What choices must a biographer make when stitching the pieces of
a life into one coherent whole? How do we best create an accurate
likeness of a private life from the few articles that linger after
death? How do we choose what gets left out? This intriguing and
witty collection of essays by an internationally acclaimed
biographer looks at how biography deals with myths and legends,
what goes missing and what can't be proved in the story of a life.
"Virginia Woolf's Nose" presents a variety of case-studies, in
which literary biographers are faced with gaps and absences,
unprovable stories and ambiguities surrounding their subjects. By
looking at stories about Percy Bysshe Shelley's shriveled, burnt
heart found pressed between the pages of a book, Jane Austen's
fainting spell, Samuel Pepys's lobsters, and the varied versions of
Virginia Woolf's life and death, preeminent biographer Hermione Lee
considers how biographers deal with and often utilize these missing
body parts, myths, and contested data to "fill in the gaps" of a
life story.
In "Shelley's Heart and Pepys's Lobsters," an essay dealing with
missing parts and biographical legends, Hermione Lee discusses one
of the most complicated and emotionally charged examples of the
contested use of biographical sources. "Jane Austen Faints" takes
five competing versions of the same dramatic moment in the writer's
life to ask how biography deals with the private lives of famous
women. "Virginia Woolf's Nose" looks at the way this legendary
author's life has been translated through successive
transformations, from biography to fiction to film, and suggests
there can be no such thing as a definitive version of a life.
Finally, "How to End It All" analyzes the changing treatment of
deathbed scenes in biography to show how biographical conventions
have shifted, and asks why the narrators and readers of
life-stories feel the need to give special meaning and emphasis to
endings.
Virginia Woolf's Nose sheds new light on the way biographers
bring their subjects to life as physical beings, and offers
captivating new insights into the drama of "life-writing."
"Virginia Woolf's Nose" is a witty, eloquent, and funny text by
a renowned biographer whose sensitivity to the art of telling a
story about a human life is unparalleled--and in creating it, Lee
articulates and redefines the parameters of her craft.
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