Essays: Virginia Woolf coined the term "life-writing" and her life and work dominate these essays written by her biographer, the literary scholar and critic Hermione Lee.
While she was Professor of English at York University, Lee introduced a course on life-writing and is currently establishing a post-graduate degree in the subject at Oxford. Other universities are joining in: Shelley and Coleridge's biographer Richard Holmes is now professor of biography at the University of East Anglia. The formal study of what Woolf described as "a bastard, an impure art" will inevitably swell the extensive academic literature on biographical practice and theory; perhaps it might also generate some creative biographical experiments.
"Life-writing" embraces memoirs, journals, letters and notebooks as well as autobiographical fiction and poetry, and seems to be applied almost exclusively to literary lives. The writers who concern Lee here are mainly women of the early decades of the 20th-century, many of whom (Eudora Welty, Dorothy Richardson, Rosamund Lehmann) gained a wide readership for the first time in their green-backed, Virago incarnation in the late 1970s and 1980s.
Others, such as Ellen Glasgow and Angela Thirkell (who wrote "good bad books") are less well known, or, like May Sinclair, have a narrow claim to fame: in her case it was for being the critic who first applied William James's term "stream of consciousness" to the style of Dorothy Richardson's novel sequence, Pilgrimage.
As well as her authoritative biography of Woolf, Lee has written studies of Elizabeth Bowen and Willa Cather, and is working on a biography of Edith Wharton. She is a pleasure to read: clever, witty, sceptical and sensitive, and her re-creation of Woolf as a vital, complex artist and brilliant essayist dispelled many of the myths and fallacies surrounding her life and death. At least, it did until Michael Cunningham's novel and David Hare and Stephen Daldry's film, The Hours, came along. In a generous-spirited essay in this collection, 'Virginia Woolf's Nose', Lee laments that the film "evacuates [Woolf's] life of political intelligence or social acumen, returning her to the position of doomed, fey, mad victim".
But she also knows that this version, "the Nose", won't remain fixed forever. Does it matter if it prevails for a time, she asks. "Yes, because it distorts and to a degree misrepresents her . . . No, because she continues to be re-invented - made up and made over - with every new adapter, reader, critic and biographer. There is no owning her, or the facts of her life." This is one of Lee's strongest and clearest statements about the interpretive nature and "relativist process" of biographical writing. But elsewhere she is wary of over-interpretation and seems a little harsh in her judgement of the "highly constructed and hypothetical" account in Claire Tomalin's biography of Jane Austen of the novelist's depression after moving to Bath from the countryside. This is "dependent on our accepting post-Freudian psychoanalytical terms . . . for an 18th-century writer", Lee writes. Yet, to attempt to consider Austen's state of mind using 18th-century psychological terms would surely be a ludicrously contrived exercise, which would contradict the point she made earlier about each generation of writers and readers bringing their own cultural values to bear on the authors they read?
Lee is concerned about the biographer's responsibility to accuracy, and criticises biographers whose revisionism becomes a punitive attack, such as Carole Seymour Jones's presentation of T.S. Eliot in her biography of Vivienne Eliot, which Lee characterises as "biography as blame". She puts the case for and against Eliot with brilliant lucidity, concluding: "I don't want to collapse his writing entirely into autobiography. I want to recognise the life in the work and to see how it's transformed".
For the most part, however, she's taking time off from her more serious pursuits, having fun with the bits and pieces that get left out of biographies.
Posthumous reputations and legends, conflicts over authors' burned letters, missing manuscripts and body parts that come to symbolise struggles for possession of, and authority over, an author's work - these are her concerns in these pieces, many of which are previously published book reviews. While the title "Body Parts" does afford lots of opportunity for word-play on the theme of a body of knowledge, body of work, etc, it also, unfortunately, suggests off-cuts and left-overs.
The opening, whimsical essay, 'Shelley's Heart and Pepys's Lobsters', sets the tone: it is full of anecdotes about disputes over Shelley's and Hardy's heart, Einstein's brain, Thomas More's head, Yeats's bones and Napoleon's penis, and playfully explores the question of who owns someone's life and death. The concluding essay, 'How to End it All', also questions the choices a biographer makes in the presentation of the subject's death, and quotes Adam Philips's view that "the subject of a biography always dies in the biographer's own way". She chronicles the history of the deathbed scene in biography, from fictionalised, heroic Victorian valedictions to the famously embellished death of Chekhov, whose final words may or may not have been a request for a glass of champagne. Beckett's terse treatment of the matter in his essay on Proust refuses to validate Proust's life and death in terms of his work, commenting: "whatever opinion we may be pleased to hold on the subject of death, we may be sure that it is meaningless and valueless. Death has not required us to keep a day free". Lee doesn't agree and is fascinated by the final hours and afterlife of her subjects.
Yet in this and some of the other essays, something seems lacking. While she does consider the use of Freudian theory, in particular as used by Maud Ellmann in her study of Elizabeth Bowen, she describes biography as being "resistant to theorising", and tends to take a belles lettres approach to it. She remarks on "the mystery of lives" and "how difficult it is to know other people right through", but does not offer a philosophical context that could open up an exploration of aspects of identity, epistemology and consciousness. It is unfair to criticise a book for what it is not, but it would be exciting to see someone writing about biography in a way that could forge connections between the current literary flowering and the work of cultural psychologists such as Jerome Bruner on narration, chronology and the self. That might really deserve to be called "life-writing".
Helen Meany is a freelance journalist
Body Parts: Essays in Life-writing By Hermione Lee Chatto & Windus, 245 pp. £20