Table of Contents

1: The Biography Channel
2: Exemplary Lives
3: Warts and All
4: National Biography
5: Fallen Idols
6: Against Biography
7: Public Roles
8: Telling the Story

About the Author

Hermoine Lee is a well-known literary biographer, author of critical studies of Elizabeth Bowen, Willa Cather, and Philip Roth. She has also written major biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), and Edith Wharton (2007), a selection of which was published by Princeton University Press as Virginia Woolf's Nose (2005). From 1998 to 2008 she was the Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature and a Fellow of New College at the University of
Oxford. She is now President of Wolfson College.

Reviews

It would be hard to think of anyone better to provide a crisp contribution to OUP's Very Short Introductions.
*Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian*

A sophisticated overview for the general reader.
*Andrew Lycett, Literary Review*

Enjoyable book on the subject.
*Henry Power, TLS*