Speaker
Description
The interbellum period witnessed a revolution in life writing, famously dubbed the ‘new biography’ by Virginia Woolf (1927). This movement explicitly sought to break from what Woolf identified as the Victorians’ obsessive adherence to historical facts and their overly reverential treatment of illustrious individuals – an approach strongly marked by Thomas Carlyle’s theory of the ‘great man’ as mover of history. Instead, proponents like Woolf and Lytton Strachey argued for a more literary and critical approach, one that blended fact with creative interpretation to reveal the hidden inner life and construct a coherent narrative from cradle to grave. Essentially, proponents of ‘new biography’ pleaded for an emancipation of the biographer, giving them the freedom to interpret – often through Freudian theory – the thoughts and motives of their subjects, and thus representing these as the successive building blocks of a logically unfolding narrative (Marcus 2014). This paper argues that the primary mechanism for achieving this coherence was narrative emplotment – the structuring of a life into a meaningful plot arc.
This paper will analyse how the ‘new biographers’ represented the entire lifespan of their subjects through specific narrative strategies. Focusing on two key works – Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria (1920) and Virginia Woolf’s Roger Fry (1940) – I will employ Hayden White’s theory of historical emplotment to examine how each author shaped their biographical material. In his seminal work Metahistory (1973), White posits that historians (and, by extension, biographers) impose meaning on events through archetypal plot structures: Romance, Tragedy, Comedy, and Satire.
Through a comparative close reading, I will investigate how both Strachey and Woolf instrumentalised the different types of emplotment, or hybrid variants of them, to imbue their life narratives with meaning. I will examine similarities and differences to assess the degree of homogeneity or heterogeneity within the ‘new biography’-movement in relation to emplotment, thereby elucidating the concessions its authors were prepared to make to factual accuracy in favour of readability and style. Ultimately, this analysis reveals how the ‘new biography’ did not merely document a life but actively constructed it, using the tools of fiction to impose narrative order on the complicated chronology of a human lifespan.
By placing these seminal texts in dialogue through White’s framework, this paper offers a new comparative perspective on a pivotal moment in biographical history, by revisiting the relatively understudied phenomenon of ‘new biography’ and by analysing two key works which have not previously been compared directly. This research sits at the intersection of comparative literature and biography studies, directly engaging with the conference’s theme by exploring how language and narrative form are used to make sense of a life from beginning to end.
List of references
Carlyle, Thomas. On heroes, hero-worship, and the heroic in history. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. 1906.
Marcus, Laura. “The Newness of the ‘New Biography’: Biographical Theory and Practice in the Early Twentieth Century.” In Dreams of Modernity, 124–50. Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Strachey, Lytton. Queen Victoria. London: Chatto and Windus, 1921.
White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins university press, 1974.
Woolf, Virginia. “The New Biography,” in Granite and Rainbow. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1958.
Woolf, Virginia. Roger Fry. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1940.
| Principal domain of study | English literary studies |
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