How does fiction mix with biography? Is all biography fiction, or all fiction merely finessed biography? These questions were considered last night, at the Oxford Centre for Life Writing, by two literary grandees from opposing sides of the issue: Hermione Lee, biographer of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton, and Alan Hollinghurst, whose recent novel, The Stranger’s Child, engages with biography in a fictional context.
Hollinghurst confessed to nurturing foiled biographical ambitions of his own, eager early in his career to write a life of Ronald Firbank. He attributed it to a lack of patience, unable to submit to scholarly grind. But is biography mere fact-checking chronology? The nature of biography, both agreed, has changed dramatically in the last century or so. Lee offered Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians as a breakthrough. Hagiography gave way to nosier psychology. The great and the good started having their private moments aired for general viewing.
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