Biography: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Hermione Lee

Author:Hermione Lee [Lee, Hermione]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2009-07-08T21:00:00+00:00

One answer to this intractable difficulty, an evasive and playful one, was to rewrite biography as comic, parodic fiction. Flush (1933) told the story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning through the eyes – and nose – of her spaniel. Orlando (1928), also subtitled ‘A Biography’, came equipped with full apparatus – acknowledgements, illustrations, index. It took its biographer, who appears as an unnamed, ungendered character, on a wild goose chase in pursuit of its subject. Orlando resists biographical conventions, changing from a man to a woman, living through three centuries, and refusing any determinants about identity, gender, and chronological progress. (‘For she had a great variety of selves to call upon, far more than we have been able to find room for, since a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand.’)

By subverting biographical conventions through fictional parody, Woolf found a way of writing a teasing, private memoir of her friend and bisexual lover Vita Sackville-West which could be at once coded and revealing, erotic and censored. This new form of life-writing was also a feminist enterprise (though she did not call it that), which implied – as Woolf always argued – that women’s lives required new forms of writing.

Could such playful, stylized fictional methods work as serious biographical tools? Other examples of the time read now, like Orlando, more as intriguing experiments in genre-busting than precedents for professional biography. Gertrude Stein invented a new language for telling the lives of obscure American women in Three Lives (1908), and turned autobiography and biography upside-down in the intimate, garrulous, boastful, gossipy Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). (Picasso’s great, sturdy 1906 portrait of Stein is another example of how modernist experiments in art could create a powerful sense of character.) The art historian and Boswell editor Geoffrey Scott created, in The Portrait of Zélide, an elegantly dramatized life of the Dutch 18th-century writer Isabelle de Tuyl, who was connected to Voltaire, proposed to by Boswell, and loved by Benjamin Constant. A. J. A. Symons, Paterian aesthete and admirer of Wilde, wrote a biography of Frederick Rolfe, alias Baron Corvo, author of Hadrian the Seventh, failed priest, exile, unhappy homosexual, and venomous letter-writer, in the form of a pursuit of its elusive subject. The Quest for Corvo is part detective story, part spiritual journey, and part meditation on biography. Steeped in arcane learning, queer encounters, and fanciful symbolist prose, it is a very peculiar operation indeed, leaving the reader unconvinced that there was ever such a real person as Frederick Rolfe – or, possibly, his biographer.

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