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.’
Verdict: Recommended.
Irrepressible: The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford by Leslie Brody
Another awful title. What is it with American academics? This biography of the second youngest Mitford (the communist one) concentrates on her life in the USA. Writing in the Spectator, Anne Chisholm noted
‘This shift of emphasis is welcome, as is the author’s refreshingly bemused attitude to British upper-class language and customs. But her own idiom, a sprightly Americanese, can be irritating, and she has not avoided the trap, awaiting all biographers, of falling under her subject’s spell.’
Other reviewers shared Chisholm’s mixed feelings, although the Telegraph’s John Preston was more strident:
‘Seldom have I read a biography which so utterly fails to illuminate its subject.’
Verdict: You’re better off with her memoirs, starting with the brilliant Hons & Rebels. Or her collected letters, Decca, published two years ago.
PG Wodehouse: A Life in Letters by Sophie Ratcliffe
This collection of Wodehouse’s correspondence claims to add a new dimension to this unworldly and much-loved writer.
Although he didn’t agree with the editor’s desire to paint Wodehouse as a scholar manqué, Roger Kimball felt the Oxford academic had succeeded expertly. Writing in the Literary Review, he said:
‘Ratcliffe aimed, she tells us in her introduction, to produce a volume that would appeal to academics as well as that elusive beast, the General Reader. And she has succeeded marvellously’
Kimball’s praise was echoed by other critics, including Philip Hensher in the Telegraph:
‘The letters reveal a more complex, somewhat angrier, more venal character than the novels care to, and give an interestingly enriched self-portrait.’
Verdict: Another one for the Christmas stocking.
Virginia Woolf by Alexandra Harris
Alexandra Harris won the Guardian First Book Award last year with Romantic Moderns. Her second book is an accessible look at Virginia Woolf’s life and work.
New Statesman reviewer Rachel Bowlby thought it was
‘More of a guidebook for first-time visitors to a much-visited site’
Although she added
‘Don’t get me wrong; this book is a very good read, assured and imbued with an infectious wish to impart an enthusiasm for all that Woolf made and was.’
Edmund Gordon in the Sunday Times said more or less the same thing:
‘As an introduction to Woolf, Harris’s study will do very well; she writes beautifully, with an eye for lucid detail, and is for the most part in firm command of her material. But the brevity of her account does mean that a lot gets boiled down to the point of flavourlessness or left out.’
Verdict: An excellent undergraduate primer; if you’re after something more substantial go for Hermione Lee’s 1996 biography.
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