By Kat Meads
Amused to see me clutching yet another Brontë biography, a pal of mine remarked: “Still hoping that story will come out differently?”
(In my case, the alternate story would be: Emily lives on, spared sister Charlotte’s “improving”/meddling with her work, and successfully publishes a Wuthering Heights follow-up, its plot as thick with revenge, fog, lust and ghosts as its predecessor.)
My pal was teasing, joking. However. It’s a valid question. What motivates serial biography-ing? Why do I, why does anyone, rush off to read the latest biography of Catherine the Great, William Shakespeare, Nina Simone, Andy Warhol and countless others history has deemed biography worthy? Why doesn’t reading one biography about that person do the trick?
Researching and writing These Particular Women , a collection of essays about Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie, Kitty Oppenheimer and others, revealed at least one answer (which probably should have been obvious): no biography entirely agrees with another.
Christie’s biographers can come to no agreement about the why of Christie’s eleven-day disappearance in 1926, some arguing that it was a calculated revenge plot against her philandering husband, others accepting Christie’s own explanation that she had suffered a bout of amnesia that nixed her true identity and allowed her to enjoy herself under an assumed name at the Hydro Hotel while search parties scoured hill and dale for a missing mystery novelist.
Although every biography of Virginia Woolf covers her childhood, her writing, her quarrels and suicide, the details and interpretations of those details vary quite a lot, most markedly in interpretations and descriptions of Woolf’s “madness” and sexuality.
Turns out, biographers, like everyone else, have worldviews and pet peeves. They may be writing about the same life—but delivering the same “story” of that life? Not so much.
Biographers’ statements, justifications, assessments of the genre in general, and commentary on the unreliable falsity of any narrative began to fill my notebooks.
• “Biographers pretend they know people.”—Virginia Woolf
• “The dead cannot be shamed.”—Diane Middlebrook, biographer of Anne Sexton and Ted Hughes
• “The man of letters is, in truth, ever writing his own biography.”—Anthony Trollope
• “It is difficult to recover the inner life of a marriage.”—Ruth Painter Randall, biographer of Mary Todd Lincoln
• “Isn’t an authorized biography … autobiography in disguise?”—Jenny Diski
• “Too many facts, of whatever laudatory or dismissive nature, destroy the shape of all lives.”—Elizabeth Hardwick
• “All memory is fiction, which is why autobiographical accounts, and historical ones for that matter, are notoriously inaccurate.”—Beryl Bainbridge
• “Everything is real until it’s published.”—Robert Lowell
As an incorrigible reader of biographies, here’s my theory: try as we might to read “historically” rather than personally, some wee part of us continues to yearn for the one nail-down-able, definitive version of a particular life that will serve as a tidy, wrapped-up-in-a-bow instructive example, a little extra help for those of us still attempting to navigate this perplexing thing known as existence. It’s almost a plausible theory, isn’t it?
When last I spoke to my teasing pal, she teased me some more after I confessed that, yes, I was in fact in the middle of reading my twelfth Brontë biography, this one written by Dame Daphne du Maurier. In du Maurier’s version, the moors are still wild and windy, the ill-heated Parsonage still overlooks the crowded, shadowed graveyard, brother Branwell remains a major family headache, and “self-contained” Emily still sickens and dies before Charlotte. But Emily’s supposed “misery” during her stay in Brussels, away from her beloved Haworth? Utter “nonsense,” according to du Maurier.
There’s no getting around it. Writing about the lives of others, consciously or unconsciously, we reveal ourselves.
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Kat Meads ’ These Particular Women , a collection of essays on the contradictory biographical portraits of ten famous and infamous women, was published in April. Her essays have appeared in New England Review, Agni Online, Southern Review, World Literature Today and elsewhere. She lives in California. Find out more at her website .
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