Lives in Institutions

We are working at a time when biography as both a mode of writing and an object of study appears to have been accepted by British universities. After decades of lingering suspicion about the genre's apparent lack of a coherent methodology, poetics, or theoretical framework, several higher education institutions including Warwick, Sussex, and Oxford now offer their students the chance to read and even produce life writing of various kinds. Meanwhile, at Buckingham, King's College London, Sussex, and the University of East Anglia there are stand-alone MA programs that aim to provide a practical and theoretical apprenticeship to emerging biographers. International academic conferences of the sort that brought so many university-based scholars to King's College London in May 2009 are flourishing as are those pioneering periodicals, a/b and Biography. In 2001 Britain got its first Professor of Biographical Studies when Richard Holmes, a professional author of international distinction, took up a chair at University of East Anglia. Any lingering sense that biography is not a "proper" academic subject but simply a commercial genre has gradually receded in the face of a bibliography of critical reading and commentary that grows longer and more sophisticated by the year. After decades of hanging around the tradesmen's entrance, it looks as though biography has finally been invited to dine at High Table.

What makes biography unusual is that it continues to be written from both outside as well as from within the academy. This is particularly true in Britain where biography has traditionally been the preserve of self-employed writers whose formal relationship with higher education ended at the age of twenty-one (and in the case of Michael Holroyd, did not even last that long: Britain's most celebrated biographer famously left Eton at eighteen and educated himself at Maidenhead public library). As far as other university disciplines are concerned, any tug between amateur origins and subsequent professionalization has long since been erased. You cannot, in the twenty-first century, set yourself up as a bio-chemist by turning your kitchen into a laboratory; even philosophers, who require no special equipment other than their own bodies, are required to go to work in a university rather than sit at home thinking. There is perhaps no literary activity other than the writing of biography that manages to flourish equally both within and outside the academy.

In fact, I believe that it is this unique position, together with the slight awkwardness that it still engenders, which accounts for biography's continuing liveliness. It is, paradoxically, the genre's refusal to be completely contained by either the academy or by the market place which gives it its continuing vitality. Far from knowing its place, biography is always threatening to burst through the boundaries of any institutional or cultural context in which it has been situated. Track the history of the genre's relationship with the academy and you will find neither an assimilation nor a forking of the ways but rather a series of actions and reactions. This dialectic relationship may be neither as dramatic as a stand-off or as absolute as an incorporation, but it generates the crackle that keeps the genre developing in fruitful and often unexpected ways.

At the University of East Anglia where I teach on the MA in Life Writing we start the program by looking closely at the history of British biography. There is something about the fact that we are undertaking this activity in a seminar room which immediately focuses attention on the genre's relationship with the academy. And what soon becomes apparent is that questions of legitimacy, commercial success, standards of scholarship, and media exposure are not only not new, they are written into biography's founding DNA. Take John Aubrey, whose Brief Lives is generally agreed to be the first great biographical work in English Literature. It consists of a striking collection of witty, learned character sketches written in the 1680s though not published until the nineteenth century. John Aubrey was a man whose entire life could be said to be shaped by being, and not being, at Oxford...