The Domestication of Genius: Biography and the Romantic Poet (review)

The Domestication of Genius is a detailed study of the role biographies played in the formation of the myth of the Romantic poet towards the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. Julian North shows that in taking up the Romantic poet as a subject, biography as a genre shifted towards its modern form still present today—namely, it combines the intimate details that characterize the life of common people with the images of greatness that distinguish celebrities or geniuses from common folk. Usually, this style provokes a conflictive relationship between the public-historical dimension and the private-domestic one.

In her Introduction, North argues that scholars who have analyzed the Romantic period have concentrated mostly on autobiographies, dismissing biographies written by Victorian authors on Romantic subjects because such scholars understood these biographies mostly as attempts to present their subjects as respectable Victorian characters. Critics of biographies also resisted the genre because biographies are viewed as a product mediated by a third party. However, most critics believe that, although they cannot entirely explain the connection between Romanticism and biography, this connection is a key to the development of Romantic subjectivity. North proposes a creative and thoroughly researched explanation for this connection.

The author examines how biographical discourse shaped the Romantic period and the image of the poets whose lives were narrated. In the decades of this period, biography became a popular genre in the publishing market and biography itself went through a transformation. Whereas at the beginning of the period, biographies generally created moral and superior images of their subjects, at the end of it, biographies began to reveal the most intimate aspects of the lives they narrated.

Domestication is central to North’s argument. According to her, the term may have multiple readings. From a twentieth- and twenty-first century critical point of view, domestication can refer to the taming Victorian biographers wanted to perform on their Romantic biographical subjects, trying to present them as respectable and civilized. Feminist theorists have used the term to explain the transformation in biographies of the Romantic poets from representations that make the poets seem spontaneous or simply different into representations that normalize their behaviors. North’s study explores the many aspects of the Victorian’s assimilation of the Romantic poets through biography to question further the common understanding that nineteenth-century biography accords with Victorian political ideas and repressiveness.

So why do biographies contribute so much to the creation of the mythology of the Romantic poet, moreso even than their own work does? Is it because in order to bring its subjects closer to the public, biography allows its authors to “domesticate” the lives of its biographical subjects through the narration of their intimate lives? Or is it because the rise of the genre facilitates transmitting the myth to a wider audience than the Romantics’ poetry does? North argues that while biography is key to the transmission of the Romantic poet’s myth, the genre is heavily shaped by its subjects and also by the transition from Romanticism to Victorianism.

The book poses another set of questions as well: what is the significance of biography in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? In what ways do biographies assist the transition between Romanticism and Victorianism? Why do the written lives of particular authors play a part in the formation of modern biographic style? In what ways does late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century domestic ideology serve as the key to understanding biographies of that time? How do biographies question the gendered opposition between the domestic and the historical? What is the contribution of female biographers to the shaping of male poets’ reputation?

North’s book is divided into six chapters: in the first two chapters, she discusses the relationship between biographies and Romanticism, and the following chapters illustrate her theoretical approach with case studies of the written lives of particular authors. In the first chapter, North explores the development of...