Why do writers make such wonderful biography subjects? We posed the question to a panel of experts: Katherine Rundell, whose Donne biography, Super-Infinite, won the Baillie Gifford; Hermione Lee, who most recently published a biography of Anita Brookner; and Richard Holmes, whose latest book is the Baillie Gifford-shortlisted Tennyson biography, The Boundless Deep. Here’s what they had to say:
Katherine Rundell
I think some of it is practical – a novelist or poet is more likely to leave vivid writing scattered around them: letters, diaries, essays. They are by definition likely to be better at capturing their own lives in writing than, say, an Olympic ping-pong player: they give you more text to start with, and our greatest writers have had rich, strange, powerfully fascinating inner lives. On the flipside, they do tend to have less thrilling outer lives. Jane Austen did not, as far as I know, ever leap aboard an enemy ship crying “death or glory!”. John Donne, who is I think perhaps the greatest poet of desire in the English language, spent a lot of time sitting in small rooms: the drama is within, in the life of the mind.
Hermione Lee
Mountaineers, politicians, explorers and rock stars have more action-packed lives for biographers to sink their teeth into. Writers (as Virginia Woolf comically observed in Orlando) are a hard nut to crack as often they do nothing but write. But nothing can compare with the excitement for the biographer of trying to track the inner life of a writer through their work and of describing the often strange and obscure relation between that inner life and the writer’s everyday public life. And the quest is especially exciting when that writer, like Anita Brookner, has hidden her tracks and concealed her secrets.
Richard Holmes
I remember Michael Holroyd, that wise and witty godfather of modern literary biography, telling me that novelists and poets made marvellous, lively, contradictory subjects, “providing their handwriting was at least nearly legible”. (Shelley’s penwork gets peculiarly tempestuous when aboard his last Italian sailing boat.) Besides, the intrinsic fascination of literary letters and diaries as biographical evidence, tending to be exceptionally well written (Byron’s low aristo style, Woolf’s high catty observations, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s agonised Catholic interiority), put all us narrating biographers on our mettle. We cannot afford to write pre-loved prose in such vivid company.
Such lives also offer a peculiar kind of double, or binocular, vision of human existence. The daily life is always shadowed, or rainbowed, by the imaginative life, the dream life, the ongoing life of the author’s creations – which may be utterly different the one from the other. John Milton saw the rebel angels of Paradise Lost when he was blind and housebound. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde while convalescing in a villa in Westbourne. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote a long, witty letter about his refusal to put down cheese-baited mousetraps in his Somerset cottage (“tis telling a lie”), and months later wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner with its treacherous killing of the albatross, and its universal green parable about the perils of wounding Nature. Which also means, perhaps, that literary lives stay alive for us longer.
Inspiring lives … Barbara Cartland. Photograph: Smith Archive/Alamy
