The limits of post-mortem knowledge

Not many collections of old reviews and lectures make worthwhile books, no matter how skilfully topped and tailed; but everything Hermione Lee, who both writes and teaches biography, has written about the state of the biographer’s art in recent years is worth re-reading. The title is off-putting, suggestive of the morgue, and there is something irritating about the subtitle as well: ‘life-writing’, apart from being clumsy, suggests that ‘biography’ is somehow old-fashioned, perhaps unlikely to lure students to a seminar. However, Professor Lee justifies the term by pointing out the incontrovertible fact that there are many different ways for writers to tell life stories — memoir, autobiography, journalism, diaries, letters, even fiction — and clinches it by reminding us that the subject of her last biography, Virginia Woolf, may have invented, and certainly used, the nasty phrase.

As for ‘body parts’, Lee tells us that she is especially concerned in this volume with the question of how biographers deal with ‘moments of physical shock, or with the bodily life of the subject, or with the left-over parts of a life’. Left-overs, after all, constitute the material on which biographers depend — the documents and memories and other leavings that constitute the body of work they study in order to describe the life, physical as well as mental, of the body in question. There is an obvious analogy between a biography and a post-mortem; sometimes, in both, a vital part goes missing. Lee recounts, in grisly and fascinating detail, the different versions of how Shelley’s heart was removed from his decomposing corpse during the famous scene of the pyre on the beach at Viareggio. Eventually, with reluctance, his friends surrendered the relic to his wife, Mary, who kept it pressed between the pages of Adonais.