Winter Term reading list

Topic 1: Dr Johnson and Biography
*Richard Holmes (ed): Johnson on Savage (Harper Perennial, 2005)
Richard Holmes: 'Biography: Inventing the Truth' in John Batchelor ed. The Art of Literary Biography
Richard Holmes: Dr Johnson and Mr Savage (1993)
James Boswell: Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)
Richard Wendorff: The Elements of Life
James Clifford (ed): Twentieth-century Interpretations of Boswell's Life of Johnson
James Clifford (ed): Boswell's Life of Johnson: A Collection of Critical Essays
Adam Sisman: Boswell's Prodigious Task (2000)
Norma Clarke: Dr Johnson's Women (2001)
David Nokes: Samuel Johnson (2009)
Beryl Bainbridge: According to Queenie

Topic 2: Romantic Biography
Richard Holmes: Godwin on Wollstonecraft (2005)
Richard Holmes: Southey on Nelson
Rupert Christainsen: Romantic Affinities
William St Clair: The Godwins and the Shelleys

Topic 3: Victorian Biography
J.A.Froude: My Relations with Carlyle (1886) [pamphlet downloadable from Google Books]
Elinor S. Shaffer: 'Shaping Victorian Biography' in St Clair, Mapping Lives
Thomas Carlyle: On Heroes and Hero-Worship
[recommended edition, M K Goldbery (ed), University of California, 1993]
*A O J Cockshut: Truth to Life: the Art of Biography in the Nineteenth Century (1974)
Ira Nadel: Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form ch 2
L S Lockridge etc (eds): Nineteenth-Century Lives 1989
J A Froude: Thomas Carlyle (4 vols, 1882-4)
Trev Broughton: 'The Froude-Carlyle Embroilment: Married Life as a Literary Problem' Victorian Studies 1995
Trevor Broughton: Men of Letters: Writing Lives. Masculinity and Autobiography in the Victorian Period (1998)

Topic 4 : Women and Biography MORE
We will be focussing on one or more of the following three case studies:
(a) Charlotte Brontë - by Elizabeth Gaskell (1857), Lyndall Gordon (1994) and Juliet Barker (1995) – the Brontes
(b) Virginia Woolf - by Quentin Bell (1972) Hermione Lee (1996) & Louise DeSalvo (1989)
(c) Jane Austen - by Park Honan (1987 - revised 1997), David Nokes (1997) & Claire Tomalin (1997)
(d) Queen Victoria – by Lytton Strachey and Elizabeth Longford
Lyndall Gordon: 'Women's Lives: The Unmapped Country' in Batchelor ed., Art of Literary Biography
Carolyn Heilbron: Writing a Woman's Life (1988)
Victoria Glendinning: A Suppressed Cry (1995)

Topic 5: Bloomsbury and Biography
*Virginia Woolf: 'The Art of Biography' and 'The New Biography' in Collected Essays vol 4
*Lytton Strachey: Eminent Victorians (1918)
*Michael Holroyd: Lytton Strachey (1995) (especially introduction to 1995 edn)
Robert Skidelsky : Keynes vol I (1983)
Harold Nicolson: The Development of English Biography (1929)
Hermione Lee: Virginia Woolf
Ruth Hoberman: Modernizing Lives: Experiments in English Biography 1918-1939
Regina Marler: Bloomsbury Pie: The Making of the Bloomsbury Boom

Topic 6: Political/Historical Biography
Barbara Caine: Biography and History
Patrick O'Brien: 'Historical Biography' Biography, 1998
Patrick O'Brien: 'Political Biography and Pitt the Younger', History, 1998
Ben Pimlott: Frustrate Their Knavish Tricks
Robert Blake: in Homberger & Charmley, Troubled Face
T C W Blanning & D Cannadine (eds): History and Biography (1996)
Martin Gilbert: In Search Of Churchill
David Reynolds: In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War

Topic &: How to write Biography without sources
Anne Wroe: Pontius Pilate