Items24The creator’s order
  1. 1James BoswellJames BoswellBorn 29 Oct 1740Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, published in 1791, invented the modern biography by putting the subject's own talk on the page. For two decades Boswell noted Johnson's conversation almost verbatim in his journals, then shaped it into scenes, so readers meet a melancholy, funny, contrary man…0i
  2. 2Elizabeth GaskellElizabeth GaskellBorn 29 Sept 1810Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë, written at the request of Charlotte's father and published in 1857, two years after her death, created the image of the Brontës that still dominates: three gifted sisters isolated on the moors at Haworth, writing against grief and hardship. She drew on…0i
  3. 3Lytton StracheyLytton StracheyBorn 1 Mar 1880Strachey's Eminent Victorians, published in 1918 as the First World War ended, punctured four national heroes, Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold and General Gordon, in short, ironic portraits instead of the reverent two-volume lives the Victorians wrote. He selected quotations…0i
  4. 4Richard EllmannRichard EllmannBorn 15 Mar 1918Ellmann's James Joyce, first published in 1959, is often called the greatest literary biography of its century, and the reason is its method: he tracked down Joyce's siblings, friends and Dublin acquaintances and showed, street by street, how real people and incidents went into Ulysses and…0i
  5. 5Robert K. MassieRobert K. MassieBorn 5 Jan 1929Massie came to the last Romanovs through his own family: his son had haemophilia, and Nicholas and Alexandra, published in 1967, argues that the Tsarevich Alexei's illness, and his mother's desperate trust in Rasputin, shaped the collapse of imperial Russia. It turned a political story into a…0
  6. 6Brenda MaddoxBrenda MaddoxBorn 24 Feb 1932Maddox twice moved a woman from the margins of a famous man's story to its centre. Nora, her 1988 life of Nora Barnacle, showed Joyce's partner as a witty, independent force rather than the uneducated chambermaid of legend, drawing on letters and Galway records. Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of…0
  7. 7Antonia FraserAntonia FraserBorn 27 Aug 1932Fraser's Mary Queen of Scots, published in 1969, rescued its subject from both romantic tragedy and Protestant propaganda, reading the casket letters and Scottish politics carefully to present a capable, unlucky ruler caught between factions. It became a bestseller and showed that serious,…0i
  8. 8Claire TomalinClaire TomalinBorn 20 Jun 1933Tomalin's The Invisible Woman, published in 1990, pieced together the life of Nelly Ternan, the young actress who was Charles Dickens's secret companion for 13 years, from scraps of letters, account books and records her family had suppressed, and Dickens has never looked quite the same since. Her…0i
  9. 9Janet MalcolmJanet MalcolmBorn 8 Jul 1934Malcolm changed how we see biographers themselves. The Silent Woman, published in 1994, examines the battle over Sylvia Plath's life between her biographers, Ted Hughes and his sister Olwyn, and shows how every account of a dead writer takes sides, comparing the biographer to a burglar going…0i
  10. 10Michael HolroydMichael HolroydBorn 27 Aug 1935Holroyd's two-volume Lytton Strachey of 1967 and 1968 was the first biography to write openly about its subject's homosexuality and the tangled loves of the Bloomsbury group, using letters the family made available, and it changed how British biography treated private life. His later life of…0