The Practice of Biography

by Jan Marsh
|
5 books
These titles reveal how life-writing and research are done, even when documented evidence is slender.
Read more... Read less...

Possession

A. S. Byatt, 2012
Fiction but nonetheless a key text dramatizing biographical detective work, interwoven with the imagined rediscovered life. So it works thrillingly on at least two levels.

The Quest for Corvo

An Experiment in Biography
A. J. A. Symons, 2018
As Hermione Lee writes: ‘a very peculiar operation indeed, leaving the reader unconvinced that there was ever such a real person as Frederick Rolfe - or, possibly, his biographer.

Footsteps

Adventures of a Romantic Biographer
Richard Holmes, 1996
Holmes describes how he found ‘in that most English of forms, the biography, everything I wanted from writing. I could combine the scholarly and critical elements of finding things out and getting them right with more writerly and storytelling skills. If you are only a scholar your story will be dead, but if you are only a storyteller then it will be ludicrous.

The Hare with Amber Eyes

A Hidden Inheritance
Edmund de Waal, 2011
The Hare with the Amber Eyes ISBN978-0-374-10597-6 [694399313] Family Biography of a wealthy European dynasty, whose chief Viennese branch were dispossessed and murdered by the Nazi Reich, beguilingly told through lengthy research into long deceased family members and the history of their hidden collection of Japanese netsuke.

King and Emperor

A New Life of Charlemagne
Janet L. Nelson, 2021
Based on Prof Jinty Nelson’s ultra-extensive medieval knowledge, this is a biographical detective story, interpreting obdurate scraps of evidence, from prayer books to skeletons, gossip to artwork. By refusing all subsequent accounts in favour of contemporary records, this gets as close as one can hope to Charles as he was understood in his own time.