marriage) is in four volumes; Lockhart’s Scott is in seven. How are these dinosaurs to be recovered? Perhaps by editing?
Next, there are certain obvious biases within the selection. There are few American, Irish or Australian lives. There is the large predominance of literary biography over scientific, political or military. Equally, there is the overwhelming predominance of men over women, either as biographers or as subjects. This seems historically unavoidable. Aubrey included only three women in his Brief Lives, though one was the remarkable Countess of Pembroke; Johnson wrote nothing about his large circle of brilliant bluestocking friends; Hazlitt included no women in The Spirit of the Age. It was only with the late recognition of the mid-Victorian heroine – Caroline Herschel, Charlotte Brontë, Florence Nightingale, Harriet Martineau, Mary Somerville – that the biography of women began to emerge, and only with modern feminism that it began to have serious impact on the form after 1970, with work by Claire Tomalin, Hilary Spurling, Nancy Milford, Judith Thurman, Stacy Schiff and others.
But there is a wholly different level of objection. How can the term ‘classic’ (in the sense of unique and enduring) be applied to even the greatest of these biographies, when their facts and interpretations will always be altered by later research? This crucial question of the superannuating of any biography raises several issues. At the simplest level, it is a matter of factual accuracy. This is an obvious problem in the case of Thomas Moore, who altered and spliced so many of Byron’s letters and journal entries; or Boswell, who could not fully come to terms with Johnson’s early, unsettled years in London; or Mrs Gaskell, who suppressed much of Charlotte Brontë’s amorous life and correspondence with her Belgian mentor Monsieur Héger. (These letters, largely unsent, were published after Brontë’s death, though they had been partly used in her novel Villette.)
This leads on to a larger, almost philosophical question about the apparently ephemeral nature of biographical knowledge itself. If no biography is ever ‘definitive’, if every life story can be endlessly retold and reinterpreted (there are now more than ten lives of Mary Wollstonecraft, thirty lives of Johnson, two hundred lives of Byron, four hundred lives of Hitler, and literally countless lives of Napoleon), how can any one Life ever hope to avoid the relentless process of being superseded, outmoded, and eventually forgotten – a form of auto-destruction which has no equivalent in the novel.
This would also seem to imply that as ‘factual content’ grows out of date, the artistic structure is fatally weakened from within. When we learn of the young actress Ellen Ternan and her place in Dickens’s life, from the modern biographies by Peter Ackroyd (1990) and then Claire Tomalin (1991), doesn’t this fatally superannuate John Forster’s Life? (Forster mentioned Ellen Ternan only once – in an Appendix with reference to Dickens’s will.) Or when we discover from Richard Westfall’s magisterial Never at Rest (1980, abridged as The Life of Isaac Newton, 1993) the real extent of Newton’s alchemical and astrological interests, and their impact on his concept of universal gravity, doesn’t this weaken the authority of Sir David Brewster’s great two-volume Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (1855)?
In fact, one might suggest that precisely here lies one of the greatest arguments in favour of the disciplined, rigorous academic study of biography as a developing form. It is exactly in these shifts and differences – factual, formal, stylistic, ideological, aesthetic – between early and later biographies that students could find an endless source of interest and historical information. They would discover how reputations developed, how fashions changed, how social and moral attitudes moved, how standards of judgement altered, as each generation, one after another, continuously reconsidered and idealised or condemned its forebears in the writing and rewriting of biography.
Here one is considering virtually a new discipline, which might be called comparative biography. It is based on the premise that every biography is one particular interpretation of a life, and that many different interpretations or reassessments are always possible. (If there can be innumerable different interpretations of a fictional character – Hamlet, Moll Flanders, Mr Pickwick, Tess – then surely there can be as many of a historical one.) So, in comparative biography the student examines the handling of one subject by a number of different biographers, and over several different historical periods. In the case of Shelley, for example, one might compare the biographies by his contemporaries Hogg and Peacock (1858) with the late-Victorian one by Professor Edward Dowden (1886), the jazz-age one by André Maurois (1924), and the American New Deal biography by Newman Ivey White (1940). The ‘Shelley’ that we have inherited has grown out of all these versions, and he in turn reflects back a particular picture of each generation which has, alternately, been inspired or bored or scandalised by him.
Some comparative work has already begun. Sylva Norman has written about the strange shifts in Shelley’s posthumous reputation in The Flight of the Skylark (1954); Ian Hamilton about the cumulative influence of literary executors in Keepers of the Flame (1992); and Lucasta Miller in her study of the increasingly exotic literary cult of Haworth parsonage in The Brontë Myth (2001).
The notion of comparative biography also raises the question of the perceived limits of the traditional form. Ever since Edmund Gosse wrote a second, child’s-eye, version of his father’s biography (1890) as Father and Son (1907), and Virginia Woolf transformed a biography of Vita Sackville-West into the historical romance Orlando (1928), the boundaries between fact and fiction have become controversial and perilous. These experimental novel-biographies also form part of the tradition that might be usefully taught and studied. No critical account of modern ideas about biographical narrative could ignore Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) or A.S. Byatt’s Possession (1990).
The subtle question of the nature of non-fiction narrative, and how it differs from fiction, offers one of the most fascinating and fruitful of all possible fields for students. It is different from the conventional discipline of historiography. All good biographers struggle with a particular tension between the scholarly drive to assemble facts as dispassionately as possible and the novelistic urge to find shape and meaning within the apparently random circumstances of a life. Both instincts are vital, and a biography is dead without either of them. We make sense of life by establishing ‘significant’ facts, and by telling ‘revealing’ stories with them.
But the two processes are rarely in perfect balance or harmony. Indeed, with some post-modern biography the two primal identities of the biographer – the scholar and the storyteller – may seem to split completely apart, and fragment into two or more voices. This happens at unexpected, diverting moments in Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens (1990), or in a rich, continuous, polyphonic way with Ann Wroe’s Pilate: The Biography of an Invented Man (1999), or in a deliberately sinister, insidious, disconcerting manner with Andrew Motion’s Wainewright the Poisoner (2000). Yet this too is part of an older tradition already explored in Woolf’s Flush (1933), the playful biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog (with its genuine scholarly notes). Indeed, I believe it goes back through certain texts as far as the eighteenth century, and I have tried to investigate the roots of these bipolar forces (which may also be described as ‘judging versus loving’) in Dr Johnson & Mr Savage (1993). It is, of course, tricky terrain, the impossible meeting of what Woolf herself called ‘granite and rainbow’. But for that very reason, and because it requires a growing degree of critical self-knowledge, it could be rewarding for students to explore further.
Equally, the close textual study of biography could throw much more light on the unsuspected role of rhetorical devices such as ‘suspense’, ‘premonition’, ‘anecdote’ and ‘ventriloquism’ in the apparently transparent narrative forms of life-writing. And this in turn could reflect on the way that we are all, continuously, reinterpreting our own lives with story-based notions such as ‘success’, ‘failure’, ‘chance’, ‘opportunity’ and ‘achievement’. So biography could have a moral role, though not exactly the naïve exemplary one assigned to it by the Victorians. It may never teach us how to behave, how to self-help, how to find role models. But it might teach us simply how to understand other people better. And hence, through ‘the other’, ourselves. This, too, is part of the potential humanist discipline.
So,