In the preface of her recent biography of Mary Shelley, Miranda Seymour candidly indulges the romance of many a literary biographer. She sits in London's St Pancras churchyard, a grim urban island between traffic roar and railway lines, and imagines herself 200 years back when it was the edge of the countryside. She sees Mary Godwin as a child visiting the grave of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. She dreams of her later courtship by Percy Shelley in the same place (though she does not say whether she visualises their making love at the graveside, as they seem to have done).
By the look of her acknowledgments, Seymour has spent most of her research time in that sanctum of the professional biographer, the London Library. Yet only visiting the haunts of her characters really "brings the past to life with a jump": "climbing the steep twisting path up to the Casa Bertini, the Shelleys' home at Bagni di Lucca, sneaking, without permission, up to the dusty library of books on the top floor of Byron's grand palace on the Lung'Arno at Pisa". Her dream is of a sudden closeness to the very personality of a writer, and enough readers share that dream to make literary biography the one common way in which literature is discussed outside academic publications. It is also a clue to the preference of biographers for certain kinds of writer: those who seem to make their personalities the matter of their writing - especially those whom we call "romantic".
The work which has most influenced biographers (and publishers) who would realise this ideal has been Richard Holmes's 1974 Shelley: The Pursuit . Holmes set the standard as well as the trend for romantic biographies that could reach a middle-brow market while achieving academic respectability. His subtitle tells us of the quest of the biographer as well as of the idealism of the poet whom he was trying to recover. The special relationship between biographer and writer was suggested again by the subtitle of his hugely successful follow-up volume, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer . "Romantic" here refers both to Holmes's quarry and to himself. It takes a romantic to follow the tracks of a personality past the usual rows of dates in search of an inner character.
Holmes's latest volume, Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer, pursues the association and the idea that characters might be rediscovered in a kind of geographical wandering. His introduction declares that his tracking down of all the writers who have intrigued him has amounted to one large composite picture of the romantic artist. Such a creator peculiarly allures biographers by appearing to enact the oneness of life and writing. Janet Todd begins her new biography by observing that Wollstonecraft seems to thrust her life upon the reader. Her most successful and appealing work (William Godwin said it made him fall in love with her) was her Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, an extraordinary combination of intellectual analysis and abrupt confession.
Equally, AC Grayling's new life of William Hazlitt characterises him as "a completely autobiographical author". "He lived a confessional existence, transposing his experience into literature, writing with stark honesty." Grayling gives special attention and sympathy to Hazlitt's Liber Amoris, a self- humbling account of the middle-aged author's unrequited passion for his landlady's teenage daughter. Taking emotional candour beyond all normal limits, it attracted ridicule and disgust from contemporaries. To the delight of today's biographers, he was but one of a generation of writers who made literature out of their own lives. So many of the greatest works of the period are autobiographies: Wordsworth's The Prelude, Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, Byron's Childe Harold and Don Juan, De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater.
And because of the interest of these writers in the self, and in the creative imagination that dignified the self, the lives and characters of writers were attended to as never before. The modern biographer has rich resources of contemporary memoirs, full of intimacies and animosities between famous writers. A representative record is Hazlitt's "My First Acquaintance with Poets", its very title seeming to tell of his meeting with a new breed of humanity. Written 25 years after the event, it remembers his first encounter with Wordsworth in 1798. "He was quaintly dressed (according to the costume of that unconstrained period) in a brown fustian jacket and striped pantaloons ... There was a severe, worn pressure of thought about his temples, a fire in his eye (as if he saw something in objects more than the outward appearance)."
This sense of the creator encountered immediately in the character and life of the author repeats itself again and again in the memoirs admirers wrote of the leading romantic authors. Such sources confirm the mission of the latter-day biographer, whose romantic bias might explain the interest in writers at the edge of the romantic period. There have been two substantial new lives of Fanny Burney in the last two years, as well as Peter Martin's life of James Boswell, who has become a romantic writer avant la lettre. More recently there has been Adam Sisman's Boswell's Presumptuous Task, an account of Boswell's making of his Life of Johnson. John Mortimer, choosing it as his book of the year in the Guardian, talks of Boswell taking "the author of some rather dull plays and pontificating journalism" and turning him into one of the great literary characters. It is as if a romantic artist were touching the costive old 18th century with his wand.
It was Johnson who first raised the esteem of literary biography with his Lives of the Poets , accounts of English authors that are utterly unromantic. His Dryden is a portrait of lofty sycophancy; his Pope full of anguished animosity and self-promotion. These studies in the life of writing belong to a different age, one represented by the outstanding anatomy of an author published this year, Howard Erskine-Hill's Alexander Pope: Selected Letters. Pope's shimmering correspondence - witty, acid, duplicitous, entirely literary in its construction - is a terrible puzzle for a modern biographer. No private self is ever on display; it is all too deft and knowing.
It is notable that when biography for the general reader turns to the pre-romantic 18th century it is more attracted to aristocrats and eccentrics than to writers. Lucy Moore's Amphibious Thing: The Life of Lord Hervey is a biography of the epicene Whig courtier who was cruelly immortalised as Sporus ("This painted child of dirt that stinks and stings") in Pope's "Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot". At its heart is an account of his homosexual relationship with Stephen Fox, recorded, if obliquely, in their surviving correspondence. Yet here we find a pale reflection of Pope's example: Hervey's letters are literary exercises rather than explorations of the self. It is not even clear whether the relationship was anything more than a high-camp literary exercise. Moore's book looks like the offspring of Amanda Foreman's hugely successful Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, also hot on sexual adventure among the titled, but has little of Foreman's saving weight of research. Neither is it a patch on the biographical work that set off the fashion: Stella Tillyard's 1994 Aristocrats.
Sexual adventure features, of course, in the stories of many authors of the romantic age. It often seems like another aspect of the rebelliousness that so appeals to biographers (Seymour, Grayling and Todd all find their subjects heroically unconventional). The great writers of the romantic age stand out against their age; their idealism is always to be rescued from the censorship of earlier commentators. This need gives many literary biographies an oddly partisan quality. Seymour notes how often Mary Shelley was made to take the blame by her husband's posthumous followers for whatever aspect of his behaviour needed to be wished away.
The attention, sometimes devotion, to the singularity of one author seems often to involve taking sides. So biographies that feel enormously persuasive, imaginatively in sympathy with their subjects, look odd as soon as they are put next to each other. Coleridge, the hero of the imagination in Holmes's account, becomes a baleful paranoiac in Juliet Barker's recent life of Wordsworth. Hazlitt does not seem much better to her. Yet if, like Grayling, you are in the business of sympathising with Hazlitt's sad sexual yearnings, Wordsworth will appear stiff-necked for turning his back on him after he scandalised Keswick locals by spanking the bottom of a servant girl who had resisted his advances.
There must be more on the way. Andrew Motion's Keats, though strictly speaking adding nothing to the knowledge gleaned by earlier lives, has probably warned biographers off for a while; ditto Ackroyd's Ackroydish Blake, while there have been two thorough lives of Byron aimed at the non-academic reader in the last three years. But literary biographers will keep returning to the romantics for the good reason that they seem to exemplify a proposition biographers would dearly like to believe: that to give an account of an author's life is to be taken to the very source of his or her writing.
