would also seem to imply that as ‘factual content’ grows out of date, the artistic structure is fatally weakened from within.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, finally, I returned to the fundamental question: what would students be studying biography for? To discover and appreciate a great literary tradition: certainly. To learn both the values and the limitations of accuracy and historical understanding: without doubt. To grasp something of the complications of human truth-telling, and to write well about them: yes, with any luck. But above all, to exercise empathy, to enter imaginatively into another place, another time, another life. And whether that could be taught, I still had no idea at all.
3
So it was, in the spirit of enquiry more than anything else, that in 2001 I signed a contract to design and then teach a new Masters degree in biography as part of the celebrated Creative Writing course at the University of East Anglia. My theories now required strictly practical and immediate application. This was my first and only academic appointment, and I took it on with proper trepidation. But I decided to be ambitious, and to design a course that would begin with the Greeks and run to the twenty-first century. I spent most of the summer of 2001 reading Plutarch in an olive grove on the tiny island of Paxos, where an ancient legend said a voice was once heard at dusk, calling from the sea: ‘The great god Pan is dead.’
For the next five years I was responsible for about sixteen new postgraduate biography students every autumn. The first thing that delighted and astonished me was the evident appeal of the course to a hugely disparate group of people, whose ages ranged from twenty-two to sixty-seven, and whose backgrounds, life experiences and professions differed wildly. My notebooks record an Irish poet, an American Mormon, a general practitioner from Oxford, a Pakistani air force pilot, a Japanese businesswoman, a TV researcher, the ex-headmistress of an English girls’ school (not Greta Hall), a human rights barrister from London, a Vassar literature graduate, a Canadian TV executive, a financial journalist from the City, a Norfolk asparagus farmer, a Birmingham social worker, and a mother of three from Sussex whose sailor husband (I eventually discovered) was dying of cancer.
The central discipline of the MA was indeed my idea of ‘comparative biography’. In practice this established itself in two ways. First, we would look
