‘Life writing’, a variant term that has gained some currency in recent years, is sometimes advanced as a wider concept, though I suspect the reverse may be true: that through its stress on textuality – on the written word – life writing in fact diminishes the richer possibilities of the Greek compound it appears to translate, which more broadly denotes the graphic representation of life, through any existing or potential medium. It is biography, in this wider sense, rather than mere life writing, that is my theme here.  I want indeed to suggest that the current revival of interest in biography may be due in part to a growing recognition of the many different ways and many different media in and through which human lives nowadays may be represented and recovered; that the return of biography may have been partly prompted by the rapid technological changes of the past decade, and by the spirit of experimentation which those changes seem in turn to encourage.

At the gentler levels of technological sophistication, take object biography, soon to become a focus of attention at the National Museum of Australia in a new gallery entitled Australian Journeys, and the subject of a recent presentation by National Museum curators at the Humanities Research Centre’s conference, Transnational Lives. Object biography sets out to narrate the life histories of certain physical objects – how and where they were made, how they work, how they have travelled, what they signify culturally – in relation to the lives of particular people with whom the objects have been associated. A Latvian national costume and a twenty-three-stringed Vietnamese bamboo musical instrument were amongst the items under discussion; film footage and sound recordings accompanied the display. Researchers at the University of New England have recently been studying the way in which biographical narratives are increasingly being posted on the Internet, on somewhat unlikely websites: that of the National Quilt Register, for example, where detailed histories of the genesis and design of particular quilts are accompanied by even lengthier histories and even larger photographs of their makers and successive owners; or the websites of celebrity chefs, such as Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson, where family stories and snapshots are cunningly intermixed with culinary tips and commercial promotions. Quilts in themselves may actually constitute biographical narratives, personal and family stories being sewn quite literally into the fabric of what are known as memory quilts. Food may be used to similar ends, as I discovered to my surprise when I stumbled upon the website ‘Pizza Biography’. ‘Do your students love pizza? If so, they’ll love creating pizza biographies!’ advises Education World: The Educator’s Best Friend. ‘Students will create a “visual” biography of a famous figure, in which each pizza slice represents a paragraph and toppings represent supporting details.’

Object biography may carry its own enigmas and frustrations, as Julian Barnes wittily reminds us in his novel Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) (what does a stuffed parrot in a museum in Rouen tell you about a long-dead writer who may have had it – or was it perhaps another parrot? – on his desk years ago?), and as Dr Johnson, centuries earlier, noted in exasperation in his Lives of the English Poets (1781) when confronting a similar biographical relic, the famous armchair in which John Dryden sat while holding court at Will’s Coffee House, an item which, he was helpfully told, was placed on the balcony in summer and by the fire in winter: ‘This is all the intelligence which his survivors afforded me.’ Yet objects, at times, can also surprisingly serve to enlarge and illuminate a biographical narrative. In another presentation at the conference just mentioned, a biographical account of the American philanthropist Elihu Yale and his role in the East India Company was accompanied, intriguingly, by a biography of nutmeg, the commodity on which the considerable fortunes of Yale the man and Yale the university have been built.

An enterprising exhibition earlier this year at the National Portrait Gallery in London, entitled Searching for Shakespeare, presented an extraordinary assemblage of material objects – gloves, hats, shoes, maps, manuscripts, wills, marriage certificates, printed books, skulls of bears, buttons and dress pins excavated from the Rose Theatre footings, multiple portraits of Shakespeare, or someone like Shakespeare, and of his patrons and fellow-actors and dramatists, rapiers, signet rings, rosewater basins, theatre designs – all of which items served to prompt, provoke, tease and materially frame our sense of that mysterious figure, so universally known, so largely unknown: Shakespeare. At the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., newly reopened in July 2006 after extensive renovation, conventional and experimental forms of portraiture are accompanied by film, video and sound recordings, and by a variety of physical objects: maps, coins, letters, diaries, watches, weapons, car registration plates; an automatic telegraph receiver beside the portrait of Samuel Morse, an early sewing machine next to the portrait of Isaac Singer, a phonograph alongside Thomas Edison. The new Australian National Portrait Gallery (now under construction on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin, and due to open in 2008) is expected to deploy, with equal if not greater ingenuity, a variety of technologies, new and old, to represent the lives of individual Australians.

Until quite recent times, biography has not enjoyed much of a foothold in universities worldwide, though it has clung to odd nooks and tussocks along the academic cliff-face. The Centre for Biographical Research at the University of Hawai’i, home for many years to the great American biographer Leon Edel, and, in this country, the Biography Institute at Griffith University, which flourished throughout the 1980s under the direction of Andrew Field and James Walter, have been shining but isolated examples of organised biographical enquiry within the academy. For a long period from the advent of the New Criticism in the 1940s and throughout the heady era of Parisian theory from the late 1960s, biography was widely regarded with scepticism and suspicion by academics within the humanities and social sciences in Australia and elsewhere. If the author was truly dead, why bother about the life? Pleasure – and profit, too, it seemed – lay primarily in the text: in formalist analysis and theoretical speculation. Many leading biographers during those years chose to pursue their work outside the academy, removed from the distractions of university administration and the discouraging glances of more theoretically minded colleagues.

Today the scene has changed dramatically. Biography is now well established as an academic subject within many universities throughout the world. In Britain, undergraduate and postgraduate studies in this field are led, for example, at the University of East Anglia by the Romantic biographer Richard Holmes, nowadays ensconced within the academy as Professor of Biography, and at Oxford University by Hermione Lee, biographer of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton. In Australia, similar courses are attracting students at several universities, including La Trobe, Curtin, and Monash. Two years ago, the Humanities Research Centre established its Biography Institute, which provides a regular programme of conferences, seminars, Visiting Fellowships, and public events. The Institute is already working in close collaboration with academic and cultural institutions both here and overseas, including the National Library of Australia, the National Portrait Gallery, the National Museum, the National Archives; and at ANU itself with the Australian Dictionary of Biography: that great flagship project, established in the late 1950s, and, since July 2006, available online in fully searchable format; a superlative and instantly accessible resource for researchers into virtually any aspect of Australian social, political or cultural history. When the HRC advertised last year its Visiting Fellowship programme for 2006, Remembering Lives: Biography, Memory, and Commemoration, we received applications from classicists, anthropologists, economic historians, literary critics, philosophers, political scientists, musicologists, social historians, historians of science. There were art historians trained in the formalist school of Clement Greenberg, who were now discovering, through encounters with such magisterial works as Hilary Spurling’s Matisse (2005) and John Richardson’s (to date) two-volume A Life of Picasso (1991–96), the rewards and hazards of biographical enquiry; lawyers who had learnt that a closer knowledge of the personal lives of the judiciary enlarged  their understanding of the seemingly impersonal legal judgements they were trying to interpret.

Both within and beyond the academy, then, something is starting to shift. But how deep do these changes go? What advances have really been made? How new is the new biography, and how does it differ from the old? And what has happened (come to think of it) to those dissentient voices that were often heard just a few years ago: to the disparagers of biography, the sceptics, those who hoped it might take other forms? One way of critically assessing the return to biography I have just described might be to hear once again just a few of the voices of those dissidents and discontents. I would like to recall five such voices – of figures both famous and not so famous, both living and dead – and ask how one might respond to their dissatisfaction today.

Here, then, is the first of my antibiographers. It is the English critic Terry Eagleton, writing just a dozen years ago in the London Review of Books about a biography that he hadn’t much enjoyed reading – Sean French’s life of the once-fashionable, now largely forgotten novelist and playwright of the 1930s, Patrick Hamilton (1993) – and seizing the opportunity to register some gloomy thoughts about the fatuity of biography in general:

the cult of the Individual Life [writes Eagleton] is, of course, ultimately self-defeating. For one thing, most individual existences are routine and unremarkable … Biographies cannot help reminding us, in the very act of distilling the uniqueness of their subjects, of just what tediously generic creatures they are. The structure of biography is biology: even the most wayward of geniuses have to get themselves born and educated, fight with their parents, fall in love and die. The remorseless linearity of the biographical form represents one of the last pockets of realism untouched by Modernism, and the triumph of the ideology of the ego over Tristram Shandy.

One of the more curious assumptions in this lament is that biography lacks formal properties of its own; that it merely represents, in some lumpish, unmediated way, life itself, as distinct from the more fashioned, more daring allurements of art; that, in so far as it achieves a form, it is a form imposed implacably by life itself, which determines an invariable narrative of ‘remorseless linearity’. Biography, as Eagleton views it, is moreover focused entirely on the individual life, and all individual lives, he suggests, turn out in the end to be much the same as each other, tediously generic, scarcely worth the labour of exploring. In this last, somewhat surprising, sentiment, Eagleton seems to echo the thoughts of the nihilist Bazarov in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1861), who believes,

All people are alike in their bodies as in their souls. Each one of us has a brain, a spleen and lungs made in the same way, and the so-called moral qualities are the same in all of us. The minor variations don’t mean anything. One human example is sufficient to judge all the rest. People are like trees in a forest. No botanist is going to be concerned with each individual birch tree.

a notion which Turgenev’s own subtly discriminating narrative within the novel comprehensively refutes, and which we who live in the land of the eucalypt know instinctively to be untrue.

Biography, of course, is not only devoted to the chronicling of individual lives, but may also explore the collective lives of groups and communities, both large (Paris: A biography) and small. Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men: Five friends whose curiosity changed the world (2002) is a brilliant recent example of this kind of writing. It traces with great skill the activities of the members of a remarkable late eighteenth-century club located in the English midlands who met once a month on the night of the full moon (so they could find their way home again after an evening’s energetic drinking and argumentation). It focuses especially on five of its leading figures, the potter Josiah Wedgwood, James Watt of steam engine fame, Joseph Priestley the radical preacher and chemist, Matthew Boulton the manufacturer, and Erasmus Darwin, physician, poet, and botanist. Uglow does not offer a comprehensive birth-to-death narrative of the lives of any of these people, but charts instead their social and intellectual interaction over a relatively brief, but exceptionally fertile, period of time. James Shapiro’s recent and much-praised study, 1599: A year in the life of William Shakespeare (2005), takes a narrower slice of biographical history, looking at Shakespeare’s creative development during a single eventful year of English social, political, and theatrical history. John Lahr’s biography of Barry Humphries (2000) focuses with even greater intensity on a particular three-week period in Humphries’ performing life.

Even in the dozen or so years that have passed since Eagleton gave it short shrift, biography has become, I would venture to say, a more adventurous art, more varied in its forms, more quizzical of its own procedures, more fun to read. Take for example Jonathan Coe’s wonderful biography, Like a Fiery Elephant: The story of B.S. Johnson (2004). Thirty years after B.S. Johnson’s premature death, his name may not provoke instant recognition, though he did his best to make it famous in his day. He was a working-class Londoner and a self-made, strenuously experimental writer; a friend of Samuel Beckett, who admired his work, which amounted to seven novels, two slim volumes of verse, a number of plays (mainly unperformed), several short films, mainly for television, and a quantity of journalism. Johnson admired his own work too, with a solemnity that bordered at times on the comic, but shaded eventually into terminal depression. Johnson’s novel The Unfortunates (1969) was famously published in unbound format, its loose pages being delivered in a box; readers were invited to shuffle the pages and read in any sequence they chose. Librarians, to his chagrin, tended officiously to bind the pages together in the interests of tidiness and security. In Hungary, where Johnson had a big following, The Unfortunates was published as a bound paperback, but Johnson gave elaborate instructions as to how purchasers might then proceed to dismember the work and relish its narrative in an appropriately randomised manner. In another of his novels, Albert Angelo (1964), Johnson arranged for a rectangular hole to be cut through recto pages 147 and 149, so that readers might have a foreglimpse of a future event described on page 151. A number of booksellers returned their copies, assuming that they been supplied with defective stock, and an Australian customs officer impounded the book in the belief that obscenities had been cut out. In Johnson’s first novel, Travelling People (1963), in homage to the famous black page in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760–1767) – a modernist gesture that might gladden the spirits of Eagleton – the pages shade at a critical point of the narrative from grey to black to signal a character’s experience of a heart attack.

Jonathan Coe, himself an accomplished novelist, approaches his subject with a finely judged mixture of awe, amusement, critical severity, narrative dexterity, and – underpinning the entire account – unwavering respect. Johnson was a compulsive hoarder of papers and chronicler of personal events, and Coe found forty boxes of materials awaiting him as he began his biographical task. He intersperses his narrative with 160 textual ‘fragments’, as he calls them: passages from Johnson’s diaries and notebooks, from his letters (often stern in character) to friends and editors and publishers and unsympathetic reviewers; excerpts from his novels, his films, his poems, his radio plays, his parodies, his unfinished works; from his  football reports written for The Times of India, from his screenplay for a projected film of the 1966 World Cup; postcards and applications for fellowships, reports to funding bodies, speeches to the Society of Authors; transcripts of animated and accidentally recorded late-night, drink-fuelled conversations about art and life; notices of the subject’s death. There follow edited reflections from forty-four people who knew Johnson well, interviewed by Coe; and Coe’s own final heroic attempt to plumb at least some of the mysteries of his complex and tormented biographical subject. No one who picks up this absorbing life – perhaps in its way, the most lasting, though indirect, artistic legacy of B.S. Johnson – is likely to share the view that biography is an art that remains still ‘untouched by Modernism’.

My second biographical dissenter is herself one of the central figures of modernism, Virginia Woolf, a writer who spent much of her life thinking critically about the aims and objects and structures of biography as conventionally practised, wondering if there were not other, more imaginative ways in which lives might be recorded and remembered. Virginia Stephen was born in the very year in which her father, Leslie, started work as Editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, a vast enterprise on which he worked single-handed during the first eight years of its existence. He saw twenty-six volumes of the Dictionary through the press, and personally wrote 378 of its entries –essays of between five and ten thousand words apiece – but this immense workload led eventually to his physical and mental breakdown, and ultimately to his retirement from the project.

Virginia was proud and fond of her father, but distressed by the general tendencies of the biographical task to which he was committed. ‘It gave me,’ she wrote in her diary in 1923, ‘a twist in the head’. Leslie Stephen worked on the Dictionary at home in the room above his daughter’s study, and she could hear the movement of his rocking chair and the occasional thump as he dropped a book or another completed manuscript to the floor. What bothered her most about the DNB and biography as generally practised in the early years of the twentieth century were the people it left out, the unrecorded lives, the missing persons: women, most obviously (who constituted a mere three per cent of the entries in the original Dictionary), but also, as she put it, ‘the lives of the obscure’. In A Room of One’s Own (1929) she watches ‘a very ancient lady’ crossing the road with her daughter, and feels ‘the pressure of dumbness, the accumulation of unrecorded life’, in those and ‘all those infinitely obscure lives’ that are waiting to be chronicled. At the centre of A Room of One’s Own is that ‘fascinating and masterly biography’, as Woolf calls it, of Shakespeare’s imaginary sister, Judith, the kind of life which biography and society traditionally ignored. Woolf’s essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1924) is another attempt to ‘tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure’, to understand the lives of the neglected. The conventional forms of biography distressed Woolf as much as biography’s traditional exclusions: the assumption that lives were to be perceived in terms of their trajectory, their purposeful onward movement, of an ever-swelling list of achievements, offices, honours, and distinctions; the assumption that an accumulated record of such distinguished lives could ever constitute a true history of England. Might there not be other ways in which the stories of more humble, less known, less ambitiously driven people could be told?

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, published in 2004, tries to redress some at least of the gaps and imbalances of Leslie Stephen’s original DNB, which itself had been followed by a series of supplementary volumes of the more recent dead, and of so-called Missing Persons. Yet for all its welcome moves towards a greater social inclusiveness, the new Oxford DNB is still undeniably a dictionary that tells us about a prominent sector of society, a cohort of persons who, by one means or another – outstanding criminality and sporting prowess are amongst the several avenues to fame – have made their social mark. Where does that leave the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure? Are such lives really unamenable to biographical description?

Alexander Master’s brilliant biography, Stuart: A life backwards (2005), shows in exemplary fashion that they’re not. Stuart is a one-time homeless junkie and psychopath who has been living in a literal and spiritual region of Cambridge wholly unknown to Virginia Woolf; well below those finely discriminated upper gradients where the quality of high table food at the colleges for women is contrasted with the high table food at the colleges for men, and one has, or has not, a room of one’s own. Stuart is discovered by social workers at a much deeper Dantean circle of torment, Level D of the Lion Yard carpark well beneath the city of Cambridge, sleeping rough with  a handful of companions who have truly abandoned all hope, the socially irredeemable, known to professional workers as the chaotics. Against all the odds, Stuart has retained his searing wit and sharp intelligence; against all prediction, he moves up from his underworld carpark to doss at street level in Sidney Sussex Street, where Alexander Masters first finds him – and squats down beside him on the pavement to talk, feeling, with a curious rush of conflicting sensations, what it’s like to live habitually at this level. Miraculously, Stuart shifts eventually to Council housing and an intermittently less chaotic existence.

The narrative that Masters gradually assembles of Stuart’s life is moving, original, and surprisingly funny: not least when Stuart himself, on being shown the manuscript in progress, laceratingly mocks the story that Masters is labouring to tell (‘It’s bollocks boring … Alexander, sort it out – you’re the writer. I just done the living’). Finally, he suggests that Masters narrate the story backwards, starting from the present and tracing events back to the decisive moment when, at the age of twelve, the young and hitherto cheerful Stuart began to fall apart. This is an extraordinary biography, told not merely backwards but from the bottom up; a biography whose subject is not, like Woolf’s Mrs Bennett, sitting dumbly in the railway compartment, a passive object of writerly observation, but a dynamic collaborator, who – scathingly, humorously, irrepressibly – talks back.

I will deal with my third and fourth dissenters, Lytton Strachey and Roland Barthes, with the brevity they both admired. Both Strachey and Barthes felt oppressed by the characteristic forms that biography had adopted in their day, by its prevailing positivism, by its unchallenged dominance amongst possible modes of critical and historical explication, by its habitual dullness and fatiguing length. Strachey’s view of the ideal forms of biography is succinctly expressed in his essay on the art of John Aubrey, a writer he much admired:

A biography should either be as long as Boswell’s or as short as Aubrey’s. The method of enormous and elaborate accretion which produced The Life of Johnson is excellent, no doubt; but failing that, let us have no half-measures; let us have the pure essentials – a vivid image, on a page or two, without explanations, transitions, commentaries, or padding. This is what Aubrey gives us; and this, and one thing more – a sense of the pleasing, anxious being who, with his odd old alchemy, has transmuted a few handfuls of orts and relics into golden life.

Roland Barthes’s famous essay ‘The Death of the Author’ has sometimes been seen as a wholesale rebuttal of the value of biography in general. It is in fact a more sharply political piece, published significantly in Paris in May 1968, and trained quite particularly on current academic practices in France. Barthes was not opposed to the practice of biography as such, but, as Sean Burke has shown in his book The Death and Return of the Author (1998), was interested in alternative ways in which human lives, and especially the lives of authors, might be valued and remembered. In the preface to his book Sade, Fourier, Loyola (1971), Barthes toyed with the idea of a biography that might be composed entirely of fragments, rather than constituting a finished and organic whole. ‘Were I a writer and dead,’ he declares, ‘how I would like my life to be reduced, by the attentions of a friendly, carefree biographer, to a few details, a few tastes, a few inflections; let’s say, biographèmes.’ At the end of this book, Barthes included, by way of example, two ‘lives’ of Sade and Fourier, made up simply of a few numbered biographèmes, strewn and linked ‘like atoms of Epicurus’.

How would these two lovers of brevity, these advocates of biographical partiality (in the several senses of that word) feel about the state of current biographical writing if they were back in our midst today? Here my otherwise Whiggish account of the progress of biography begins to waver. Biography, in my view, does suffer today from what I am tempted to call a hoovering approach, in homage to the thirty-first president of the United States, whose personal archive is nowadays stored in an enormous tower on the campus of Stanford University, and to a well-known brand of vacuum cleaner, that sucks up everything within reach. It is a curious irony that the life of Strachey himself, that engaging but undeniably slight literary figure, should have been written at such staggering length by one of Britain’s finest living biographers, Michael Holroyd, with characteristic scholarly excellence but an undeniable zest too for what Strachey chose to call ‘enormous and elaborate accretion’. For true biographical brevity and true delight, look outside the English tradition, to the deft and elegant miniature lives of famous authors wittily composed by the Spanish author Javier Marias, Vidas Escritas (1992) published just this year in a superlative English translation (by Margaret Jull Costa) under the title Written Lives.

My fifth and final biographical sceptic is the Cambridge intellectual historian Stefan Collini, writing earlier this year – sympathetically, on the whole, but with one raised eyebrow – about Nicola Lacey’s recent biography of the Oxford legal philosopher, Herbert Hart (2004). This is how Collini’s review begins:

In 1945, Herbert Hart was a 38 year-old London barrister who had spent the previous six years largely working in military intelligence. What could be more obvious, then, than that he should be thought the perfect candidate for a full-time teaching position in Oxford in philosophy, a subject with which he had had no sustained connection since it formed part (though only part) of his undergraduate degree sixteen years earlier? Similarly, in 1952 Hart was a 45-year-old philosophy tutor who had by that point published only three essays and two book-reviews. Self-evidently, he was the ideal man to elect to Oxford’s Professorship of Jurisprudence.

Such a bizarre – and by present-day standards, quite scandalous – academic progression, Collini goes on to argue, cannot really be explained through the medium of biography, by concentration on the life of a single figure. What is called for here, he suggests, is a more wide-ranging inspection of the nature of academic institutions in mid-twentieth-century Britain: ‘the kind of analytical and comparative enquiry that can only lightly be touched upon in a biography ambitious to enjoy a publishing success beyond the confines of a specialist readership.’ Popular biography, in short, won’t do the trick; this is the kind of task that needs to go to the social historians.

On this general question, I think, the jury is still out. I would simply note that social historians themselves are beginning increasingly to discover how much can be learnt about an entire society, a wider historical moment, through following with close attention the trajectory of a single life, a single family, a small group of individuals whose lives, though seemingly unusual, are also in some sense exemplary. I think, for example, of the current work of the British historian Linda Colley, who is tracing the life of an individual named Elizabeth Marsh, who was conceived in Jamaica in 1734 and transported in utero across the Atlantic, whose childhood and adult life were spent in near-constant and at times quite hazardous peregrination, criss-crossing the globe. ‘There is a fundamental sense,’ Colley argues, ‘in which Marsh was not so much exceptional, as diversely and precociously representative to a remarkable degree’, swept up as she was in so many of the social and demographic currents of the late eighteenth-century world.

I think also of the recent work of Cassandra Pybus, tracing in astonishing detail the worldwide movements of individual runaway African slaves, conjuring, from the stories of these particular lives, a revealing larger narrative about the various societies through which these individuals moved. These are lives that were hitherto obscure or totally unknown. That their stories can be told at this moment is due not merely to the ingenuity and resourcefulness of individual researchers, but also in part (as Pybus herself points out) to recent technological change: to the sudden dramatic expansion of the archives through wholesale digitisation of institutional materials, such as the criminal records of the Old Bailey; even through the patient labours of individual family historians, placing their findings conveniently on the World Wide Web.

Micro- and macro-history may get along together, then, more companionably than our final sceptic suggests. Biography, conceivably, may have a better tale to tell, and better ways of telling it, than all five sceptics thought. For better or for worse, it’s back with us, in any case: surrounding us, like life.