Writing lives

Writing Lives: From Victorian glorification to Bloomsbury boldness to contemporary obliquity, the life story of the biography is chronicled by D.J. Taylor

Q: WHO, JUST UNDER A CENTURY AGO, WROTE THE FOLLOWING, AND ABOUT WHOM? No doubt the old-fashioned biography will return, and, with the years, we shall once more learn to assist with our fathers’ decorum at the lying-in-state of our great men … Meanwhile, we must keep our tongue in our cheek, must we not, for fear it should loll out and reveal the idiot? We have discovered a jollier way of honouring our dead. The corpse has become a marionette. With bells on its fingers and wires on its toes it is jigged about to a “period dance” of our own piping; and who is not amused? In fact, this pointed little homily on the biographer’s art is taken from the preface to Evelyn Waugh’s Rossetti: His Life and…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, December/January 2025

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