Best short biographies
Brief lives for your hand luggage
Fifteen years ago, in an interview at the Edinburgh Book Festival, the great biographer Michael Holroyd predicted that biography was, if not dead, then seriously in decline. But he did offer one consolation, at least. ‘People are writing lives backwards; people are writing parts of lives,’ he said. ‘Look on the bright side: biographies are getting shorter.’
I was heartened to see, earlier this week on Substack, the equally great novelist
championing the genre of biography (even if it was at the point of a a gun). He makes some brilliant suggestions for further reading in his post, and clearly knows a good biography when he sees one. But he admits that he hasn’t yet started Robert Caro’s four hefty volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson (the fifth and final volume of this major biography is due soon; see this interview in The Paris Review).It’s going to take time to get through the life of LBJ, so in the meantime here are a few of my suggestions of biographies that, while comparatively short, are packed full of good things.
With Eminent Victorians, published in 1918, Lytton Strachey threw out all the conventions of the respectful, cradle-to-grave Victorian biography. What was needed instead, he argued, was a ‘becoming brevity – a brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant – that, surely, is the first duty of the biographer.’
Alethea Hayter’s A Sultry Month: Scenes of London Literary Life in 1846 (Faber & Faber, 1965) is a ground-breaking group biography that brilliantly evokes the interlocking personal crises of the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon and his circle over one sweltering summer.
A Suppressed Cry (1969) was Victoria Glendinning's first biography. It’s about her great-aunt Winnie Seebohm’s brief life and the happiness she found while studying at Newnham College, Cambridge. ‘I could, had I waited, have written a longer and different book,’ Glendinning wrote in her preface to the 1995 reissue. ‘It might not have been a more telling one. Too much information can blur the issues.’
Claire Tomalin is rightly celebrated for her doorstep-sized (but never dull for a moment) biographies of Charles Dickens, Samuel Pepys and Jane Austen. But the first book of hers that I read was the diminutive Shelley and His World (1980). I was hooked on biography (and Tomalin’s writing) for life after that.
‘If we managed to suppress marriage, what would we have left to tell?’ I am mad about Phyllis Rose's classic study of love and power, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (1983). She writes about the troubled marriages of famous writers, and her book is still fresh and interesting today (re-released a few years ago by Daunt books).
‘If you are not in love with them you will not follow them - not very far, anyway.’ Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer by Richard Holmes (1985) led the way in biographers blending memoir, travel writing and devious detective work… and speaking of which:
‘The biographer at work,’ writes Janet Malcolm in The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes (Granta, 1993) ‘is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away.’ I don’t agree with everything Malcolm wrote here (she’s too sympathetic to Ted for a start - see my TLS review here), but it’s a brilliant page-turner of a book nonetheless.
‘Stuart does not like the manuscript. He’s after a bestseller, “like what Tom Clancy writes.”’ Anyone who reads Alexander Masters’ funny, heartbreaking Stuart: A Life Backwards (2005) will never forget it. A masterpiece that uses the ‘backwards’ structure to tell a homeless man’s story as sympathetically and honestly as possible.
I love Frances Wilson’s The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth (2008) for her passionate sympathy for her subject and superb storytelling. She brings Dorothy out of the shadows of Wordsworth and Coleridge and shows what a powerful talent she was in her own right.
Combining research, parody, diaries, interviews, lists and wicked gossip, Craig Brown's Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret (2017) is skilful, experimental and hilarious. You certainly don’t have to be a royalist, or a fan of biography, to enjoy this wonderful book. Almost 100 years on, I think Lytton Strachey would have approved.
*and one more to conclude…
*Brief Lives is a collection of short biographies written by John Aubrey (1626–1697) in the last decades of the 17th century. In John Aubrey: My Own Life (Chatto & Windus, 2016) Ruth Scurr brilliantly takes on the personage of Aubrey writing his own memoir, based on her extensive reading of books by contemporaries, and letters and other manuscripts she found in the archives. ‘Do we honour or betray the dead when we write about them?’ she asks in her Preface. ‘Because I chose to write Aubrey’s life in the form of a first person diary, I had to get as close to him as I could, despite the passage of time.’
Now over to you. Is there a brief but brilliant biography that I’ve overlooked? (My list is very UK-centric, so far.) Have you read an account of a life that really stayed with you, or made you feel differently about its subject? I would love to know!
Finally, finally…
Other Substack posts I’ve enjoyed this week include
, who in ‘The Steinbeck Review #6’ introduces us to some less well known Steinbeck books, including A Russian Journal (1948): ‘Steinbeck's vivid prose and Capa's evocative photography transport us to a world where the human spirit triumphs over the forces of history and ideology.’ I loved ’s vastly entertaining and knowledgeable cultural history of the quail, and two informative and insightful articles about practical aspects of being a writer, ‘Writing for a Living’ and ‘Showing and Telling; Cooperation Not Competition’, illustrating the value of a collaboration by and . ‘We are sensitive machines’ by is a reminder not to waste the five good, creative hours that we can hope for in a working day. Virginia Woolf would have agreed. Thank you for taking the time in your own precious day to read this.
When I saw the title, immediately thought of Parallel Lives - and there it was. I loved it. Id recommend Mrs Woolf and the Servants by Alison Light in a similar vein, as it's a kind of group biography. It looks at Virginia Woolf's relationship with the women who worked for her, and so explores domestic power, class, and the changing role and expectations of women.
Ah, I love a good book list! As someone who secretly wishes that biographies in general kind of skipped the childhood stuff and got straight to the good bits, I love a short biography. My addition to the list is Living Well is the Best Revenge, by Calvin Tomkins, about the jazz-age couple Sara and Gerald Murphy.