Volume 45, Number 19 · December 3, 1998
The Hack of Genius
By P.N. Furbank
Daniel Defoe: The Life and Strange, Surprising Adventures
by Richard West
Carroll and Graf, 427 pp., $26.00
It will be agreed that, in the case of a writer, biography and bibliography are inextricably intertwined. Were we to find reason for supposing that Confessions of a Justified Sinner, the attribution of which to James Hogg has occasionally been questioned, was really by Jane Austen, or that large chunks of the Edinburgh Review were written by her, David Nokes and Claire Tomalin would have to rewrite their recent biographies drastically. It would mean more than just adding a chapter on her 'Edinburgh period.' Michel Foucault, in What is an Author?, makes a very sensible remark in this connection. 'The author's name,' he says, 'is not… just a proper name like the rest.' If we decided that the same author wrote the works of Bacon and Macbeth, King Lear, and The Tempest, etc., it would 'entirely modify the functioning' of the name 'Shakespeare.' In the case of Shakespeare, as in the case of Austen, we would have a different writer, a different person, on our hands.
Review, 4125 words
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