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Companion of the British Empire for Services to Literature and author of highly respected biographies of Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf, Lee examines the art and artifice of fixing a person's life, turning it into a narrative and inevitably emphasising some points, omitting others so that only a 'likeness' can possibly emerge. The idea that a biography can be neutral, factual and true is an illusion. The question is only how much of a distortion the various 'versionings' are.She writes of the
Biographers are myth-makers and fantasists! What a great collection of essays around the notion of a biographers' role. Hermione Lee's casual in these essays, expressing her thoughts on four very different challenges that biographers are faced with: what is considered "fact" and what is considered "myth"; idealisation and interpretation of an author's life as a succinct and sustained narrative OR as indicative of their lifes' work; the problems of submissions or omissions with regards to express...
Hermione Lee is a critic and biographer who's published books on Philip Roth and Elizabeth Bowen as well as biographies of Willa Cather and Virginia Woolf, the latter perhaps the definitive work on the subject's life. Here she turns her attention to the craft of biography. In considering the huge amount of information available from a variety of sources, she's concerned with how a biographer chooses what to include, what to leave out. Whose perspective to value, whose to avoid. Her essay on Shel...
Was actually lovely as far as it went, but very thin and mostly consisted of examples of contradictory versions of events in various writer's lives given in different biographies, demonstrating that biography is never truly objective and is wielded by the biographer in service of a point the biographer wants to make. So it was interesting -- but I found myself wishing it went further. More, I think I loved Lee's Virginia Woolf so much because it opened so many questions for me about my own preco...
This is a wonderful collection of essays by one of the very best biographers. The essays really give a feeling for what writing biography is like, where authors get stuck and inspired.
I was very intrigued by this book and excitedly anticipated reading it for years, given my love for both Virginia Woolf and reflective essays on complex ideas, but I was disappointed by it. I felt that Hermione Lee was too caught up in the minutia of her somewhat boring examples and neglected to do much actual reflecting on biography itself: the particularities of biography as an art form (e.g. the pressures to please the loved ones of the biographee), the biographer as an impartial narrator, wh...
The title essay was the real stunner, though I suspect that's because I wasn't interested in the subjects of the other three. Loved the snark Lee dropped in at the most unexpected moments. Made for a fun read. 3.5 stars
Loved it!
Lee presents four essays on biography that make for highly-valuable reading for anyone who likes biographies. The second essay, the title of the book, provides her insight into Woolf, Cunningham's novel about Mrs. Dalloway, the Hours, and the production of the film by the same name; Lee writes about her insight in the process, esp. since her biography of Woolf was the one that Cunningham used in writing his Pulitzer Prize winning novel. The introductory essay presents the multifarious problems t...
An excellent little book that combines, in the best tradition of Richard Holmes' Footsteps or Dr Johnson and Mr Savage, immense erudition on the subject with a constant questioning of key topics, all of it written in a lively, jargon-free style. Beyond showing how problematic the writing of biographies is (from the point of view of knowledge, of synthesis, against teleological readings etc), Hermione Lee is mostly interested in asking what is, in fine, a life? Can it ever be truly understood? An...
A short little volume of semi-academic essays on biography, focusing in turns on biographical treatments of specific parts of the subject's lives. The title essay is on various biographical imaginings of Virginia Woolf, specifically the book and subsequent movie adaptation of The Hours.
My review here.
I use this book as a textbook for my writing classes. It's wickedly funny by an adept at English biography. And Lee also spikes the howlers in The Hours, a movie, a dreadful take on VA.
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