Textual biography

writing the lives of books

Antony Atkins

pp. 277-292

in: Warwick Gould, Thomas F. Staley (eds), Writing the lives of writers, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1998

Abstract

Most discussions of literary property amongst biographers are concerned with practical questions, such as how to gain access to people, manuscripts, and letters, and the legal status of such activities and materials. Biographers routinely compare themselves to burglars, detectives, explorers, or authorised guests touring a stately home (even if with burglary secretly in mind). All of these metaphors assume that an analogy can be drawn between books, someone's personality or reputation, and various kinds of property — land, housing, or other artefacts — which can be owned by individuals and institutions, and are subject to a nation's laws and statutes (the laws of libel, trespass, patent, copyright, and so on). At the same time, most biographers are aware that the notion of a fixed identity "out there", to be explored, transgressed, protected, or owned, is at best a convenient shorthand. It is certainly economical with the truth, for one of the key fascinations of biography lies in the interplay it offers between the continuity of its subject's individual body and his or her personal identity, that same individual's knowledge and experience of continual change and adaptation, and the efforts of the biographer, through research and narrative, to re-imagine and interpret this experience afresh.