This is not an omission of Colley’s own making but rather comes from her choice of subject, which many writers would have recoiled from taking on. There are no personal letters by Marsh, her husband or her parents, for example. Colley has selected her subject more for her position (or rather her constantly shifting position) as an ordinary individual buffeted on the waves of history than for her qualities or achievements as an individual, and she has remained admirably undeterred by the lack of information about the apparently unexceptional Marsh herself. On this count alone, the book is a lesson in research tenacity: by trawling through archives held all over the world Colley has unearthed hundreds of sources which take us tantalisingly close to Elizabeth Marsh, plotting the social, political and economic webs surrounding her, and the lives of those whose paths crossed hers. (Colley plausibly writes of ‘the ordeal of tracking Elizabeth Marsh’.)
This book may well prove a significant departure in the history of life-writing, but the success of this brand of biography will depend on readers adapting their expectations. Colley characterises her work as charting ‘a world in a life and a life in the world’ but the life itself often recedes almost without trace from the foreground. Elizabeth Marsh is less the subject of this book than the thread which holds it together: the result is a bold and disconcerting experiment in redefining what we mean by, and expect from, biography.
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