Introduction. The Poetics of Reconstruction -- 1. Trailblazers across the Twentieth Century -- 2. The Spectre in Literary Biography -- 3. Claire Tomalin and the Composite Story -- 4. Richard Holmes and the “Implied Biographer” -- 5. Critics and Academics Haunt Literary Biography -- 6. Conversations with Biographers Haunted by Biography -- 7. Rereading and Rewriting -- Bibliography.

This book is about one person’s reading and what has been learnt about how the lives of other people, particularly authors, have been written in British literary biographies over the last fifty years. It is less interested in what happened in the lives of the people described in these biographies, and more concerned with how these stories have been told. It aims to have a conversation with British biographers, particularly Michael Holroyd, Richard Holmes, Hermione Lee and Claire Tomalin, to make their voices heard, to set them talking. It understands biography as an ongoing collaboration, not only between biographers and their subjects, but between biographers and their readers. This is also a study of haunting, in which we haunt the lives of others to help us come to a better understanding of our own.

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