Among Ellen Hill’s sketches were the steps on the Cobb at Lyme, so crucial to Persuasion, and Jane Austen’s ivory cup and ball, so revelatory of her love of children and of games. The book also reproduced key portraits, notably silhouettes and miniatures of family members. Places, things and pictures — the pioneering Hill sisters revealed that biography does not have to confine its raw materials to written documents, nor to be bound by the restrictive covenant of chronology.
So too with Shakespeare. Following the tracks that led from rural Stratford-upon-Avon to urban London and back again, Shakespeare’s life feels cyclical, not sequen- tial. For Prospero in The Tempest, time is a “dark backward and abysm”. For Hamlet, the process of “looking before and after” defines the “large discourse” — the powers of reason and speech — that makes man something more than a “beast”. Shakespeare’s own imaginative practice licences his biographers to loop backwards and forwards through his life as we try to read his mind and discover the touchstones of his genius. We came closer to his inner life through The Lodger, Charles Nicholl’s 2007 microbiography of his time with a Huguenot family in Silver Street, than we did in Peter Ackroyd’s rehash of the traditional narrative of his whole life published a couple of years before.
Because of the powers of memory and imagination — two of Shakespeare’s and Aus- ten’s greatest gifts — the mind does not obey the same rule of time as the human body which moves inexorably from birth to death. In writing lives of great writers that look “before and after”, or that care for key moments and exemplary minutiae, that hold close to landmark trees rather than seek to survey the whole wood, we might just be true to the art of literary creativity itself. And we might also find an escape from the shackles of that sequential womb-to-tomb narrative form that is endangering the future of literary biography.
HarperCollins, one of the leading publishers of biography, recently announced that they are reducing their three non-fiction imprints to two, in the face of the challenge from “the wealth of free content online”. Henceforth, chief executive Victoria Barnsley explains, there will be two clearly differentiated lists: one for the likes of Cheryl Cole’s My Story and the other for more serious works — by writers such as Richard Holmes — which “stretch the boundaries and redefine the genre”. Aptly, the new branding for the high-class list is a revival of the name of William Collins, who in the 19th century pioneered the publication of improving biographies for the masses. The telling point, though, is the one about the wealth of free content online. You can find every fact you could possibly want to know about Shakespeare and Jane Austen and almost every other major writer somewhere on the internet (as well as an alarming number of factoids and outright falsities, but that is another matter). Encyclopaedic works such as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography have migrated wholly to the digital world. We no longer need to buy biographies to get the facts. This might just be not a death-knell but a renaissance for this venerable genre.
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