Anna Baddeley

Briefing note: Writers’ lives, pt 2

The second part of our critical roundup of the ten most-talked-about literary biographies. Read part 1 here.

Georgette Heyer: Biography of a Bestseller by Jennifer Kloester

This admirable attempt to resurrect the queen of regency romance doesn’t really meet its objective.

When publishers are looking for quotes for the paperback, Daisy Goodwin’s ‘solid and well-researched’ (Sunday Times) will probably have to do.

Rachel Cooke’s Observer review was the most damning:

‘What, I wonder, is the point of this book? Who is it for? According to its jacket, Jennifer Kloester is “the foremost expert on Heyer” (as if the world’s universities were crammed with her competitors, all of them writing PhDs on The Grand Sophy and Regency Buck). What this means in practice is that she tells you everything – I mean everything – about a woman whose life was simply not very interesting … As for the mystery of Heyer’s writing — how it works; why so many intelligent people love it — Kloester simply does not go there, and her book is thus squeezed dry of all the joy it might have had.’

Verdict: Give it a miss.

Ben Jonson: A Life by Ian Donaldson

No one had a bad word to say about this biography of champion bruiser and half-decent playwright Ben Jonson.

Sam Leith’s Spectator review pretty much sells it:

‘… a terrific book about an amazing man … As far as its position on the pop/scholarly scale goes, this is a book by an academic reaching out to the general reader rather than vice-versa. You won’t find much of the florid, novelistic ‘conjuring of the sights, sounds and smells of Tudor London’, or speculation on what Jonson ‘must have felt’. It’s much more interesting than that. Instead, you have a work of clarity and lucidity, exact in its historical detail, full of new material and ingeniously suggestive in its conjecture and interpretation.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in