The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [159]
37. For example, the “Epistle Dedicatory” to Nicholas Harpsfield’s biography of Thomas More, in which he says that the biographer presents a “lively image” of a human being that compares favorably to the work of a sculptor or a painter, or Izaak Walton’s biography of John Donne, where he will present “the best plain Picture” of Donne’s life and, using the language of drawing, the most accurate that “my artless Pensil, guided by the hand of truth, could presnt.” Judith H. Anderson, Biographical Truth: The Representation of Historical Persons in Tudor-Stuart Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 15.
38. David Hume, “Of the Study of History,” in Essays Moral, Political, Literary (1777), ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987). Lepore, “Just the Facts, Ma’am,” 81.
39. Anderson, Biographical Truth, 2.
40. Ibid., 69.
41. Ibid., 1.
42. Ibid., 69.
43. Julia Blackburn, The Three of Us: A Family Story (New York: Pantheon, 2008). “100 Notable Books of 2008,” The New York Times, December 7, 2008.
44. Elizabeth McCracken, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination (New York: Little, Brown, 2008).
45. For example, chosen at random from a biography sitting on my desk at the moment, p. 340, “I intend no sacrilege …” Variety article by Azariah Rapoport, December 18, 1963, or—just below it—p. 340, “Unashamed vulgarity …” Boston Globe, February 1, 1964. Humphrey Burton, Leonard Bernstein (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 562.
46. Sometimes, however, the absence of footnotes leads to difficulty for the publisher or the author. See, for example, Laura Secor, “Muse of the Beltway Book,” The New York Times, June 27, 2004; Timothy Noah, “How to Curb the Plagiarism Epidemic,” Slate, January 28, 2002.
47. Virginia Woolf, “The New Biography,” originally published in the New York Herald Tribune, October 30, 1927. Reprinted in Woolf, Collected Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1967), 4, 230.
48. Ibid., 231.
49. Ibid., 229.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid., 231.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid., 234.
54. Virginia Woolf, Flush: A Biography (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1933), 82.
55. Ibid., 175.
56. Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria, 1921 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World), 125–26.
57. Correspondence of Sarah Spencer Lady Lyttelton, 1787–1870, ed. Mrs. Hugh Wyndham (New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1912), 303.
58. Ibid., 354.
59. Ibid., 402.
60. Virginia Woolf, “The Art of Biography,” in Woolf, Collected Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1967), 4, 223.
61. Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians, 1918 (London and New York: Penguin, 1986), 1–2.
62. Ibid.
63. Woolf, “The Art of Biography,” 4, 223.
64. Ibid., 4, 224.
65. Ibid., 4, 226.
66. John Updike, On Literary Biography (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 36.
67. N. Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes (New York: Knopf, 1994), 154, 24.
68. David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 175.
69. Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging (New York: Knopf, 1995), 391.
70. Laura Hillenbrand, Seabiscuit: An American Legend (New York: Random House, 2001).
71. David Shipman, Judy Garland: The Secret Life of an American Legend (New York: Hyperion, 1993), 155.
72. Steven Bach, Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend (New York: William Morrow, 1992), 229.
73. Thomas C. Reeves, A Question of Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy (New York: Free Press, 1991), 272.
74. Anne Sewell, Black Beauty (London and New York: Puffin, 2008), 2.
75. Hillenbrand, Seabiscuit, 41, 58.
76. Ibid., 107.
77. From Jonathan Miles, “All the Difference,” a review of Brian Hall, Fall of Frost (New York: Viking, 2008), in The New York Times Book Review, May 11, 2008, 14.
78. René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature, 3rd edition (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956), 80.
79. Ibid., 78.
80. Ibid., 76–77.
81. Ibid., 77. I have made a similar argument in an essay called “Bartlett’s Familiar Shakespeare,” in Marjorie Garber, Profiling Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 2008), 278.
82. Friedrich Nietzsche,