Literary biography in a post-truth age: facts or interpretation?

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Where does the “literariness” in literary biography belong? With the book’s subject—or its author? Traditionally, it’s attached to both, and to a third element too. Literary biography also cares about the writing its subjects produce, and has done so ever since that arguably founding text, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1817 Biographia Literaria , which is subtitled Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions. “And Opinions” indeed: for publishers, critics and authors alike, so much of literary life consists in what John Updike tellingly called “Higher Gossip.”

By its very nature, literary biography does more than simply stand alongside other genres on the bookshelf. It explicitly engages in a dialogue with them. True, every book does this to some extent. After all, no writing is innocent. All language comes to us “preloved”; even hot off the press, each book is second-hand. Simply by adopting the forms of publication, let alone one existing literary form or another, new work finds itself prepacked with elements that are already in use. The dream of lyric poetry—that it be a truly personal confession, an utterly independent magic—is just that.

But literary biography owns the depths of its engagement with the world of books. No to mention periodicals: impossible to resist the vicarious excitement of the New York literary village in Frances Kiernan’s 2002 biography of Mary McCarthy, Seeing Mary Plain , Benjamin Moser’s Sontag (2020), or Darryl Pinckney’s 2023 literary memoir Come Back in September .

Works like these remind us that literary significance attaches not just to a subject’s work but to their milieu. In this sense, every literary biography is also a group portrait. I loved, for example, Mary Gabriel’s 2019 group study of the women abstract expressionists, Ninth Street Women . But equally influential, willy-nilly, is a biography like Richard Holmes’s Shelley: The pursuit (1974). Radical in its time, but also in its effect on reception of the Shelley coterie. It so successfully side-lined Mary Shelley that even in 2018, when I published my biography of that female prodigy, I still encountered the double claim that she wasn’t really a writer herself but had instead simply damaged that “real” writer, the poet.

By its very nature, literary biography does more than simply stand alongside other genres on the bookshelf. It explicitly engages in a dialogue with them.

Such layered literariness within a writer’s biography suggests a kind of total immersion. I think it also creates a kind of space for affect. Admiration can be well advanced before it becomes articulate. How long it took my adolescent, autodidact self to find the words for that burnished glow I’d discovered in Henry James, or for the incredible mobility of Virginia Woolf’s thought. So finding a subject might start, for the literary biographer, with something like an intuition. Just as with all writing, there’s a sense of something there: of some knot or density to be explored. But there must also be a faint echo of elective affinity. Which is not to place oneself at the same literary high table as J.W. von Goethe—or alongside one’s subject. I admire inordinately the trio of great Romantic women writers to whom I’ve dedicated the last decade: Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Sand. But I don’t imagine myself in any way their equal.

And yet. I do recognize certain character traits. The emotional literal-mindedness with which Mary Godwin trusted Percy Bysshe Shelley. How much the young Elizabeth Barrett “hated the word ‘feminine'” and its self-limiting demands. George Sand’s dogged workaholism. Such recognition is a form of affinity; a bit like falling into friendship. It’s also something I try to tease out in biography, not to debunk these extraordinary figures, but on the contrary so that we continue to engage with them.

Life is unparaphrasable; no self can ever be fully known. Literary biography is an interpretive art. Like other arts of literary interpretation, with which I’ve also been deeply involved at times—editing, literary translation—it requires scrupulous accuracy and is at the same time dependent on moments of intuitive engagement. Those flashes of insight when for once we manage not to, as T.S. Eliot had it, have “heard the words and missed the meaning”; or when Henry James’s “pattern in the carpet” comes clear. As Mary Shelley wrote, in a biographical essay about the Renaissance biographer Pietro Metastasio, the success of the biographer is “to collect the peculiar character of the man—his difference from others—through the bringing forward of minute yet characteristic details.”

It’s also noticeable how essential it is for this process—as it is for translating a poem or editing a periodical—to be embedded in the literary context. That hinterland which gets called a “discourse” is really a mixture of feel and technical knowledge. And it accommodates the apparently unremarkable: George Sand’s 67th novel, say, Mary Shelley’s poetic juvenilia. Working on biography means spending time in that country we call “literature.” It means having a dialogue with other writers, and with writing itself. But as with all interpretive arts, it requires a disciplined modesty. The biographer speaks from a place of concealment; is perhaps most direct in ventriloquy. At a certain point in Becoming George , for example, I use George Sand as an avatar of female authority and its reception.

All of which makes what we might call, borrowing from Virginia Woolf, “the new biography” as exhilarating as it is demanding. To inhabit the facts of another writer’s life without invention requires the most detailed primary research, not only in literary archives but in almanacs, old newsprint, civic records. Yet it also requires that the resulting great bolus of knowledge be properly digested; concealed by an inviting, writerly surface.

This kind of formal necessity is, as every poet knows, the mother of literary invention. “Literary” doesn’t have to mean “fiction.” Yet increasingly, literary biography seems to steer between the Scylla of fictionalisation (never mind the facts, feel the prose) and the Charybdis of non-literary history (never mind the prose, feel the facts). It can be personally frustrating when an interviewer hasn’t read your actual book, the one in which you are the writer yourself, but just some Wiki notes on your subject. As if that subject had somehow simply risen from the grave and walked all by herself onto the review pile.

Yet perhaps the real challenge to literary biography today is the account that does play to the gallery but uses fictional anecdotes. As if it doesn’t matter what we say about our subjects. As if they aren’t real people to whom we owe the duty of care that is the biographer’s contract. As if we no longer owe that duty of care to the truth.

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Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand by Fiona Sampson is available from W.W. Norton & Company.