Reflections on Biography - Hardcover

Backscheider, Paula R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 019818641X ISBN 13: 9780198186410

Publisher: OUP Oxford, 1999

Synopsis

Reflections on Biography, written by the author of an award-winning life of Daniel Defoe, is an invitation to turn 'biography' over in the mind as we turn an artefact in our hands. Intended for all readers of biographyDSlifelong or occasional, critical or casualDSit examines the subject from many angles, and gives a tour of the decisions biographers make and the implications of those choices. Its aim is to increase the pleasure of reading biographies, to add new, enjoyable dimensions even as it increases readers' insights into the art of writing them. Among the biographies given special attention are prize-winning lives of writers, mathematical geniuses, intellectual women, the Roosevelts, and unusual marriage partners. The book is full of lively comparisons, for instance, of Keats by Walter Jackson Bate, Andrew Motion, and others, and of a century of biographies of Edith Wharton.

About this title

Review

She writes a fluent, good-humoured, often humorous prose, she wears her extraordinary erudition as lightly as a scarf, and her aims are disarmingly pragmatic: to offer a practical guide ... based on her personal experience ... and a remarkable range of intelligent reading (the bibliography is a treasure-trove) ... Her book will be blessed by generations of biographers and historians to come, not only because Backscheider makes the rough places plainer, but because she celebrates the biographer's art as at once compelling, horribly difficult and significant. (Inga Clendinnen, London Review of Books)

Edition details

• Publisher: OUP Oxford
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 019818641X
• ISBN 13: 9780198186410
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 312