Virginia Woolf argued for an androgynous art that would transcend gender and set the novel free to soar in a realm where the maleness or femaleness of its creator no longer much mattered. TS Eliot wanted an impersonal poetry in which his work would be read without any reference to the known or imagined details of his life. Above all what neither writer wanted was for their books to be situated in a network of gossipy and limiting confusion about where they ended and their artistic productions began.
No one, though, has ever suggested the same thing for biographers. Indeed, exactly the opposite has tended to be the case, with a disproportionate amount of the reader's attention directed towards the relationship between the writer and his or her subject. It is this rather than the work itself—five years of research agonisingly beaten and polished into what is supposed to be a work of art—that becomes the subject under scrutiny and review.
I only realised how true this was when I started giving talks and presentations about my new biography, a life of the Victorian cookery writer Mrs Beeton. One conference organiser asked if I'd be bringing along food for the participants. Another suggested that I might do a cookery demonstration in real time, a proposal which so appalled my mother that she offered to come along and perform the whisking and baking for me while I stood to one side providing a PowerPoint presentation.
Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management isn't simply a collection of 2,000 recipes, it is also a guide to running your household elegantly and economically. Neither of these adjectives are ones that even (or particularly) my closest friends would ascribe to me, but that hasn't bothered the audiences with whom I have so far come into contact. Without pausing to consider whether I am any kind of authority on domesticity, they have bombarded me with questions about how to get rid of moths (surely there's something in a sachet you can buy in Woolworth's?) and how to stop children eating junk food (don't know, haven't got any).
I haven't, though, suffered as much as some of my female biographer friends. One woman, a university teacher for 15 years, was surprised to find herself asked questions by a national newspaper on the subject of her "career" as a call girl. She had written an accomplished study of a courtesan whose interventions in various Regency scandals had threatened to topple governments. When she explained to the disappointed reporter that it didn't follow that she was herself an enthusiastic Westminster bed-hopper, the young man made his excuses and left.
Another friend who had written about a 1930s racing driver found herself asked to pose provocatively for the cameras over the bonnet of a sleek classic motor. She had to explain that, although it was true that her subject was famous for taking her clothes off in public, she, the writer, was not about to follow suit. Yet another friend who produced a book about a famous woman mountaineer found herself besieged with invitations to lead groups of enthusiastic climbers up some of the peaks her subject had famously conquered in a crinoline 150 years earlier.
It is true that biographers don't pick their subjects at random, and there has to be a spark that brings the two halves of the equation together. The friend who wrote about the racing driver does like sweeping up the M1 in her BMW, while the one who chose the mountaineer is a keen hillwalker.
On the other hand, you often get a kind of negative pull, a fascination for the opposite or the other which brings author and subject together. It was because I am domestically shambolic that I first became fascinated, years ago, by Mrs Beeton's bible of perfection. If I was the sort of woman who ironed her tablecloths—or even possessed tablecloths—would I really feel the need to read about a world where parlourmaids smooth the household into daily calm?
There remains, however, a strange anomaly, a gender disparity that has not yet been properly explained. It seems to be only female biographers who get confused with their subjects. No one assumes that Michael Holroyd is gay simply because he once wrote a book about Lytton Strachey. No one expected the late Richard Ellmann, who wrote about Oscar Wilde, to be the source of a stream of arch one-liners. No one assumes that because he wrote two books about Coleridge, Richard Holmes is signalling to the world that he has a drug problem.
At the heart of this disparity must be good old-fashioned sexism. Women, even those operating in high culture, still tend to lack an individual identity, a crisp-edged outline over which no one may trample or scribble. With a little sleight of hand, or even casual carelessness, women can be made to merge together, stand in for one another, until the point is reached where it becomes impossible to tell one from another. Men, by contrast, remain sharply defined, individual, insoluble. When a male biographer takes on a subject, the relationship is assumed to be one of cautious friendship in which both parties keep their defences up and their wits about them. When a woman does the same thing, by contrast, she is assumed to have melted and run until, in effect, she has become the person she is writing about.
