The Art of Biography - Ready for Reading

C1 Advanced · Multiple Matching · Ready for C1 Advanced 4th Edition, Macmillan Education

You are going to read an article about the genre of biography. For questions 1–10, choose from the sections (A-D). The sections may be chosen more than once.

A few years ago, I wrote a piece in which I declared that biography, if not quite dead, was in very poor condition. I was concerned that for far too long, publishers had been churning out inferior versions of Amanda Foreman’s excellent Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire, which had deservedly been a hit. The endless imitation Georgianas, however, showed all the tendencies that the critic Janet Malcolm had identified as the marks of so much biographical writing: a sense that, as long as the facts are there, it doesn’t much matter how badly or hastily they are set out. The biographers Malcolm had in her sights were written in leaden prose and entailed a marathon trudge from cradle to grave. I hesitated before telling people I was a biographer: it felt tantamount to admitting that I was a journalist incapable of original thought.

But it turns out that biography wasn’t in terminal decline after all. It was more that I hadn’t been looking for it hard enough or in quite the right places. Last weekend, the University of East Anglia hosted a conference at which the masters of biography took its pulse and made the cheering diagnosis that it is, in fact, in good health. What has happened, these expert practitioners explained, is that biography has changed its shape. This shift has emerged from a growing sense that biography as it used to be done was not getting us close to the experience it was trying to describe. We all know that life isn’t actually comprised of a stately march through the decades in which loose ends, false trails and those periods where nothing much happens are tidied away out of sight. Mostly our lives feel shapeless, coming into focus only when a particular occasion makes us feel, for a few minutes at least, fully ourselves.

One new approach to biography employs the presenting of something small to tell a bigger story. Frances Wilson demonstrated how effective this can be in How to Survive the Titanic. She focuses on the moment when J Bruce Ismay, the ship’s owner, jumped into a lifeboat while other first-class men allowed women and children to take the available spaces. Pressing hard on Ismay’s split-second decision to leap to safety, Wilson tells a story not just about one man’s lost honour, but about a layered drama of class, nationality and technological modernity. Another approach is to organise your narrative around objects that carried a particular emotional charge for the person you are writing about. In The Real Jane Austen, for instance, biographer Paula Byrne pulls out an East Indian shawl and a carriage that figured in both Austen’s personal experience and her fiction, and weaves a new narrative around them. Amanda Foreman uses yet another approach in her latest book. In A World on Fire, she tells the story of the American Civil War by using scores of micro-biographies. Dealing with all these characters demonstrates her extraordinary degree of technical ability. While in a classic single-subject biography it’s clear where you must go next, in group biography you are required, like a circus performer, to keep many plates spinning while keeping all the efforts invisible.

Other biographers have realised that their subject’s non-eventful schooldays or the long holidays by the sea can be compressed into a few terse paragraphs so they can spend more on the bits that matter. It is an approach showcased brilliantly by Matthew Hollis. In Now All Roads Lead to France, Hollis concentrates on the defining moment when the Anglo-Welsh writer Edward Thomas gave up his unfulfilling journalistic career in favour of the poetry he had never quite got round to making. Unlike the pressure of the looming war, Thomas finally becomes the kind of writer he was meant to be, producing poetry that would change the music of the English language forever. It would be disingenuous to claim that these new ways of telling lives are entirely driven by intellectual concerns. The pressures are commercial, too. People also have shorter attention spans, which means that these doorstop biographies of 400 pages can start to seem like a looming threat rather than a delicious promise. But more and more interesting books are being published which deal with the lives of others. They may not announce themselves as ‘biographies’, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t.

The Art of Biography

What is the future for this literary genre, asks Kathryn Hughes

a biography being based around items that would have been meaningful to the book's subject

Hughes' confession that she was once reluctant to reveal the nature of her job

Hughes' admission that she had been wrong about the state of biography as a genre

the possible reaction of readers today towards biographies they consider oversize

the advantage of skimming over less interesting parts of a subject's life

the view that the traditional structure of a biography does not accurately reflect reality

the skill required to produce a biographical-type book that features multiple subjects

the stimulus a biographer's subject required before finding their true vocation

a specific event being used as the focal point in a biography that deals with wider issues

Hughes' contempt for a trend she thought she had detected

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