Turning Points: The Event, the Collective and the Return of the life in Parts, University of East Anglia, 9–10 February 2013

I went to this conference as a would-be biographer, from a history background, hoping for pointers and new ideas. I was not disappointed: it brought together leading figures like Claire Tomalin, Charles Nicholl and Richard Holmes with academics, postgraduate students, professional biographers and novices like myself, and was a most fascinating and wide-ranging event.

Plenary and panel sessions focused on recent developments in biographical writing, contrasting the traditional ‘cradle-to-grave’ account with approaches which aim at depth rather than breadth, such as those which explore relationships within a group, or focus on a ‘turning-point’ event or a significant period or element within a life. This is not a comprehensive report – I missed some plenaries and had to choose between panel offerings – but rather an account of some of the contributions I listened to which spoke particularly to my concerns, along with some personal reflections.

The importance of narrative and chronology emerged as a key difference between biographical and (much) historical writing. Thus Claire Tomalin stressed that a biographer starts by wanting to ‘tell a story’ which fascinates and excites her, and this is what she must convey to the reader – though I and others found her statement that the biographer always despairs at some stage very encouraging! Richard Holmes supported the suggestion that a would-be biographer should stick a post-it on her computer asking ‘What’s the story?’, and also, if only as an exercise, should produce a sixty-second pitch along the lines of a film proposal (though he did add that the story will change in the course of the research and writing).

While the emphasis on ‘story’ is clearly about more than narrative – for example it highlights the need for a clear overarching theme – it does draw attention to the narrative structure which seems so essential to biography. This does not have to be straightforwardly chronological however, as various papers showed. Holmes himself discussed his use in group biography of varying techniques such as a sequential ‘relay-race’ coverage of the different characters, a ‘cluster’ approach dealing with them together, or even ‘sliding panels’ in which each individual’s story overlaps.

Biography or life-writing has only recently been accepted in academia as a subject of study in its own right, and so the University of East Anglia, which runs one of the few British MA courses on the subject, was well placed to put on the conference. Significantly, its taught MA course ‘Biography and Creative Non-fiction’ is located in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing. I felt this influenced the content and angle of much of the discussion, usefully highlighting the importance of the writing skills which historians do not necessarily possess, but perhaps giving less attention to gathering and interpreting material, which forms a key part of the biographical enterprise.

On the other hand history and biography are closely linked, and on reflection I wondered if some of the ‘new’ approaches discussed at the conference have not been around for some time, especially in women’s history. I thought for example of Destined to be Wives, Barbara Caine’s 1986 group biography of Beatrice Webb and her sisters, and Spinsters of this Parish, Sybil Oldfield’s 1984 study of the contrasting but linked lives of Mary Sheepshanks and Flora M. Mayor. Nevertheless the ideas being discussed here clearly presented particular challenges for some historians who were present. One such person confessed that the conference made him nervous, highlighting as it did the importance to biography not only of narrative but also of what he saw as ‘leaps of interpretive faith’. In a plenary discussion on biography in the academic setting, gender historian Rebecca Fraser vividly illustrated some of the issues, describing her discomfort when, having previously researched the world of the enslaved in the antebellum American South, she embarked on a biography of a woman from an abolitionist background who chose to marry a slave-holder. In order to tell this story she needed quite a different approach from...