Volume 53, Number 10 · June 8, 2006
The Charms of Selfishness
By P.N. Furbank
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius
by Leo Damrosch
Houghton Mifflin, 566 pp., $30.00
It is best to think of biography, with all its utilitarian obligations, as a craft, and autobiography as an art. But this makes difficulty for a biographer of Rousseau. For the main, and often the sole, source of information about his early life is his autobiographical Confessions, which is an incomparable work of art (for me the greatest by far of his books), and there is something repugnant in its being dismantled, interspersed with commentary, and turned into the mere raw material of biography. (One would not treat Wordsworth's Prelude so.) Perhaps there is no alternative; and up to now biographers of Rousseau have always taken this course. But it might be allowed to the reviewer of Leo Damrosch's excellent new biography to skirt around the problem.
Review, 3614 words
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