Literary Biography: An Introduction

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Literary Biography Now and Then

The Cinderella of Literary Studies

The Rise and Rise of Literary Biography

Dr Johnson: Biographer, Theorist and Subject

Virginia Woolf: Time, Memory and Identity

2. Life [Hi]Stories: Telling Tales

Aspects of Narrative

(i) Beginnings: Charlotte Brontë

(ii) Middles: Thomas Hardy

(iii) Endings: Jane Austen

The Naked Biographer

Inventing the Truth

3. Reading Biography

Biographer, Biography and the Reader

Imagining Blake

Problems of a Hybrid Form

Reading Lessons

4. Literary Biomythography

Biomythography

Myth-Making: The Brontë Paradigm

(i) Facts: Selection and ‘Spin’

(ii) Fact into Fiction

(iii) Fiction into Myth

(iv) Myth into ‘Faction’

(v) Demythologising the Brontës

Variations on the Theme

(i) Byron

(ii) Dickens

(iii) Sylvia Plath

Conclusions

5. Inferential Biography: Shakespeare the Invisible Man

Virtual Shakespeares

(i) The Facts

(ii) The Theatrical Context

(iii) The Social Context

(iv) The Shakespeare Mythos

(v) The Shakespeare Canon

The Implied Author: Inferential Biography

(i) The Art of Love: The Sonnets

(ii) Prejudice, Discrimination and the Law: The Merchant of Venice

(iii) War and the Politics of Nationhood: Henry V

(iv) Language and Thinking: Hamlet

(v) Art and Artifice: The Tempest

The Limits of Imagination

6. Literary Biography and Portraiture

Sister Arts

(i) Biography and Portraiture: Reynolds’s Portrait of Dr Johnson

(ii) Reading the Image: Cassandra Austen’s Sketch of Jane Austen

(iii) Visual Myth-Making: Henry Weekes’s Shelley Monument

(iv) Celebrity Image: Thomas Phillips’s Portrait of Byron in Albanian Dress

(v) Visual Memoir: Joseph Severn’s Portrait of John Keats

(vi) Bardography: The Chandos Portrait of Shakespeare

(vii) The Inner Life: R. W. Buss’s Dickens’s Dream

(viii) Sisters’ Arts: Vanessa Bell’s Portrait of Virginia Woolf

(ix) ‘To prepare a face …’: Patrick Heron’s Portrait of T. S. Eliot

(x) Branwell’s Ghost: Branwell Brontë’s Portrait of his Three Sisters

Art to Order

7. Comparative Biography: Dickens’s ‘Lives’

The Victorian Dickens

The Modern Dickens

The Post-Modern Dickens

Lives and Times

8. Literary Auto/Biography

Acts of Self-Creation in Wordsworth and Joyce

Wordsworth’s ‘biographic verse’

Joyce’s ‘artist, like the God of creation’

Masks and Metaphors

9. Biography in Practice

An Interview with Dominic Hibberd, author of Wilfred Owen: A New Biography

Living with the Subject

Imagining Wilfred

Matters of Life and Death

10. Authorised Lives

The Life of Graham Greene by Norman Sherry  

Bernard Shaw by Michael Holroyd

T. S. Eliot by Peter Ackroyd

Orwell: The Life by D. J. Taylor

Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life by Andrew Motion

Contemporary Lives

11. Literary Lives: Scenes and Stories

Dinner with Dr Johnson and John Wilkes

Dinner with Mrs Ramsay

Biography and Fiction

12. Biography and the Future

Select Bibliography

Further Reading

General Bibliography

Index