Literary Biography

Michael Benton is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Southampton. His publications include the highly influential Teaching Literature 9–14 (with Geoff Fox, 1985) and several widely used anthologies of poetry, most notably the Touchstones series (with Peter Benton, various editions 1968–2008). His most recent book was Studies in the Spectator Role: Literature, Painting and Pedagogy (2000).

List of Illustrations xi
Acknowledgements xii


Introduction xiii


1 Literary Biography Now and Then 1


The Cinderella of Literary Studies 1


The Rise and Rise of Literary Biography 4


Dr Johnson: Biographer, Theorist and Subject 7


Virginia Woolf: Time, Memory and Identity 12


2 Life [Hi]Stories: Telling Tales 18


Aspects of Narrative 18


(i) Beginnings: Charlotte Brontë 19


(ii) Middles: Thomas Hardy 21


(iii) Endings: Jane Austen 25


The Naked Biographer 28


Inventing the Truth 30


3 Reading Biography 35


Biographer, Biography and the Reader 35


Imagining Blake 38


Problems of a Hybrid Form 42


Reading Lessons 45


4 Literary Biomythography 47


Biomythography 47


Myth–Making: The Brontë Paradigm 48


(i) Facts: Selection and `Spin’ 49


(ii) Fact into Fiction 50


(iii) Fiction into Myth 50


(iv) Myth into `Faction’ 51


(v) Demythologising the Brontës 52


Variations on the Theme 53


(i) Byron 54


(ii) Dickens 55


(iii) Sylvia Plath 58


Conclusions 63


5 Inferential Biography: Shakespeare the Invisible Man 67


Virtual Shakespeares 68


(i) The Facts 68


(ii) The Theatrical Context 69


(iii) The Social Context 71


(iv) The Shakespeare Mythos 72


(v) The Shakespeare Canon 73


The Implied Author: Inferential Biography 74


(i) The Art of Love: The Sonnets 75


(ii) Prejudice, Discrimination and the Law: The Merchant of Venice 77


(iii) War and the Politics of Nationhood: Henry V 79


(iv) Language and Thinking: Hamlet 82


(v) Art and Artifice: The Tempest 85


The Limits of Imagination 87


6 Literary Biography and Portraiture 92


Sister Arts 92


(i) Biography and Portraiture: Reynolds’s Portrait of Dr Johnson 94


(ii) Reading the Image: Cassandra Austen’s Sketch of Jane Austen 96


(iii) Visual Myth–Making: Henry Weekes’s Shelley Monument 98


(iv) Celebrity Image: Thomas Phillips’s Portrait of Byron in Albanian Dress 100


(v) Visual Memoir: Joseph Severn’s Portrait of John Keats 102


(vi) Bardography: The Chandos Portrait of Shakespeare 104


(vii) The Inner Life: R. W. Buss’s Dickens’s Dream 106


(viii) Sisters’ Arts: Vanessa Bell’s Portrait of Virginia Woolf 108


(ix) `To prepare a face …’: Patrick Heron’s Portrait of T. S. Eliot 110


(x) Branwell’s Ghost: Branwell Brontë’s Portrait of his Three Sisters 112


Art to Order 114


7 Comparative Biography: Dickens’s `Lives’ 117


The Victorian Dickens 118


The Modern Dickens 121


The Post–Modern Dickens 125


Lives and Times 130


8 Literary Auto/Biography 132


Acts of Self–Creation in Wordsworth and Joyce 132


Wordsworth’s `biographic verse’ 134


Joyce’s `artist, like the God of creation’ 143


Masks and Metaphors 149


9 Biography in Practice 152


An Interview with Dominic Hibberd, author of Wilfred Owen: A New Biography 152


Living with the Subject 153


Imagining Wilfred 157


Matters of Life and Death 166


10 Authorised Lives 171


The Life of Graham Greene by Norman Sherry 172


Bernard Shaw by Michael Holroyd 176


T. S. Eliot by Peter Ackroyd 181


Orwell: The Life by D. J. Taylor 186


Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life by Andrew Motion 192


Contemporary Lives 199


11 Literary Lives: Scenes and Stories 202


Dinner with Dr Johnson and John Wilkes 203


Dinner with Mrs Ramsay 208


Biography and Fiction 215


12 Biography and the Future 218


Select Bibliography 225


Further Reading 225


General Bibliography 229


Index 239