Authonomy Masterclass no.2: Biography

This week, one of literature’s eminent authorities on life writing, Richard Holmes, will offer our community some thoughts about the inspiration and discipline of biography.

Richard’s most recent work, The Age of Wonder, was one of the best-received books to be published in all of 2008. John Carey wrote of it in the Sunday Times

'Holmes suffuses his book with the joy, hope and wonder of the revolutionary era. Reading it is like a holiday in a sunny landscape, full of fascinating bypaths that lead to unexpected vistas…The Age of Wonder is offered, with due modesty, as a model, and it succeeds inspiringly'


The area which one might loosely term ‘biography’ covers a number of sub-genres, and it’s certainly an area in which I like to focus during my own explorations at authonomy.com.

According to figures recently produced by BookScan, no fewer than 4000 new biographical titles are published per annum, so by this logic, the earnest follower would need to read ten biographies a day to keep abreast of developments …

The BookScan figure includes the personal memoir, which has become immensely fashionable in recent years. We’ll be looking in detail at this area and technique soon, as many authonomists are crafting their memoirs with the help of the community, and getting some good feedback on the site. (It might be worth saying that if you’re interested in telling your own life story, you might also visit http://www.harpertrue.com/ to submit your story for a new publishing venture.)

But there’s an impressive number of people here who have chosen a celebrated or perhaps unknown subject for biography … and a few members amongst us choosing to focus their work on a cluster of lives and a theme rather than the traditional Life and Times biography.

Richard Holmes oversaw the prestigious Biographical Studies course at UEA for many years:

"The teaching of biography has flourished notably in the last ten years. The Tertiary courses now flourish in Britain, Australia and the United States, and to some degree in France and Germany.

In 2001 the University of East Anglia appointed its first professor of biography: a working writer, not an academic. This happened to be me. This was my first (and only) academic post in forty years as a working biographer … I gave a lecture to the Oxford faculty of English entitled ‘The Biographer Who Came in from the Cold’, named after John le Carré’s famous spy novel. I taught at UEA for six years. Now I am ‘The Biographer Who Got out of the Kitchen’. After some initial doubts, I do not believe that teaching biography will paralyse it with Theory. On the contrary, it should develop the creative future of the form and produce new generations of young writers who will ‘go forth and multiply’, biographically speaking!"

Part I tomorrow: Richard Holmes on National identity and biography, Biography and storytelling
Part II on Friday: Richard Holmes on The future of biography, Science and biography, Biography and the emerging nation

Your Biography Reading List


Great personal memoirs
Michael Holroyd's Basil Street Blues (1999)
Lorna Sage's Bad Blood (2000)
George Steiner's My Unwritten Books (2008)


Interesting fractured or postmodern biography
Brian Matthews’s Louisa (1987)
Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens (1990)
Richard Holmes’s Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985)
and also Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer (2000)
Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984)

The story that lasted centuries
Defoe’s Life of Jack Sheppard (1724) (edited by Richard Holmes)



Masterful 'Life and Times' sorts of biographies
Claire Tomalin on Samuel Pepys (2002)
Hilary Spurling on Henri Matisse (1998, 2005)
Hermione Lee on Edith Wharton (2007)
Michael Holroyd's A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and Their Remarkable Families (2008)


Lost Lives
Johnson’s Life of Mr Richard Savage (1744)
Defoe on Sheppard and Wild (2004)
Alexander Masters’s Stuart: A Life Backwards (2005)
Ben Macintyre’s, Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love and Betrayal (2007)

Good Science Biographies
Dava Sobel’s Longitude (1996)
Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo’s Telling Lives in Science: Essays on Scientific Biography (1996)
Lisa Jardine’s Ingenious Pursuits: Building the 17th Century Scientific Revolution (1999)
Janet Browne’s Charles Darwin: Voyaging (1995)
and also The Power of Place (2002)
Patricia Fara’s Newton: The Making of Genius (2002)
Anne Thwaite’s Glimpses of the Wonderful: The Life of Philip Henry Gosse, 1810–1888 (2002)
Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men (2002)
Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007)


Really interesting ways to write a biography
Michael Holroyd’s Basil Street Blues (1999)
Bella Bathurst’s The Lighthouse Stevensons (1999)
Lucasta Miller’s The Brontë Myth (2001)
Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future, 1730–1810 (2002) Alexander Masters’s Stuart: A Life Backwards (2005)
William St Clair’s The Grand Slave Emporium: Cape Coast Castle and the British Slave Trade (2006)
Anne Wroe’s Being Shelley: The Poet’s Search for Himself (2007)
Linda Colley’s The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (2007)
Frances Wilson’s The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth(2008)
Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder (2008)



The best Russian biography I've read
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)

Oral Histories from China
Xinran Xue’s China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation (2008)