artists, and their place in the changing history of the form. This would imply an agreed canon of classic works, and of classic biographical authors, as it does in the novel. But has such a canon ever been put forward or generally accepted? Does biography have a widely acknowledged Great Tradition, in the same way that the novel does?
There has been a considerable growth in modern biographical theory, especially since Leon Edel’s Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (1984). But surprisingly little has been written about the specific question of a canon, between Harold Nicolson’s The Development of English Biography of 1927 and Paula Backscheider’s Reflections on Biography of 1999. Indeed, Backscheider concludes that the need to establish and teach a canon is a paramount requirement for the future evolution of the genre as a whole: ‘If biography is to come closer to reaching its potential either as an art or a cultural force, then readers must demand art, collect the books, think in terms of canons and schools, and biographers must have the daring to accept the calling.’
But what about the daring to propose a canon? Leaving aside classical and Renaissance precursors, and concentrating on the early modern English tradition only, there are perhaps fewer than half a dozen names which would immediately spring to mind. These might be Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, Boswell’s Johnson, Mrs Gaskell’s Charlotte Brontë, and Strachey’s Eminent Victorians – though technical objections can be made to all of them as ‘impure’ biography. Johnson, it could be argued, was writing critical essays; Boswell a dramatised memoir; Mrs Gaskell a romantic novel; and Strachey a social satire.
However, let me propose for argument’s sake a possible canon of twenty-seven classic English works written between 1670 and 1970, which might form the basis for postgraduate study. I give abbreviated working titles, though the full original versions are often revealing, as when Godwin omits to mention his wife’s name but describes her only as ‘the Author’ of her most controversial book.
Izaak Walton, Lives of John Donne and George Herbert (1640, revised 1670)
John Aubrey, Brief Lives (1670–88, first published selection 1813)
John Dryden, Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (translations edited 1683–86)
Daniel Defoe, The History of John Sheppard (attributed, 1724)
Samuel Johnson, The Life of Mr. Richard Savage (1744)
James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. (1791)
William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798)
Robert Southey, Life of Nelson (1813)
William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age (pen portraits, 1825)
Thomas Moore, Life and Letters of Lord Byron (1830)
John Gibson Lockhart, The Life of Sir Walter Scott (1837–38)
Thomas Carlyle, Life of John Sterling (1851)
Elizabeth Gaskell, Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857)
G.H. Lewes, Life of Goethe (1855, revised 1863)
Alexander and Anne Gilchrist, Life of William Blake (1863)
John Forster, Life of Charles Dickens (1872–74)
David Brewster, Life of Sir Isaac Newton (1855, revised 1880)
J.A. Froude, Life of Thomas Carlyle (1882–84)
Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (1918)
Geoffrey Scott, Portrait of Zélide (1925)
A.J.A. Symons, The Quest for Corvo (1934)
Cecil Woodham-Smith, Florence Nightingale (1950)
Leon Edel, Henry James (1953–72)
Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (1959, revised 1982)
George D. Painter, Marcel Proust: A Biography (1959, 1965)
Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey (1967–68, revised 1994)
All these books could be justified on grounds of literary quality, the historic pictures they achieve of their subjects, and their significance within the development of the form. Yet one is immediately aware of several objections to their place in a canon for study. First, there is the simple problem of length, upon which Virginia Woolf expatiated with such eloquent irony in Orlando (1928): ‘documents, both private and historical, have made it possible to fulfil the first duty of a biographer, which is to plod, without looking to right or left, in the indelible footprints of truth; unenticed by flowers; regardless of shade; on and on methodically till we fall plump into the grave and write finis on the tombstone above our heads’.
This is particularly evident in the nineteenth-century convention of inflating a chronological narrative with enormous excerpts from original letters and diaries, which by modern scholarly convention would now be published separately. For example, Froude’s Carlyle (though one of the greatest studies of Victorian 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
