Literary Lives: Biography and the Search for Understanding

A meditation on the nature of biography and the way biographers habitually explain their subjects’ lives by reference to psychology, ancestry, childhood experience, social relations, the body or illness. The aim of the book is to uncover principles which biographers adopt in their efforts to make sense of the lives of others and ensure that their own narratives remain coherent. In exploring the methods of biographers and the ways in which they interpret the material they accumulate - from Dr Johnson to Sartre - David Ellis is able to make challenging comments on biography in general. He draws upon recent biographies of writers such as Dickens, Henry James, Flaubert, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Graham Greene, George Orwell, W.B. Yeats and Ernest Hemingway. While the emphasis is on literary lives, the book also takes in biographies of such compelling figures as Mozart, Picasso and Cezanne.