Biographical Passages: Essays in Victorian and Modernist Biography: Honoring Mary M. Lago (review)

Biographical Passages: Essays on Victorian and Modernist Biography: Honoring Mary M. Lago, edited by Joe Law and Linda K. Hughes; pp. xii + 208. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2000, $34.95, £27.95.

In their closing essay to Biographical Passages, dedicated to Mary M. Lago, Joe Law and Linda K. Hughes honour her "traditional yet forward-looking" (191) scholarly and cultural interests. These embrace music, the writings of Rabindranath Tagore and E. M. Forster, as well as the art of Edward Burne-Jones and Christiana Herringham. Lago's expertise traverses the borders between the tonal and the representational arts, the Victorian and post-Victorian worlds, and (anticipating postcolonial concerns) the imperial centre and the colonial periphery. It has enabled her to produce critical biographies of diverse subjects, as well as editions of their letters and conversations. Thus, Lago's own biography, and her commitment to the practice of biography, are the principles linking the various essays in this collection.

The essays honouring her are consequently diverse, and focus as much on interpretive practices embedded in biography as they do on examples of biographical writing. P. N. Furbank writes on biography as a craft, and Michael Holroyd on Lytton Strachey and Gerald Brenan as Bloomsbury biographers. Mary C. Francis explores the significance of sexual orientation in understanding the collaborative involvement between Benjamin Britten and E. M. Forster on their operatic adaptation of Billy Budd (1951), whilst Julie F. Codell examines the gendered biographical construction of the artist figure in the 1890s. Debra Mancoff's essay on Edward Burne-Jones is rooted in a biographical reading which enables her to reconstruct Burne-Jones's late iconography as a response to his approaching death. Finally, Anantha Sudhaker Babbili contributes a striking piece of autobiographical writing about his passage from rural India to the American academy. In their introductory essay, Law and Hughes explain that the volume is "dedicated to exploring points of convergence between Victorian and modern biography" (3). However, points of convergence presuppose some initial grounds for separation, and the question of how to define these distinctive beasts is harder to answer than it might at first appear: as Furbank observes, "a modern biography does not seem at bottom so very unlike a Victorian 'Life and Letters.' John Forster's Dickens does not strike the reader as positively archaic" (18-19).

One response is to appeal to the literary-historical category of modernism. Holroyd does this implictly in his essay exploring Brenan's reaction to the writings of Strachey, given that Brenan saw Eminent Victorians (1918) as a work "on the border-line between the old and the new" (qtd. 29). Yet in an essay focused principally on Strachey's polished and transcendent ironies, Holroyd does not explore in depth Brenan's preference for the Joycean aesthetic that was vehemently disliked by both Virginia Woolf and Strachey. Thus, his essay does not pursue the implications that Brenan's preference might have held for a modernist biography not born and raised exclusively in Bloomsbury.

Another response is to situate the birth of modernity in later Victorianism, emblematically registered through the emergence of fin-de-siècle sexual identities: Law and Hughes note Michel Foucault's contention that modern homosexuality was discursively produced around 1870, and suggest that biography was one of its sites of production. However, the essays here suggest that the public consequences of this development emerged late and circumspectly. Holroyd provides an interesting discussion of Strachey's coded account of Prince Albert as a closet homosexual in his subversively ironic romantic biography Queen Victoria (1921). Francis's essay on Britten and Forster addresses the way in which divergent understandings of homosexual desire are artistically encoded in their operatic adaptation of Billy Budd. Francis argues that for the composer Britten, homosexual love was natural love thwarted and turned poisonous by homophobic society: on the other hand, Forster as librettist saw homosexual love as...