an image of the author as real person with feelings and a private history to occlude their focus on the work as a linguistic and aesthetic object.

Following the arrival of structuralism, post‐structuarlism, and their numerous ideological cousins, the author continued to be relegated to a secondary role in this new, theoretical, landscape of literary studies. Unlike the New Critics, who were concerned with the preservation of the novel or poem uncontaminated by the vagaries of the real world, the theorists treated both the author and the text as twin features of an exercise in self‐delusion. There was a general consensus that literature could not be defined as a form in its own right: it was, rather, a mutable element in a cocktail of linguistic discourses and non‐linguistic sign‐systems. As a consequence the author was not its originator but rather a participant in a discursive zone that minimized perhaps even eradicated individuality. Here, Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” (1967) is the exemplary essay, though whether he expected his apocalyptic scenario to be taken seriously is open to question.

Aside from there being little that resembles a pedagogic or theoretical template for the study of literary biography, there is a far more straightforward reason for its marginalization. Even the most flexible degree structures are held together by a nucleus of literary history, a chronology of major texts and authors which usually opens during the medieval period, concludes with the contemporary, and is studied in that order over a period of three or four years. The criteria for the selection of texts for the canon have been frequently debated, and some theorists have contended that the underpinning precept of some works as being aesthetically or intellectually more significant than others is a bourgeois fallacy. Nonetheless, this composition of books and authors has remained largely unchanged since the foundation of English as a university discipline.

The fact that it exists at all has more to do with exigency than pedagogic principle. Such a curricular narrative enables academics and students to consider factors such as cause and effect, involving who influenced whom and how the fabric of social and political factors underpinned a given novel or poem. This helps us to understand why literary biography, by its nature, has the potential to disrupt the orderly manner in which teaching and indeed research is routinely conducted. For example, while we can claim to have a secure, detailed knowledge of the society in which writers such as Chaucer, Sidney, and Shakespeare existed, our sense of what exactly each of them did and experienced varies greatly. Evidence on lives of individuals became an element of print culture toward the end of the seventeenth century, and alongside this the preservation of written documents such as correspondence, diaries, and anecdotal records improved, as did our perception of authors as real people with opinions and temperamental predispositions. Yet we regularly encounter inconsistencies in what we can hope or expect to know of the private lives of different authors, even those from roughly the same period.

The classic example is the acknowledged monarch of the canon, Shakespeare. Evidence as to who he was and what he did has increased hardly at all since Nicholas Rowe speculated on the man behind the plays in 1709 (see Potter, Chapter 23). At the same time his near‐contemporary John Donne left enough details of his actual presence and what he thought to enable us to conceive of him as a very real figure, a man whose state of mind is detectable within his artistic creations (see Hancock, Chapter 24). Even relative modernity does not secure for us a comprehensive knowledge of a given author. T.S. Eliot was so judiciously protective of his private life (see Keanie, Chapter 30) that we now know for more of his co‐participants in the project of modernism, such as Joyce (see McCourt, Chapter 31) and Pound, than we do of him.

If we were to treat biography as a significant collateral feature of critical assessment then we would face anomalies in terms of how it might be implemented. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to evolve a general methodology for students on the use of, say, letters, diaries, notebooks, unpublished manuscripts, anecdotes, and memoirs in a first year module on practical criticism. On its own, the latter possesses a secure disciplinary infrastructure, bulwarked by formal and generic markers, that enables us to compare one work with another in an analytical zone largely unrelated to context. But if we mix into this the information that enables us to bring a writer to life, problems arise. Texts either have certain things in common or they diverge radically in their manner and content, but the unshifting abstract paradigm of literature‐as‐literature enables us to stabilize a comparative focus. Once the presence of the author is introduced, this methodology is undermined by matters such as impressionistic empathy or revulsion—our attention to the text is distracted by a personal sense of enjoying, vicariously, an author’s company, sympathizing with their dilemmas or loathing them for what they believed in or did. Further problems arise when some authors announce themselves, through the evidence of their lives, as almost tangible figures, while others, by their own making or because of circumstance, exist only as vague, occluded ghosts and leave questions of who they were open to speculation. Variables, uncertainties, and private moments of empathy or alienation are endemic to biographies and biographical evidence, and it is therefore understandable that academia treats literary biography with caution.

There can be no immediate solution to the question of how literary biography can be integrated with literary studies, but this volume will, I hope, provide a reference point for those who wish to consider a way forward. Undergraduates searching for an original topic for their dissertation, postgraduates looking for an under‐researched field for their doctorate, and academics picking over new openings for teaching and publishing are usually well‐provisioned with guidebooks and agreed methodologies on how to deal with texts, contexts, and theoretical approaches to each. So much so that their apparent discovery of a genuinely unorthodox, non‐mainstream thesis usually turns out to be a contradiction in terms: if it exists someone is likely to have written about it. The exception is literary biography. Certainly, there are a number of substantial and important books on the topic by academics, such as Batchelor’s The Art of Literary Biography (ed., 1995) and Salwak’s The Literary Biography (1996). Both individuals are biographers—and contributors to this volume—but when they address themselves to the genre as a whole they generally find themselves looking through a window to a world beyond academe where literary biography is routinely written and read. Here, figures such as Richard Holmes in books such as This Long Pursuit. Reflections of a Romantic Biographer (2016) tell us a great deal about their travels, their evocative encounters with things touched by their subjects, rooms in which they lived, their sense of writing about writers as an emotional investment, a love story. It is an enchanting read, but works like this claiming to be literary criticism died out in the nineteenth century. There is a discernible gulf between literary biography as indulged by academia and its manifestation in the real world. This volume cannot hope to resolve it, but those willing to follow the numerous tracks charted by its contributors might find the potential for bridge‐building.

In the opening chapter in Part I, Darcy examines the birth of literary biography at the close of the seventeenth century and considers its expansion through the eighteenth. Romanticism saw the first instance of a landmark generation of literary writers who prompted accounts of how their lives interacted with the work; Keanie deals with this. North and Regis look at how peer‐on‐peer literary biography developed through the nineteenth century and note a growing tendency for writers—particularly Dickens and Hardy—to secure for themselves a biographical legacy significantly different from the truth. Davison looks at how, during the early twentieth century, the popularity of literary biography was reflected in its expansion within non‐print media, most significantly the wireless. Salwak’s chapter, on the genre’s development during the twentieth century, will open doors for later considerations of what modern and contemporary literary biography involves.

Part II will contain chapters that address the status and writing of literary biography from numerous perspectives. Some consider the ways in which the raw material of the biographer’s craft, such as letters (Devine), diaries (Lyons), and archived documents (McVeigh, Chapter 16, De Ornellas, and Morra) can be treated and made use of. Bell examines the tension between speculation and evidential material in biography, and McVeigh (Chapter 8) addresses the related question of whether the style and manner of a biographer can distort facts. Others look at how intrinsic elements of literary biography raise questions on issues such as gender (Beer and Ferres), ethics (Howes), what can and cannot be said (Stannard), and the ever‐present dilemma of whether literary texts can be regarded as autobiographical (Tegla and Underwood). Gonzalez, on Salman Rushdie, considers a unique instance of an author’s life becoming a real‐life narrative of violence and ideological polarization. Bradford conducts a survey of some of the key texts in academic criticism and theory and picks out an antipathy toward literary biography that is endemic to literary studies in universities.

The chapters in Part III, Classic Cases, examine the ways in which literary biography has played a role in our perception of writers in the mainstream of the English canon. It includes, in chronological order, pieces on: Chaucer (Turner); Shakespeare, (Potter); Donne (Hancock); Swift (Ward); Pope (Baines); Richardson and Fielding (Lockwood); Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Dickens, and Hardy (Jędrzejewski); Dickens, Tennyson, and Kipling (Batchelor); T.S. Eliot (Keanie); Joyce (McCourt); Lowell (Rollyson); Amis and Larkin (James). This Part completes and embodies the interactive character of the volume. Every chapter considers the historical progress of our perception of key authors and in this respect invites us to look back to Part I. In the latter, biographers were largely involved in lateral portraits, considering their peers, sometimes their friends, in terms of shared states of mind, and sometimes pressurized by what they were and were not allowed to say. History and the disclosure of controversial evidence altered these portraits and caused us to be aware that literary biography is an organic, hybrid form of writing, one that is almost literary—it inevitably involves speculation and a sense of narrative as its compelling attraction—yet which strives for the status of a scholarly, historical genre. At the same time, and most confusingly, alterations in our perception of authors as individuals swerve into, embrace, and often clash with our estimation of them as artists. Parts II and III involve a number of challenging interfaces, given that the chronological progress of biographies of specific authors, dealt with in the latter, is influenced, often impeded, and sometimes encouraged by the nature of evidence available and by the technique that a biographer feels is most appropriate to their subject, all of which feature as topics in Part II.

The three Parts of the volume will, I hope, create a productive friction, one that encourages readers to move between them, according to their objective or disposition. In a broader sense, this tripartite interface might spark a conversation, one that moves literary biography closer to the center of academic literary studies.

Part IThe History of Literary Biography

1The Emergence of Literary Biography

Jane Darcy

Literary biography—biographies of writers—emerged in the seventeenth century out of a tradition of historical biography and hagiography. Izaak Walton’s Life of John Donne (1640) and Life of George Herbert (1670) represent a bridge between idealized lives of saints and heroes and this new genre. Walton is innovatory in writing about the lives of poets, but he presents his subjects as exemplary men of God rather than as writers.

Thomas Sprat’s Life of Cowley (1668) has long been seen as the first proper literary biography as it focuses on Cowley as a poet. Although a preface to The Works of Mr Abraham Cowley rather than a stand‐alone narrative, it is lengthy and incisive, generally considered as setting a standard unmatched until Johnson’s Life of Savage (1744). It is equally important as an early articulation of biographical methodology. Sprat’s insistence that we should seek to know no more about a writer than what that writer has chosen to reveal about himself in his published works would be the central plank of Wordsworth’s impassioned argument about intrusive literary biography over a century later in 1816. Sprat’s argument that Cowley has “given the World the best Image of his own mind in these immortal Monuments of his Wit” is usually taken as a simple ethical principle. But his insistence on biographical propriety in fact conceals his efforts to disguise awkward details of Cowley’s career as a spy and his unsuccessful political maneuvering during the Restoration (Darcy 2013, 26–39). But the issue of the extent to which biography should probe a writer’s private life remains a critical one today as does the often‐concealed politics of life writing. Cowley’s assumption that a poet is male will be echoed in biographical and critical writing throughout the eighteenth century, especially when copyright legislation gives commercial impetus to new anthologies of poetry, so crucial to canon formation.

Sprat’s other influential stricture is against the use of familiar letters in biography. In “Letters that pass between particular Friends,” he writes:

the Souls of Men should appear undress’d: And in that negligent habit, they may be fit to be seen by one or two in a chamber, but not to go abroad into the Streets.

(Cowley 1668)

Sprat’s principle is not seriously challenged until William Mason defends his innovative use of familiar letters in his biography of the poet Thomas Gray (1775), arguing, “I am well aware that I am here going to do a thing which the cautious and courtly Dr Sprat (were he now alive) would highly censure.” (Mason 1775, 4).

But in fact John Dryden in his often‐neglected Life of Plutarch (1683) argues that it is exactly this state of undress—even nakedness—that biography should reveal. Comparing biographical writing with that of history, Dryden isolates the feature that gives biography its particular interest:

[…] there is withal, a descent into minute circumstances, and trivial passages of life, which are natural to this way of writing, and which the dignity of the other […] will not admit. There you are conducted only into the rooms of state; here you are led into the private Lodgings of the Heroe: you see him in undress, and are made Familiar with his most private actions and conversations.

(Dryden 1683, 94)

Nearly all the enduring issues in the writing of literary biography—about the primacy of uncovering a person’s hidden motivation, and the value of anecdote as a tool to achieve this—have their roots in classical biographical writing of Plutarch. An important legacy from Plutarch is his insistence that “it is not so much histories that we are writing but lives” (Duff 1999, 15). Starved of biographical information about Plutarch, Dryden uses his engaging essay to develop his own theory of biographical writing. His insistence that biography should explore the inner nature of the subject and make use of quotidian detail pre‐dates Johnson’s important Rambler 60 essay on biography by several decades.

It is also important to understand the commercial imperatives behind the growth of literary biography, in particular the development of copyright legislation. Under the Licensing Act of 1662, strict pre‐censorship had been imposed on all publications. This benefited the London book trade by legally protecting their copyrights, which were held to be perpetual and thus were extremely valuable. Under these circumstances, only the holders of a particular author’s copyright could publish his works—there could be no rival editions, no anthologies. Between 1695 when the Licensing Act lapsed and the Act of Queen Anne in 1710, publishers were made insecure, no longer able to enjoy legal protection for their copyrights. The Act of 1710 was largely designed to break down the monopolies of London booksellers by giving legal protection of only 14 years to new works and 21 years to works already in print. Booksellers, however, exploited a legal loophole, insisting that in common law their perpetual copyrights remained legal. The 1730s, when the first new copyrights began to expire, thus became a period of particularly fierce legal contests. These carried on until a decisive House of Lords ruling in 1774 that closed the legal loophole allowing perpetual copyright (St Clair 2004).

It is for this reason that throughout the period from 1710 to 1774 there was no incentive for booksellers to commission new lives of their poets. The main form of literary biography remained the brief biographical preface to an edition of the author’s works, usually dignified and dull—a brief summary of the writer’s parentage and education followed by an account of the works themselves. Tickell in his Life of Addison (1726), for example, deems Addison’s private family life to be of minimal interest, openly stating, “I have proposed to touch but lightly on those parts of his life, which do not regard him as an author” (1726, xix). The other place where the lives of writers appeared in print was in biographical dictionaries, such as William Oldys’s Biographia Britannica (1747–1766).

This is not to imply that the full‐length biography in general remained in the doldrums in the first 75 years of the eighteenth century. Sensational biographies, such as the lives of criminals and actresses, flourished, as did new novels often purporting to be the life story of their hero or heroine. The unscrupulous Edmund Curll’s practice of rushing out cheap and inaccurate biographies of recently dead celebrities led to Arbuthnot’s famous quip about Curll adding a new terror to death (Baines and Rogers 2007, 1).

But biographical controversy had a powerful effect on the nascent genre of literary biography, fueling the demand for further biographies of a single author. Even Johnson, as Roger Lonsdale points out, exploited contemporary taste for scandalous biography in his Life of Mr Richard Savage (Darcy 2013, 59).

The final abolition of perpetual copyright in 1774 was followed, in the words of Johnson’s early biographer, Sir John Hawkins, by “a scramble of the lowest and least principled of the booksellers, for the jewel thus cast among them” (Lonsdale 2006, 1:4). Most of the copyrights of the important poets had been owned singly or jointly by London booksellers. To make the most of their threatened assets, they needed to bring out an edition of all their poets before they were undercut by their rivals in Scotland. J.D. Fleeman has explained that what would establish copyright was the inclusion of new prefaces, deemed inalienable, and so these were commissioned with the intention of safeguarding the texts of the poets (Lonsdale 2006, 1:13).

This was the background to Dr. Johnson’s commission to write his biographical prefaces, the Lives of the English Poets. When Edinburgh bookseller John Bell advertised his grand venture, an affordable 109‐volume series, The Poets of Great Britain Complete from Chaucer to Churchill, London publishers had to act quickly. In March 1777, a large consortium of them sent a deputation to Johnson, commissioning him to write a set of prefaces for a rival anthology. By April the imminent publication of The English Poets, with a Preface, Biographical and Critical, to each Author, By Samuel Johnson, LL.D was being advertised. The task proved a momentous one, the completed volumes appearing between 1779 and 1781. The relatively brief prefaces Johnson envisaged became full blown pieces of literary biography in which he gave serious critical assessments of each poet’s works. It is here, for example, in his “Life of Cowley,” that Johnson coined the term “metaphysical poetry.” These poets, 52 in all, were not selected by Johnson: the booksellers dictated who should be included. But Johnson did not feel bound by the commercial imperative to offer bland praise. The works of minor poets he dismisses. Of Richard Duke, for example, he comments, “His poems are not below mediocrity: nor have I found much in them to be praised” (Mullan 2009). He admired Paradise Lost, but said candidly, “No one ever wished it longer than it is” (Mullan 2009).

Johnson’s interest in biography was well established long before he began Lives of the Poets. In 1744, as already noted, he published his wry biography of his unreliable friend, the poet Richard Savage. His periodical essay Rambler 60 is a text that became fundamental to biographical theory. Biographical prefaces by his contemporaries often opened with a reference either to this essay or to his Idler 84 on biography and autobiography. And from the eighteenth century to the present day, critics of life writing almost inevitably quote Johnson on the subject. He made a strong case for the importance of biography as a genre:

no species of writing seems more worthy of cultivation than biography, since none can be more delightful or more useful, none can certainly enchain the heart by irresistible interest, or more widely diffuse instruction to every diversity of condition.

(Johnson 1969, 318–319)

The ultimate search in biography is to add to our understanding of happiness and sorrow. We look to biography, he writes in Idler 84, not to discover “how any man became great, but how he was made happy; not how he lost the favour of his prince, but how he became discontented with himself” (Johnson 1963, 261).

Where biography had conventionally been concerned with great men, Johnson articulates the century’s new interest in the ordinary life: “there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful” (Johnson 1969, 320). Plutarch had written that “often a little matter like a saying or a joke hints at character more than battles where thousands die, huge troop deployments, or the sieges of cities” (Duff 1999, 15). Johnson’s well‐known statement “more knowledge may be made of a man’s real character by a short conversation with one of his servants, than from a formal and studied narrative” (1969, 322) tacitly endorses Plutarch’s and lightly suggests a further aspect of it: a biographer needs to authenticate the judgment made from revealing details by consulting someone who knew his subject as a private man.

Equally famous is Johnson’s statement about the value of quotidian detail:

It is frequently objected to relations of particular lives, that they are not distinguished by any striking or wonderful vicissitudes … But the business of the biographer is often to pass slightly over those performances and incidents which produce vulgar greatness, to lead the thoughts into domestick privacies, and display the minute details of daily life. There are many invisible circumstances which … are more important than public occurrences. Thus Sallust, the great master of nature, has not forgot, in his account of Catiline, to remark that ‘his walk was now quick, and again slow’, as an indication of a mind revolving something with violent commotion. (1969, 320–321)

Johnson saw the troublesome issue of “domestick privacies” and the extent to which biography ought to reveal the private life of its subject as bounded at one extreme by the pointlessness of uncritical praise. So, for instance, he criticizes Sprat’s Life of Cowley for giving so little detail that “all is shewn confused and enlarged through the mist of panegyrick” (Lonsdale 2006, 1:191). At the other end, he believes there should be a sense of decency, writing in his “Life of Addison” that “caprice, obstinacy, frolick, and folly, however they might delight in the descriptions, should be silently forgotten” (Lonsdale 2006, 3:18).

Of single‐subject literary biographies as opposed to group biographies, the most significant one between the 1774 copyright ruling and Boswell’s Life of Johnson in 1791 was William Mason’s Memoirs of the Life and Writing of Mr Gray (1775). Mason deliberately challenged Sprat’s earlier prohibition of the use of private letters biography. By publishing Gray’s letters, Mason famously declared, “Mr Gray will become his own biographer” (Mason 1775, 5). Horace Walpole immediately announced that biography had now found its epitome, writing to Mason, “You have fixed the method of biography and whoever will write a life must imitate you” (Cafarelli 1990, 22). The dominance of the life‐and‐letters model throughout the nineteenth century suggests Walpole was right. Together with this, Mason’s coinage of the phrase “become his own biographer” took a strong hold on popular imagination. It was frequently invoked by biographers and their reviewers for decades. It seemed to promise a new level of intimacy with a famous writer.

Boswell was one of the first to declare he was following the “Mason method,” by using Johnson’s own words to narrate his Life of Johnson (1964, 1:29). But he was neither Johnson’s official biographer, nor his first. He turned down a request from his publisher in December 1784, days after Johnson’s death, for “an Octavo volume of 400 pages of [Johnson’s] conversations ready by February” (Hyde 1973, 91).

Sir John Hawkins, another of Johnson’s friends, was prepared to step in. By the following year Hester Thrale Piozzi, herself compiling a book of biographical anecdotes about Johnson, heard that there were at least six others working on his biography (Hyde 1973, 92). The rivalry between Piozzi and Boswell in Johnson’s lifetime intensified in the years after his death, both determined to demonstrate their unique intimacy with the great man. Both had been recording Johnson’s sayings for a good 10 years. But Boswell had to contend with the fact that Johnson had effectively lived in the household of Hester Thrale and her first husband for extended periods. Boswell, by contrast, lived and worked in Scotland and thus was unable to see Johnson for long stretches at a time. It has been estimated that he only spent in the region of 200 days in Johnson’s company.

Following Johnson’s death, Boswell first published his account of the journey the two men made to Scotland. His Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785) was an immediate commercial success, although it had its critics, Horace Walpole calling it “a most absurd enormous book … the story of a mountebank and his zany” (Hyde 1973, 99). A year later, in 1786, Thrale Piozzi published her Anecdotes of Johnson. In her preface, she goes on the offensive with rival biographers, giving the precise date of a conversation in which Johnson asked her who she thought would be the best person to write his biography. He considers his old friend Dr. Taylor “better acquainted with my heart than any man or woman now alive,” but adds his intention “to disappoint the rogues” and either get Piozzi herself to write it, or write one himself (Piozzi 1786, 32). Piozzi’s signal is clear: Boswell is of no account, either as friend or putative biographer. In 1787 publishers offered Piozzi 500 pounds to publish Johnson’s letters to her—where Johnson himself had been content with an offer of 200 guineas to write all the Lives (Hyde 1973, 116). When these are published in 1788, Boswell is disappointed at Johnson’s lack of reference to him. He had already felt slighted by his deliberate side‐lining by Piozzi in her Anecdotes, privately calling her “a little artful impudent malignant Devil” who “wants to bite me as much as she can” (Hyde 1973, 100). The publication of Sir John Hawkins’s portentous life of Johnson in 1787, however, perturbs neither.

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