John Aubrey and our golden age of life writing

John Aubrey’s Brief Lives invented biography – it sought the ‘naked and plain truth’ about its subjects. But how to tell the story of his own life?

John Aubrey by William Faithorne, c1666. Photograph: Hulton Getty

Ruth Scurr

Saturday 28 February 2015 The Guardian 

John Aubrey, you should be living at this hour! The father of English biography would be astonished to find that his child is the publishing phenomenon of our time. In Britain last year, biography, autobiography and memoir outsold history. Success has come not just to the lives of the famous, with celebrity stories of chefs and footballers, but to innovative books such as Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk, winner of the Samuel Johnson and Costa prizes, and Henry Marsh’s Do No Harm, shortlisted for the Guardian First Book award. Aubrey, the 17th-century gentleman and scholar who died virtually unpublished and unknown in 1697, was the inventor of modern life writing whose time has come again.
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