Abstract
The conference ‘Writing the Lives of Writers’ made it clear that most biographers feel biography to be immensely difficult. Speaker after speaker reiterated this point with wit, with style, and with deep feeling.
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Notes
Samuel Johnson, ‘Parliamentary Debates’, Gentleman’s Magazine, xii (1742), 344 (election of Arthur Onslow as Speaker);
‘Preface to Shakespeare, 1765’, Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), vol. i, p. 95;
Helen Gardner, ‘Literary Biography’, in In Defence of the Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 189 (italics added).
Philip Davis, In Mind of Johnson: A Study of Johnson the Rambler (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1989), p. 241.
E.g. Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 5, 41–3.
Alexander Pope, Epistle to Lord Cobham (1734), lines 23–4, 75–6 (or in Warburton’s text, lines 29–30, 134–5).
James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill and L. E Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), vol. ii, pp. 365–6.
Hayden White, The Content of the Form, Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 4, 21, 24.
Iris Barry, Portrait of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (London: Ernest Benn, 1928; preface dated from Bloomsbury), p. 8.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Complete Letters, ed. Robert Halsband (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965–7), vol. iii, p. 80, vol. ii, p. 46, vol. iii, p. 198.
Samuel Johnson, The Rambler (1750), ed. W J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969), vol. iii, p. 321;
Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978 (New York: Norton, 1979); Montagu, Complete Letters, vol. ii, p. 124.
A phrase used several times, notably by Alexander Pope in ‘Epistle to Mr Jervas’ (1716), line 60 (altered in 1735 to ‘Worsley’s’), in Minor Poems, ed. Norman Ault and John Butt (London and New Haven: Methuen and Yale University Press, 1964), p. 158.
See Isobel Grundy, ‘Medical Advance and Female Fame: Inoculation and its After-Effects’, Lumen, xiii (1994), 13–42.
Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985);
Edith Sitwell, Alexander Pope (London: Faber, 1930).
Frances Harris, A Passion for Government: The Life of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991).
Joseph Spence, Letters from the Grand Tour, ed. Slava Klima (Montreal and London): McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1975), p. 356;
Bathsua Makin, An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen (1673), p. 3.
William Congreve, The Way of the World (1700);
Pope, An Epistle to a Lady (1734), line 20;
Pope, Epistle to Lord Cobham, Of the Knowledge and Characters of Men (1734), line 20.
James Clifford, Young Samuel [printed as Sam in USA] Johnson (London: Heinemann, 1955);
John Wain, Samuel Johnson (New York: Viking, 1975).
Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy, The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (London: Batsford, 1990).
Susan Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660–1833 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).
For a useful discussion of attitudes, see Lois A. Chaber, ‘“This Affecting Subject”: An “Interested” Reading of Childbearing in Two Novels by Samuel Richardson’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 8: 2 (January 1996), 193–250.
Horace Walpole, Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis et al. (1939–83), vol. 30, p. 8; vol. 22, p. 56);
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Essays and Poems, and Simplicity A Comedy, ed. Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977, 1993), pp. 201–4.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Romance Writings, ed. Isobel Grundy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 106–92.
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Grundy, I. (1998). ‘Acquainted with all the Modes of Life’: The Difficulty of Biography. In: Gould, W., Staley, T.F. (eds) Writing the Lives of Writers. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26548-0_8
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