I don't always agree with what Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes. No, let me rephrase that: I mostly don't agree with what he writes. So, why not take this opportunity to half-agree with him? Wheatcroft's subject here is the form of literary biography that discloses the writer's personal flaws, showing up the fact that he or she has 'been less' as well as 'done more' than the unsuspecting reading public might have guessed: been less because of individual failings and misdemeanours; and done more in the sense of having achieved, as a writer, what most of us could not. Apropos which Wheatcroft offers, as an example, this about the divine Jane:
We don't know very much about Jane Austen... except that she was the spinster daughter of a clergyman who led an uneventful life. She just happened to write half a dozen flawless masterpieces, which came perfectly formed, not from experience but from imagination. That's what genius means.
OK, so what's the beef? It's that the would-be revelatory biography may very well not illuminate what made the writer what she was qua writer, may not help us to understand what gave him the powers of literary creativity with which he succeeded in winning a large and enduring readership. With this I agree. Does it lessen the value of the literary biography, though? Maybe yes, maybe no. It depends on the individual case, how good the specific work is that we have before us. But a more general answer might be ventured along the following lines. If a particular literary biography doesn't contribute anything to our understanding of the individual as a writer, then just to the extent that it aims or claims to do this its value is lessened by having failed in the enterprise. Nonetheless, as the account of a life, a life combining flaws and achievements, dramas and mundanities, the work can have just as much value as the skill, the research and the learning with which it has been put together. It can have some of the same kind of value as a novel, indeed, putting together for its readers the shape, the course and the details of its subject's life. Isn't that one reason why people read - to learn about other lives? And for those, if there are any, who may sometimes forget that writers are also people, it does no harm for them to be reminded of the fact. (Thanks: AS.)