Romantic Biography by Arthur Bradley , Alan Rawes (review)

Abstract

272 Reviews campaigns for political reform and the abolition of slavery, as well as in primitivist accounts contrasting the lives of noble savages with those of 'civilized' man, and the gradual introduction of institutional support for writers, artists, and scientists, who previously had been dependent economically on aristocratic patronage. In The Romantic Period Jarvis and his editors follow the series style-with useful endmatter, including a chronology that contextualizes significant literary works, brief bibliographies of secondary literature for each chapter, and biographies of less well known figures -xcept in one important respect: the lack of illustrations, which would have enhanced the subsections on landscape gardening, painting, architecture, and prints. However, with his dense and allusive descriptions of modern historiography and contemporary controversies, Jarvis does provide a dexterous summary of critical work on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; and lecturers of ahistoricist cast eager to supplement their students' knowledge will no doubt find this volume invaluable. QUEEN MARY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON MEGAN HIATT Romantic Biography. Ed. by ARTHUR BRADLEYand ALAN RAWES. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2003. XVii+ 202 pp. ?40. ISBN O-7546-o993-6. This stimulating collection of essays investigates the wide range of issues implied by the term 'Romantic biography', examining not only biographies of writers of the Romantic period (including Wordsworth, Clare, Southey, Austen, Byron, Burns, Scott, Keats, and Shelley), but also the degree towhich the form is itself shaped by assumptions about the self and its relations to creativity and society that are themselves Romantic. The volume is framed by two polemical essays that address particularly this question, the editors' introduction, which calls for Romantic biography to become both 'less Romanticized' by escaping these assumptions and 'more Romanticized' by bringing to light the hidden contexts of Romanticism (p. xii), and Ralph Pite's excellent closing essay, 'Writing Biography that is not Romantic', which argues that biography is 'worth reforming because it is ameans of revealing the social locatedness of particular selves' (p. 178). The collection begins with four essays by writers who are both Romantic biogra phers and literary critics. In the first, Michael O'Neill shows how the poems of the period are themselves engaged with the issues at stake inRomantic biography; they offer a complex treatment of selfhood and feeling that the biographer can never hope to equal. As O'Neill argues with reference to 'This Lime Tree Bower My Prison', 'what one wants is a biography as sensitive to the fluctuations of feeling as the poem itself.Which is to say, one wants the poem' (p. 7). It is testimony to both the power of O'Neill's argument and the brilliance of his readings that at the end of his essay it is indeed the poems he discusses that the reader wants to turn to, rather than the bio graphies of their writers. With a different readership inmind, Jonathan Bate argues strongly that it is literary biography, rather than academic literary criticism, that will bring John Clare to the attention of a large potential audience who 'would be com pelled by his life and work if only they knew about it' (p. i8). Mark Storey presents the aim of his biography of Robert Southey as being 'to set the record straight, to give as true a picture as possible' (p. 34), while Kenneth R. Johnston illuminatingly discusses the challenges presented to the biographer byWilliam Wordsworth's own self-creation as aRomantic figure. A concern with the extent towhich Romantic assumptions shape the biographies of Romantic subjects is shared by the next three essays. Joe Bray contrasts Claire Tomalin's and David Nokes's biographies of Jane Austen, showing how their dif fering attitudes to the relationship between the life and the novels informs their YES, 36.2, 2006 273 presentation of the writer, particularly in relation to the mysterious gaps in her life. Alan Rawes examines Benita Eisler's treatment of a similar mystery in Byron's life, demonstrating how her emphasis on the poet's incestuous relationship with his half sister (of which there is no decisive proof) is influenced by Byron's own fictions and by the Romantic model of poetry as self-expression. Similarly, Gerard Carruthers highlights the Romantic elements...