Peter Washington
Austen’s Onion
Becoming Jane Austen: A Life
By Jon Spence
Hambledon & London 294pp £19.95 order from our bookshop
Jane Austen's 'Outlandish Cousin': The Life and Letters of Eliza de Feuillide
By Deirdre Le Faye
The British Library 192pp £18.95 order from our bookshop
ONE OF THE stranger cultural symmetries of the last half century juxtaposes the rise of literary biography with increasing critical hostility to the very idea of authorship. Even as readers demand more and more information about the private lives of their favourite writers, scholars are demolishing the foundations on which biography is built by cutting the links between, in Eliot's phrase, the man who suffers and the artist who creates.What will happen then to literary biography? It will lose its apparent raison d'etre, the need to establish links between life and work. Proust the novelist and Proust the indolent Parisian homosexual with a private income and a posh social life will become two distinct characters.
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