Shakespeare and Austen present a very different case. They turn their backs upon us. Shakespeare left only two surviving letters, Jane Austen rather more — but in her case what survives is only about five per cent of the total that she wrote, and all the juicy stuff was very carefully edited out by her family. Their works were not in any obvious sense autobiographical. And their lives, also in contrast to that of Dickens, were comparatively uneventful: provincial origin, dedicated professionalism to the newest and most exciting art form of the day (the stage play in Shakespeare’s case and the novel in Austen’s), success in the city, then retreat back to the country.
It is within the arena of specifically literary life-writing that the traditional narrative form of “cradle to grave” or “womb to tomb” is in a state of considerable uncertainty, if not, as some would say, terminal decline. We sensed a straw in the wind at the dinner for the award of the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction in 2004. One of the judges sidled up and said that John Clare: A Biography was a magnificent piece of research and writing, but it was insuffi- ciently experimental in form. The prize had to reward innovation, it could not be awarded to yet another traditional “doorstopper” like the Berlioz and Pushkin biographies that had won in previous years. And indeed the biographical enterprises that have won prizes and plaudits in this century have been those unafraid to take risks. James Shapiro’s 1599 approaches Shakespeare by way of a single year, Frances Wilson’s The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth refracts an entire life through a single day (the one when William Wordsworth got married and left his sister behind). For 50 years, would- be biographers of Ireland’s greatest novelist cowered in the shadow of Richard Ellmann’s mighty James Joyce, but now the prestigious Costa Biography Prize has been awarded to a graphic novel — the genre that used to be known as the comic — about Joyce’s relationship with his daughter Lucia.
We sincerely hope that reports of the death of the detailed, chronologically- arranged literary biography are greatly exaggerated. Every major author deserves one — or maybe two, in case, as often happens, the author of the first one has an axe to grind. But what need ten, or 20, or 200? What future is there for the lives of the great writers whose stories have been told again and again?
Consider the case of Jane Austen. In the year 1997, three full-length biographies of her were published within a few weeks of each other. Two of them, by Valerie Grosvenor Myer and Claire Tomalin, followed the model of the “authorised” Family Record of Austen’s life written nearly a century before. They traced a familiar path from childhood in a Hampshire parsonage to quiet life of writing in Chawton Cottage to premature death under the shadow of Winchester Cathedral. The biographer used her intuitions and her gift for local colour to bring the story alive, but it was essentially the same story that had been told many times before.
The third contender was very different. This is how David Nokes began his life of Jane Austen:
It is the rainy season in the Sunderbunds. Inside his lonely makeshift hut the Surgeon-Extraordinary sits writing a letter home to his wife in England. The livid orange sun is sinking over this dis- mal region of fetid salt-flats, swamp and jungle, and he writes by the light of a reading-lamp she sent him in the last consignment from England.
In seeking to set Jane Austen on a wider stage, Nokes was true to her family circumstances, but his tendency to assume that he knew what people were thinking, to write from inside their heads in the manner of a novelist, alienated many readers.
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