Life-Writing

Abstract

Abstract The chapter discusses Pater’s imaginary portraits as precursors of ‘the New Biography’, defined by the modernists in rebellion against Victorian life-writing. The Imaginary Portraits constitute a set of alternative lives to Leslie Stephen’s Dictionary of National Biography: international in scope, they pose a counter discourse to the patriotic monument. The conflation of commemoration and resurrection links biography to the obituary; Pater toys with the brief life, or the obituary, in the final summing up the protagonist’s life which concludes most of the portraits. Focusing on ‘An English Poet’, the chapter explores Pater’s merging of life-writing with the literary portrait, with the portrait as literary criticism, in dialogue with Sainte-Beuve’s portraits littéraires and Macmillan’s ‘English Men of Letters’. Editor John Morley’s view that it took one man of letters to write the life of another resulted in compressed biographies mixed with literary criticism, composed by the leading writers of the day. The final section deals with some of the heirs to Pater’s imaginary portraits. Marcel Schwob’s Vies imaginaires spanned similar historical and geographical ranges as Pater’s, revolving around sudden deaths, while reflecting the authors’ awareness of their power to cut lives and narratives short. For modernist life-writing (Strachey, Nicolson, Woolf) Pater became an influential presence: Nicolson’s ‘method of writing about people and about himself as though they were at once real and imaginary’ was praised by Woolf whose own Orlando is as much a reader as a poet; her imaginary portrait becomes a piece of criticism, a catalogue of influence.