The boom in biography, especially literary biography, shows no sign of abating. There are currently five Jane Austens in the pipeline. Another life of Byron will appear next month, despite the 200 already in existence. I am myself working on a biography of George Eliot, even though a perfectly fine one came out three months ago. In most cases there is nothing new to discover in the way that biographers-as archaeologists of their subject's secrets-are supposed to. Most major literary figures have been scrutinised so many times that any coded diary or muffled asylum inmate has long since been worked into the plot.
There is, of course, that old saw about every age needing a new version of its ancestors. Instinctively Whig, we yearn to see our own significance prefigured in the past. On occasions this goes beyond simple narcissism to a genuine desire to find reflections on present dilemmas. For example, Eliot's preoccupations are uncannily our own. Her re-imagining of community in the town, her wariness of a feminism grounded in economic and political individualism, her emphasis on duties over rights have never seemed so pressing. We need a new Eliot to inspire our own reformulations of the balance between public and private dues.
But present relevance is not why publishers commissioned 3,292 biographies last year, nor why those who write them earn advances well in excess of those which go to novelists of comparable standing. Biography flourishes because it assumes, and amplifies, the idea of the coherent, effective personality. It organises itself around the biological plot of birth, sexual love, procreation (possibly) and death. It sees significance in the way its subjects act upon the world and finds a clear relationship between the life they experienced and the art they produced. It is about people a bit like us, or the people we might be if we were clever, lucky and brave.
When one feels that one does not matter very much at all, it is comforting to read about people who did; or at least about people whose biographers think they did. Throughout her life George Eliot was beset by the terror that her life was futile, and that she herself would be scattered pointlessly to the wind. It is her biographer's job-my job-to pick up the pieces and arrange them into an order which they did not have. In the process, Eliot's emotional chaos is reconfigured as the necessary agony of the genius who produced Middlemarch. Her suffering has become significant in the way that we hope ours might too.
Biography has expanded to take up the space vacated by fiction. Until 25 years ago novels still taught us how to live. Characters whom we recognised as emotional kin moved through familiar landscapes. Their tangles and resolutions became points of comparison for our own. But literary fiction long since gave up trying to be true to life. Post-structuralism pronounced the author dead, exposed characters as nothing more than textual effect, and accused plot of craving for coherence that never was. Released from the responsibility of trying to be true, fiction has scampered off to play hide-and-seek with reality. Instead of straining to appear authoritative, it shoves its unreliability in the reader's face. Narrators fib, characters go nameless and storylines trail off to nowhere. It is enough to tip the nervous reader over the edge.
Biography now does the job which the novel used to do. It offers a stable world of cause and effect in which character works out as destiny. Nor is this as clunky as it might sound. In certain important ways the genre has moved on from its earlier obligation to produce inspiring example or hagiographic celebration. Armed with the same intellectual tools as everyone else-feminism and psychoanalysis are favourites-the modern biographer is alert for the hidden, the suppressed or the unsaid. Daphne du Maurier turns out to have had an affair with Gertrude Lawrence, Emily Bront? was anorexic and Elizabeth Barrett clinically depressed. In fact, so familiar is the reader with the idea of psychological darkness, that the pressure is now on biographers to become tabloid hacks, metaphorically sifting through dustbins and standing on doorsteps to get to the dirt first. Lesbianism is currently the big crowd-pleaser and George Eliot's assumption of a male pseudonym always causes excited speculation. The question I am most often asked by people who are probably very clever, is not what Eliot contributed to the development of radical conservatism, but whether she was gay.
In other ways, too, biography has moved on. No one assumes any longer that the novelist or poet necessarily knew what they were doing. Literary psychoanalysis does not simply give us access to the subject's sexual quirks, but has cut the cords which tie art to conscious intention. Where once it was the biographer's job to match up fictional characters to real-life friends and family-"George Eliot based the character of Adam Bede on her father"-now the approach is cautious and oblique. With the text replacing the author at the heart of the reading process, the novel is now assumed to "resonate" and "rework" the raw stuff of life instead of representing it directly.
But although biographers have added some fancy new words to their repertoire, they have resolutely excluded the implications of the discipline from which those terms are drawn. In literary biography it is common to find the subject's novels or poems handled with a sophisticated awareness of their textual status followed by a crude assertion of a "truth" drawn from a letter, diary or set of household accounts. Thus in all but the most shoddy of Eliot biographies, The Mill on the Floss is rightly seen as the product of a set of interconnecting cultural, personal and political pressures. But this sits oddly alongside an assumption that manuscript sources provide instant access to what Eliot, or more properly Mary Ann Evans, was thinking or feeling. Letters, after all, may be written to boast, plead or lie. Diaries are no more authentic than the other stories we tell about ourselves.
The result of all this is that biography is in danger of becoming a second-rate genre. Its attraction, for reader and writer, has always been its potential for bridging the academy and the marketplace. It has the capacity for absorbing the trickiest intellectual angles and showing how these might play out in the world of living, breathing human beings. Theories about the construction of the self which might otherwise languish in dense journal prose, get the chance to practise on real people. It is this unique scope of biography which attracts writers from both sides of the academic divide. Books by professional authors such as Victoria Glendinning and Michael Holroyd sit alongside those by university professors such as Richard Ellman and Hermione Lee, without any sense of inferiority.
But this might end if biographers insist on merely nodding at developments in literary and cultural criticism without properly absorbing them. Refusing to acknowledge the lie at the heart of life-writing-of the known and knowable self-will result in work which looks increasingly old-fashioned and foolish. Biography will become the preserve of the commercial writer turning out a quick life to tie in with a television series or the academic who fancies a couple of years off from the coalface. The genre which once, uniquely in British culture, provided a common ground between the university specialist and the educated generalist will begin to split in two. The intellectual gap which now divides the literary critic in academic journals and the one who writes for the books pages of the broadsheets will start to make its mark on biography.
There are signs that something is being done. Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf shows that it is possible to question the nature of biography without leaving readers longing for "life" as they know it. She gives us different versions of Woolf-lesbian, Bloomsbury-ite, abused child, madwoman-and makes no attempt to knit them together. Her readings of Woolf's novels and journalism are neither simplistically reflective of biographical detail nor dangerously detached. She finds currents flowing between life and work and back again and makes no attempt to limit one by the other. It is a magnificent achievement and I hope prophetic. Biography needs to give up its strongest selling point-the fantasy of the authentic self-and embrace its fractured, lying nature. In this way it may just save itself from becoming the leader of a literary heritage trail which leads to nowhere.
