Woolf brings out the best in Lee, whose analysis of the essay ‘On Being Ill’ is a dazzling example of scholarly erudition and emotional insight. Her other subjects, almost all of whom are women, include Eudora Welty, Rosamund Lehmann and Edith Wharton (on whom she is working now); she is a generous reviewer, but can also be stern, as when she deals with the way successive biographers have handled one of the few moments of recorded drama in the life of Jane Austen, whose novels, apparently, ‘are kinds of life-writing, much concerned with family plots’. In comparing accounts of the moment when, on hearing that her family was moving to Bath, Jane Austen fainted, Lee demonstrates how ‘the interpretation of the faint will depend on what kind of Austen is being purveyed’ and how in the absence of evidence even as expert and wise a biographer as Claire Tomalin has to fall back on conjecture. Lee never lets us forget that all biographers often have to make bricks without straw.
Like many such collections, this one is uneven and weakens towards the end. The chapter on the autobiographical content of some of J. M. Coetzee’s darkly complex fiction is uncharacteristically opaque: ‘How is human life to be embodied in writing?’; it is followed, in an unlikely juxtaposition, by a glance at the slight comic novelist Angela Thirkell. Lee concludes with some ruminations on how, given that most biographies, like all lives, end in death, it is tempting for the writer to invest what may be a random, purely physical event with too much symbolic significance. Once again, she turns to Virginia Woolf, whose suicide by drowning, despite being explained in the notes she left for her husband and sister, remains, like all the deepest human experiences, private and mysterious. It is one of Hermione Lee’s strengths that despite her intellectual confidence she knows when the interpretations have to stop.
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