Must Biographers Admire Their Subject?

by Matt Sitman

Hermione Lee answers the perennial question:

I start from a position of profound admiration for the work. But it’s a mistake, in my view, to be sentimental. Writing a biography is not a love affair. It’s not a marriage. It’s a job, it’s a piece of work. You always get asked, Did you like them? Did you love them? The involvement with me always starts with the work, with a deep fascination about what kind of person and what kind of circumstances produced that work. You’re not writing about yourself, you’re not writing about a friend.

When I was trying to work out how to write the biography of Virginia Woolf, I wrote an essay, in a book called The Art of Literary Biography, called “Virginia Woolf and Offense.” It asked how you write about all the horrible things that are part of her character and her life story—racism, snobbery, spite, unkindness. There are some unpleasant things, too, in Edith Wharton’s behavior. You can’t pretend they’re not there. You can’t be defensive. Actually, I admired Wharton more and more, as a person and as a writer, as I wrote that biography. Whereas I found Cather increasingly unsympathetic as I wrote about her. I think she’s a great, great writer, but I found her an unappealing personality by the time I’d finished.