This article is taken from the March 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
If one grand eminence of contemporary lit crit is sadly no longer with us — Professor John Carey who died in December at the age of 91 — then another is still going strong.
At 82, Professor Terry Eagleton’s indefatigability knows no bounds. Scarcely a year goes by without him producing one of his delicious little guides to a particular literary form — Humour, Tragedy and so on — and even now it is rare for a month or two to pass without one chancing upon some crotchety intervention in the pages of the London Review of Books (LRB) or a left-leaning monthly.
Indeed, it was whilst browsing the LRB just now that the Secret Author came across some reflections by Professor Eagleton on the subject of Schopenhauer.
Amongst the learned disquisitions on Self, Will and the meaning which they may, or may not, give to life, the particular sentence that caught his eye was this:
The great irony of literary and intellectual biography, a form beloved of the British, is that we wouldn’t be particularly interested in the biographical stuff were it not for the light it might throw on an author’s work, yet such biographies often not only fail to illuminate the work, but use up space that might have been devoted to examining it.
Even for Professor Eagleton, this is a notably cryptic passage, but the Secret Author, having subjected it to a sustained analysis in which his existing knowledge of our man’s tics and prejudices came in useful, concluded that Prof E intended his readers to infer the following:
a) literary biography is pretty much a lightweight affair conducted by intellectually sub-par belles-lettrists;
b) the reading public are exceptionally stupid — see that “form so beloved by the British” — for liking this kind of thing
c) the criticism of literature really ought to be left to people who are qualified to understand it. That is, academics.
Feel patronised by this, gentle reader? Well, so you ought. In Professor Eagleton’s slight defence, snootiness about literary biography has been a fixture of certain kinds of lit crit since the days of I.A. Richards and probably before them.
The Cambridge School of English was more or less built on it, to the point where a refusal to allow any ulterior data into considerations of the text became a form of fanaticism (“Miss X,” a supervisor once enquired of a friend of the Secret Author, then a Cambridge undergrad, who had written a thesis about the plays of Tennessee Williams, “has it ever occurred to you that Williams was gay?”)
But why write an account of a writer’s life in the first place? The chief reason — and one which would be anathema to a critic of the Eagleton school — is straightforward curiosity. Thackeray once said that when he read a book he instantly conceived an image of its writer in his head — assumed that is, that the personality of the author was interesting in itself and would add a dimension to the pleasure to be had from reading his narrative.
As for Eagleton’s idea that we wouldn’t be interested in “the biographical stuff” if it didn’t shed light on the work or the achievement, the reverse would seem to be the case.
The first volume of Richard Shannon’s life of Gladstone, for example, contains a wonderful account of a young noblewoman on whom the tyro’s eye had fallen, observing him as he walked up the drive of her father’s mansion and remarking to her mother, “Mama, I cannot marry a man who carries his bag like that.”
A superfluous detail, no doubt, and of no interest at all in considerations of Liberal Party politicking in the mid-19th century, but somehow it tells you more about Gladstone as a man than any amount of Cabinet minutes.
It is the same with those very mundane facts about authorial upbringings, which often tend to shed more light on a writer’s trajectory than painstaking trawls through their early work. Lady Violet Powell once suggested that the root of Kingsley Amis’s fixation on the theme of selfishness and having things your own way lay in the fact that he was an only child; only children tend to be spoiled.
In the same way, recent biographies of Orwell disclose that he came back from Burma in 1927 with an engagement ring in his trunk. Had the woman to whom he proposed not turned him down he would very probably have returned to the East and carried on as a colonial policeman; Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four might well not have been written. As with Mr Gladstone’s bag, this seems far more important than endless academic articles about Orwell’s anti-imperial discourse.
Meanwhile, most publishers would probably admit that biography is one of the stimuli that keep dead writers and their books alive. You sometimes wonder whether Professor Eagleton would prefer them deceased, so that like Miss Blimber in Dombey and Son he might keep dry and sandy by digging in their graves.
