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to the diligent and responsible researcher. “The biographer could not invent her, because at every moment some document was at hand to check his invention.” So Strachey “used to the full the biographer’s power of selection and relation, but he kept strictly within the world of fact. Every statement was verified; every fact was authenticated.” But in the case of Elizabeth, the opposite conditions obtained. “Very little was known about her. The society in which she lived was so remote that the habits, the motives, and even the actions of the people of that age were full of strangeness and obscurity.” The opportunity was there for biography to approach the condition of poetry or drama, that “combined the advantages of both worlds,” of fact and fiction.

And yet in Woolf’s view, the attempt failed. Despite the consummate skill of the biographer, “the combination became unworkable; fact and fiction refused to mix. Elizabeth never became real in the sense that Queen Victoria had been real, yet she never became fictitious in the sense that Cleopatra or Falstaff is fictitious.”64 This is a point on which Woolf, the author of those two masterful fictional “biographies,” Orlando and Flush, clearly feels strongly. “The two kinds of fact will not mix.” Her essay is called “The Art of Biography,” and she begins by putting that concept in question (“Is biography an art?”).

Nonetheless, Woolf foresaw a time when, she thought, biography would evolve to meet changing circumstances in the world. Writing after Strachey’s death, and many years after she had hailed “the new biography” in 1927, she looked ahead to a moment when the biographer would revise traditional techniques to meet the opportunities and demands of modern culture. “[S]ince we live in an age when a thousand cameras are pointed, by newspapers, letters, and diaries, at every character from every angle, he must be prepared to admit contradictory versions of the same face. Biography will enlarge its scope by hanging up looking-glasses at odd corners.”65

Virginia Woolf, who died in 1941, could hardly anticipate the supersaturated media environment in which today’s biographies are written, reviewed, and read: a 24/7 bombardment of news cycles, Internet gossip, YouTube, e-mail, and text messaging. What she regarded as frenetic interruptions—newspapers, letters, diaries, even those “thousand cameras,” a phrase I think she must have intended as hyperbolic—sound rather leisurely in a paparazzi world. The truth of a life today often involves scandal, confession, and self-exposure. And what has become of the art of biography and its relation to literature?

Larger Than Life

We might think that the days of the Victorian doorstop biography, in many pages or sometimes multiple volumes, has returned in a new guise. The second volume of Robert Skidelsky’s 1994 biography of John Maynard Keynes, subtitled The Economist as Savior, 1920–1937, covers seventeen years of Keynes’s life in 635 pages, plus notes and sources. The third volume, Fighting for Freedom, 1937–1946, is 580 pages long. Peter Manso’s biography of Marlon Brando, also from 1994, came in at 1,021 pages, not including the notes and sources. These are not atypical numbers: consider Juliet Barker’s The Brontës (1994, 830 pages plus notes); James R. Mellow’s Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences (1992, 604 pages plus notes); Harrison Kinney, James Thurber: His Life and Times (1994, 1,077 pages plus appendices and notes). I pulled these books from my shelves—this is a random rather than a systematic survey—but the pattern seems fairly consistent. David McCullough’s highly regarded book on Harry Truman (1992) was 1,117 pages long, his John Adams (2001), 751 pages. It is hard to think of another trade-publishing genre that is so lengthy and yet is considered commercially viable. In hardcover and paperback, these books sell.

Clearly—leaving aside for the moment the question of style—such biographies are not literary in the sense described by Strachey, dominated by a sense “of selection, of detachment, of design.” Modern biographies