Hermione Lee, the author of lives of Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf, is what James Joyce called, in Finnegans Wake, a “biografiend” and this book is a brief examination of the curious nature of her craft.

What kind of a beast is biography, she asks? A slippery one, it seems; every classification slides out of our hands. The New Oxford Dict­ionary describes it as “an account of someone’s life written by someone else”, which sounds simple enough but excludes biographies of dogs, deities, ­diseases, cities and cod, as well as those written by someone pretending to be someone else. Thomas Hardy, for example, in order to avoid another biografiend doing the job, wrote his own biography under the name of his wife, Florence Hardy. Gertrude Stein wrote hers as if it were by her partner, Alice B ­Toklas, and then called it The ­Autobiography of Alice B Toklas.

There is also the problem that biography is always, to some extent, autobiography. While biographers such as Norman Sherry, in his three-volume Life of Graham Greene, write themselves into the story (Sherry includes illustrations of himself “on the trail” of “Our Man”), there is a current vogue — begun I imagine by Amanda Foreman in her bestselling Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire — to include a preface that describes the biographer’s special bond with the subject as a form of love affair. Lee quotes a particularly embarrassing example, where the biographer of Henry David Thoreau, the Amer­ican transcendentalist poet, describes how his “marriage to Thoreau” or their “I-Thou relationship” will have to change now that “my wife and I might be pregnant”. Biographies of this sort are less scholarly attempts to capture what Yeats called “the ­bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast” than extended explorations of the relationship between the “bundle of accident” and his adoring ­biographer.

Biographies tend to pose as erudite and come armed with wads of scholarly apparatus, but for John Updike they differed from novels only in their indexes. Aesthetes add that the difference between a biography and a novel is that the latter tends to be well written, while publishers retort that the difference lies in the sales figures.

Lee’s approach to this wayward creature is to pace around it, giving the odd prod and getting a good look at its teeth. At times the prods are pointlessly provocative: John Haffenden’s two-volume life of the pioneering literary critic William Empson is described simply as “mighty, and mightily peculiar”, as though we all know what she means by that. She describes psychobiography as having a “distorting effect” on the life in question, but is herself distorting about the part psychoanalysis has played in the development of biography.

Beginning with medieval hagiography, Lee moves through the centuries showing how each biographical style teases and taunts its predecessor. In her mock biographies, Orlando and Flush, Virginia Woolf took to pieces the life’s work of her father, Leslie Stephen, editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, while Lytton Strachey sent up the whole reverential biographical project when he debunked four secular “saints” in Eminent Victorians.

Contemporary biography has fallen from the heights of 19th-century Lives and Letters (where all a successful biographer needed, said Thomas Carlyle, was “an open loving heart”) into the moral quagmire described by Janet Malcolm as “backstairs gossip and reading other people’s mail”. Biographers are now seen, in the words of ­Germaine Greer, as “the intellectual equivalents of flesh-eating bacterium”.

Lee likes the unruly nature of biography and its attempts to get out of its cage, but her boisterous approach has the air of being dashed off for students. Her subject is perhaps too monstrous to confine in so small a space, but Lee does show how the genre has been in rebellion against its own restrictions from the start. The 17th-century biographer John Aubrey imagines the response to Sir Walter Raleigh “getting one of the Mayds of ­Honour up against a tree”. “Will you undoe me? Nay, sweet Sir Walter! Sweet Sir Walter! Sir Walter!” the maid exclaims, until “she cried in extasey, Swisser Swasser Swisser Swasser”.

So long as biografiends ­produce moments such as this, biography will never be tamed.

Biography: A Very Short Introduction by Hermione Lee
OUP £7.99 pp170

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