The art of biography

By Peter J. Conradi - Financial Times 

Biography, once an exercise in solemn sanctification, is now robust and irreverent – and all the better for it. Yet we should not be afraid to admire our subjects

©The Bodleian Library

Frank Thompson in military uniform with his parents and brother EP Thompson

There are, conventionally speaking, three ages of modern biography: Romantic, Boring and Today’s. According to this crude tripartite map, Samuel Johnson’s Life of Mr Richard Savage (1744) was the first true example of a form that ripened swiftly in 1791 with Boswell’s monumental study of Johnson himself. Such endeavours were undertaken in a spirit of potent free inquiry, and the biographer’s subjectivity was acknowledged within the narrative. This first phase culminated in William Godwin’s biography of his late wife Mary Wollstonecraft, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), and William Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris (1823), both still much-read and referred to today.
Biography lost vigour under Queen Victoria. It was the epoch of solemn lives and letters, in which British worthies were to be dignified and whitewashed for a growing national pantheon. That, at least, is what we might conclude from Eminent Victorians (1918) by the debunking Lytton Strachey, who saw himself as chief reinvigorator of the genre.
Strachey flattered himself as an iconoclast. Elizabeth Gaskell’s life of Charlotte Brontë in 1857 – to pick just one example – may have started a process of sanctification but not all Victorian biography created a stained-glass figure. You would never realise from Strachey’s account how big an outcry John Gibson Lockhart caused with his life of Walter Scott after 1838, nor the controversy that greeted James Anthony Froude’s study of the historian Thomas Carlyle in 1882. Each of these courageous books was published within a few years of their subject’s death and each met with a turbulent reception.
Still, few would deny that biography since Strachey has been practised with more licence and invention; British biography, in particular, is now exceptionally thriving, varied and interesting. It is hard to imagine Christopher Hitchens’ short and acrid meditation on the life of Mother Teresa, The Missionary Position (1995) – which portrays her as an evil-minded, rapacious Albanian dwarf – being published before Strachey lit his flare-path and established for ever that biography can legitimately mock, diminish and demote.
Full story at FT