This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Q: Who, just under a century ago, wrote the following, and about whom?

No doubt the old-fashioned biography will return, and, with the years, we shall once more learn to assist with our fathers’ decorum at the lying-in-state of our great men … Meanwhile, we must keep our tongue in our cheek, must we not, for fear it should loll out and reveal the idiot? We have discovered a jollier way of honouring our dead. The corpse has become a marionette. With bells on its fingers and wires on its toes it is jigged about to a “period dance” of our own piping; and who is not amused?

In fact, this pointed little homily on the biographer’s art is taken from the preface to Evelyn Waugh’s Rossetti: His Life and Works (1928), published a few months before his debut novel Decline and Fall, and the fellow practitioner he is taking to task turns out to be Lytton Strachey, proud author of Eminent Victorians (1918) and Queen Victoria (1921).

If one aspect of Waugh’s dislike of Strachey is generational — the inevitable contempt of a man born in 1903 for a man born in 1880 — then another is narrowly aesthetic. Rossetti (specimen sentence: “Turner was seventy-one years old, sinking like one of his own tremendous sunsets in clouds of obscured glory”) is a “romantic” biography; Strachey, alternatively, was an ironist, a debunker and (occasionally) a disparager. Waugh, in holding a few of his rival’s first principles up to scrutiny, is reacting against a reaction.

The Victorian biographers, whom Strachey set out to supplant, had no other urge than to glorify. With one or two conspicuous exceptions, they approached their great men (and very infrequently women) in the spirit of the embalmer, determined to do justice, to take pains, to heap up every last testimonial to the edifying influence their subjects had had on the world.

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All this led to gigantism on the grand scale. Monypenny and Buckle’s life of Disraeli runs to six volumes; John Morley’s biography of Gladstone sails home to port in three. Frequently, what emerged was not only partial, filed by an associate or a close relative — Dickens’s first biographer was his great friend John Forster; Arthur Benson produced a respectful two-volume account of his archiepiscopal father Edward — but not what the 21st century would call a biography, and in strict procedural terms edging much nearer to the compendium.

Take, for example, Robert A. Watson and Elizabeth S. Watson’s George Gilfillan, a 464-page doorstopper from 1894, and one of my favourite books since I found it in a second-hand shop 30 years ago. Gilfillan (1813–1878) was a dissenting minister from Dundee with a queer, billowing style who achieved a certain amount of success with a series of volumes issued under the heading A Gallery of Literary Portraits.

Gilfillan, alas, made the fatal mistake of backing the “Spasmodics” in the great poetry wars of the 1850s. What reputation he had was snuffed out in a no-holds-barred attack by the critic William Aytoun, and he ended his career as little more than a figure of fun. The excesses that saw him christened “the McGonagall of criticism” are barely hinted at in the Watsons’ memorial. His letters are lavishly quoted. Public figures line up to pay tribute. Respectful mention is made of his Remoter Stars in the Church Sky and Night, an epic poem in seven books which unfortunately sank like a stone hurled into the River Dee.

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A bare quarter-century separates George Gilfillan: Letters and Journals with Memoir from Eminent Victorians and yet the differences of approach are practically seismic. Strachey sets out not to sanctify, but to amuse, and also to confound and to deconstruct, to call settled assumptions into question and also (a vital Bloomsbury characteristic, whether in biography or anything else) to demonstrate his own superiority to most of the people he happens to be writing about.

All this set the tone for a great deal of the life writing that followed, and the bookseller’s assistant Gordon Comstock, in Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), is not the only pre-war critic to complain about the “smart pseudo-Strachey pre-digested biographies” that clutter the shelves of the Hampstead shop in which he labours.

If the specimen mid-century biography was a shade less respectful than it had once been, and if its demographic net had been cast slightly wider — the sportsman and the popular entertainer were both going strong by then — there was one portal to which it would always be denied access: the bedroom door.

Naturally, the ban on sexual detail operated even more strongly if the subject was gay, although ingenious biographers could usually find a way around it. Rupert Hart-Davis’ Hugh Walpole (1952) is a masterclass of discreet reportage from the pre-Wolfenden era in which its subject’s pursuit of casual pick-ups is glossed as “Turkish baths provided opportunities for informal social contacts”.

Six months later, Dickens’ biographer wondered if he knew anything about him at all

Strachey-era Bloomsbury, always keen on sexual frankness, turned much less enthusiastic when the sexual frankness exposed by the biographer’s pen was its own. One of the funniest by-products of Michael Holroyd’s groundbreaking Lytton Strachey (two vols, 1967–68) is the horrified reaction it produced amongst Strachey’s old friends, to whom the Sunday Times serialisation, complete with pictures of Ham Spray House under the caption “Abode of Love”, proved deeply painful (“really very vulgarised,” Frances Partridge informed her diary; “It shocked me, and the next lot may do so even more.”)

An earlier entry in her diary records an evening with Holroyd, whom she found surprisingly sympathetic, and some reflections on the task he had taken on. “I begin to wonder: is he too confident of his literary judgements and criticisms? How much can one plot a human shape by what it likes?”

These are good questions, which also occur to biographers themselves — Peter Ackroyd, shortly after completing his gargantuan life of Dickens in 1989, remarked that whilst he was writing the book he thought that he understood his subject perfectly, that when he had finished it he was still fairly confident he had done his subject justice but now, six months later, he wondered if he knew anything about him at all.

The great post-Holroyd wave of “modern” (i.e. candid, interrogative, unimpressionable) biography that started to appear in the 1970s and 1980s brought Partridge’s scepticism into sharper focus. It was the time of the anti-biography (Albert Goldman’s Elvis, 1980; the eviscerations of Kitty Kelley); biographies by biographers who had fallen out with their subjects (Roger Lewis’s Anthony Burgess, 2002); “experimental” biographies such as Andrew Motion’s Wainewright the Poisoner (2002), which, when the hard facts ran out, resorted to making things up, and, that increasingly common phenomenon, the talismanic subject whom no biographer seems able to avoid. There have been at least six biographies of Orwell; four of Evelyn Waugh; and even Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell have a little corner of the London Library all to themselves.

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How is biography shaping up here at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century in a world where Eminent Victorians, over whose portrait of Cardinal Manning Catholic priests once gnashed their teeth, seems as staid and sepia-tinted as a jar of hundreds and thousands? One obvious development is the decline of the old-style political biography, a genre in which readers long ago lost interest.

Following it down the path to oblivion is the old-style literary biography. “Nobody,” a publisher recently told me, “wants another biography about Evelyn Waugh.” Naturally, one reason for this indifference is sheer saturation, but another, it might be argued, has to do with the way in which the average literary life has changed over the past half-century and, in doing so, lost its attraction to the biographers who might otherwise have set to work on it.

The cohort of British writers born in the period 1900–1910 — Orwell, Waugh, Powell, Greene, Spender, Auden — were, it might be argued, one of the last generations who actually did anything, who fought in wars, who travelled when travel meant adventure and whose lives, consequently, have sufficient depth and variety to make them worth writing about.

It is no disrespect to the average literary man or woman born after 1945 to say that, usually, he or she does nothing except grow up, study creative writing at a provincial university and then spend 50 years behind a desk. Whoever, in however many years’ time, publishes Ian McEwan: A Life will struggle to include very much more than a list of books, the circumstances in which they were written and what the critics thought when they came out.

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Given these constraints, the best kind of contemporary biography tends to obliquity, to odd angles and coigns of vantage that sometimes leave the subject stranded in a kind of no-man’s-land where the real action is going on beyond the perimeter fence: see for example Craig Brown’s A Voyage Around the Queen, which was less about Her Late Majesty than her bemused and respectful subjects.

Meanwhile, biography, unlike poetry and the novel, is suspiciously under-theorised. I once suggested that I might be allowed to write the life of a non-existent Thirties novelist, the much-married friend of Orwell and Powell, wartime commando and subsequent Labour MP, on the grounds that this would be an invaluable lesson in establishing how biography worked and the protocols that surrounded its composition. There were no takers.