Are famous writers accident-prone? Some are

I don’t want to know too much about writers. The endless revelations about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes have put me off their poetry. Nothing can shake my love of Keats’s Odes but I don’t have any desire to see his full medical records. Nor do I care to learn anything more about Byron’s club foot (though I am fascinated by the fact that the painter John Glover, who founded the Australian school of art, and whose masterpiece ‘Dovedale at Dawn’ I possess, had two club feet). We know quite enough about Shakespeare personally, and I am happy he is still surrounded by mysteries. Of course, if his diaries were suddenly to appear, or autographed letters, that would be another matter.

The truth is, an author and his works are best kept separate. All the same, I like to know what a writer (or any famous historical personage, for that matter) looked like. I don’t want to be told about Jane Austen’s sexual yearnings, if she had any. But I would like a good, truthful portrait of her, full- length if possible. The only one we possess which shows her face, by her sister Cassandra, is feeble and amateurish and does not, I suspect, do her justice. Oh, for a minute or two of videotape, to show her sparkle and her facial expressions, and her smile when she made a wicked joke. (‘Wicked’ was a term she used about herself more than once.) It would be reassuring, too, to have a really lifelike and dependable drawing of Shakes­peare. I long to imagine him as he actually looked at his desk, scribbling away, dipping his quill pen into the inkpot, then mending and sharpening it with his dagger.

No such problem with Dickens, painted by accurate portraitists like Daniel Maclise and Ary Scheffer, often drawn and photographed, and described in detail at work.