Volume 48, Number 6 · April 12, 2001
Tracking the Untrackable
By Hermione Lee
Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer
Richard Holmes
Pantheon, 420 pp., $30.00
Literary Lives: Biography and the Search for Understanding
David Ellis
Routledge, 195 pp., $35.00
Reflections on Biography
Paula R. Backscheider
Oxford University Press, 289 pp., $55.00; $19.95 (paper)
A recent issue of the London Review of Books had as its front page lead 'The Corruption of Literary Biography.' The heading referred to two reviews. One was a scathing demolition of James Atlas's biography of Saul Bellow by Richard Poirier, who described it as a 'censorious' and 'condescending' work, fueled by 'craven hostility' toward its subject. The other was a skeptical inquiry by John Barrell into the reliability of the second volume of Richard Holmes's life of Coleridge, Coleridge: Darker Reflections.[1]
Review, 5685 words
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